Reading The Turks in World History and confused how any state whose elite were non-nomads held out before the gunpowder revolution. Also, the persistent defection of Chinese generals and soldiers to the side of the barbarians is interesting light of other conversations we’ve had.
Are there any (post-)Roman examples of this? I know that an early Dark Age a major Slavic warlord was actually a Frankish merchant (Samo). But did whole units “go native”? Seems likely in Francia and Britain.
ASHG in Orlando is over. Much more excited by ASHG in San Diego next year, because it’s in San Diego. That being said the conference seems to be moving into a strong clinical genomic direction.
Lots of stuff going on. Still recuperating. My company released a Metabolism app.
A paper from a few years ago argues that we could sequence the whole world by 2025 (capacity).
This paper argues 60 million will be sequenced in healthcare context by 2025. Seems conservative.
Went to a Broad Institute presentation where they said they had 300,000 exomes and 85,000 whole genomes sequenced.
Now that researchers are converging in the likelihood that modern humans spend the vast majority of their time in Africa, it looks like evolutionary population genomics in the next 10 years will really focus on that continent.
I guess the eastern Roman Empire just got lucky in that regard (until ironically being taken down by the gunpowder revolution), what with the strait across the Bosphorus (although the Huns did raid down south through the mountains once).
they paid the huns off. also, after 580 or so much of the hinterland beyond constantinople was accessible to barbarians. but the foundation of the empire was anatolia across the bosporus.
“confused how any state whose elite were non-nomads held out before the gunpowder revolution”
Strong walls. The Byzantines held out against a variety of nomads for almost a thousand years. It is very difficult for a band of nomads to take a walled city. Sieges are hard to pull off. The besieging forces, especially nomads who are not used to sedentary life, often run out of supplies and are decimated by disease. (it makes no difference where a horse mounted nomad poops. In a siege encampment, it is often a fatal problem.)
Sea power. Nomads have no maritime capabilites.
One thing to keep in mind about mounted armies from semi-nomadic pastoralists is that they consume VAST quantities of grass and/or fodder. And unlike armies of sedentary civilizations with some cavalry forces, in which a cavalryman might have one or two horses, the former often had five to ten remounts (!) per warrior (sometimes even more, perhaps as many as twenty per man, if a particularly well-equipped “imperial” army).
Think about the feeding and watering requirements of 100,000 horses, let alone 2-300,000… on top of 10,000 men.
On the other hand, a fully-mounted army actually did better in acquiring supplies on the move than infantry-based armies. Because of its much greater mobility, a cavalry army could forage widely and far, and devastate a substantially wider zone along the axis of advancement.
Their inability to take cities was largely a function of their lack of technical ability – they lacked both the technology and the know-how of besieging cities (or breaching/mining under walls).
And that’s why the Mongols far exceeded any of their other semi-nomadic, horse-riding forbears in conquest – they learned to take cities from the Chinese and the Persians.
after 580 or so much of the hinterland beyond constantinople was accessible to barbarians. but the foundation of the empire was anatolia across the bosporus.
Once the central Anatolian plateaus were lost, the Empire was on deathwatch, albeit a very drawn-out one thanks to the walls and waters of Constantinople. The Romaioi had traditionally two main reliable recruitment zones – the Balkans and the Anatolian highlands (although certain coastal areas such as Trebizond did contribute significant forces at times and, of course, mercenaries could be recruited from father away on the steppes or from Northern and Western Europe). That’s why Manzikert was so devastating. Not because it destroyed an imperial army, but because it opened the last remaining bedrock recruitment area to the depredation and settlements of the Turks.
Razib in laymen’s terms what do Figures S26-S30 in this paper mean?
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/06/06/146043.full.pdf
look on page 10. basically showing over-representation (or not closer to zero) of alleles which shift in a particular phenotypic direction (neutral is that stuff will go in both drxns).
@Twinkie
I wouldn’t go that far. If it hadn’t been for the Sack in 1204, they might have eventually been able to reconquer Anatolia in its entirety – they were recovering for most of the 12th century.
But the Sack just screwed them over permanently, and at the worst possible time. If the Sack hadn’t happened successfully, then in the 13th century they really could have taken advantage of the Mongols’ invasion of the Middle East to regain a lot of territory. Instead, they had to spend much of the 13th century just trying to put what was left of the Empire back together, and it was never enough.
The Mongols had some success with this. They were able to turn large portions of not only the Song, but also the Khwarezm, Arab, and Hungarian forces against themselves.
I wrote a little about this here: http://scholars-stage.blogspot.jp/2014/12/isis-mongols-and-return-of-ancient.html
Cortez picked apart the Aztec empire along similar lines, and the Thirty Year’s War has a few stories that match.
But once modern nationalism gets going this becomes very hard to do.
They should have still concentrated on the Anatolian hinterland. The Balkans did not have sufficient strategic value; only sentimental.
It is also telling that they fell apart so easily on the sack.
Greeks no longer had military superiority, and Greece can not support a large population. The epirote, Macedonian and thracian troops are too busy fighting just to survive
The westerners did attempt invasion of Anatolia a few times. However, from the dark ages, to Nicaea, to the ottomans, it was always with the base in Anatolia that the empire expanded.
@Brett re: your first comment, the Balkans aren’t very safe at all. Which is why there is so much fighting. As you’ve mentioned yourself
The Huns; now what about the Goths. The entire area was devastated. After the Huns come waves of nomads, one after another.
Whenever the Danube frontier breaks down, barbarians can sweep all the way into the sea. Slavs made it to the Peloponnese, of Sparta and Athens. In Alexander’s father’s time the hills of Macedon were roiling with northern barbarians. After the creation of Alexander’s empire Macedon was overrun by Celts.
Indeed, we can see how the Dorian and earlier invasions may have unfolded. The Danube frontier was out of Byzantine hands for most of its history
After the 410 sack of Rome, the Goths are seen historically as “invading nomads”, but could a case be made that they were a disgruntled ethnic minority of Roman subjects of immigrant background?
Fuel. Steppe cavalry armies can’t operate for any length of time away from areas with vast amounts of grazing. Until the Mongols manage to coopt the resources & methods of the settled civilisations around them.
After the 410 sack of Rome, the Goths are seen historically as “invading nomads”, but could a case be made that they were a disgruntled ethnic minority of Roman subjects of immigrant background?
yes.