A shortage of food would have weakened these dynasties, and pushed nomads in the north -- even more vulnerable to dips in temperature -- to invade their southern, Chinese-speaking neighbors. iStockphoto
Posted on 07/16/2010 6:56:24 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Two millennia of foreign invasions and internal wars in China were driven more by cooling climate than by feudalism, class struggle or bad government... Food shortages severe enough to spark civil turmoil or force hordes of starving nomads to swoop down from the Mongolian steppes were consistently linked to long periods of colder weather, the study found. In contrast, the Central Kingdom's periods of stability and prosperity occurred during sustained warm spells, the researchers said... Chinese and European scientists led by Zhibin Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing decided to compare two sets of data over 1,900 years. Digging into historical archives, they looked at the frequency of war, price hikes of rice, locust plagues, droughts and floods. For conflict, they distinguished between internal strife and external wars... "The collapses of the agricultural dynasties of the Han (25-220), Tang (618-907), Northern Song (960-1125), Southern Song (1127-1279) and Ming (1368-1644) are closely associated with low temperature or the rapid decline in temperature," they conclude. A shortage of food would have weakened these dynasties, and pushed nomads in the north -- even more vulnerable to dips in temperature -- to invade their southern, Chinese-speaking neighbors, the authors argued.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
A shortage of food would have weakened these dynasties, and pushed nomads in the north -- even more vulnerable to dips in temperature -- to invade their southern, Chinese-speaking neighbors. iStockphoto
The Haves and the Have-Nots struggled over China. ;’)
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In earlier times they simply road Southwest to India.
No one knows how many times they made the trips North and South and East, but they managed to maintain technological parity with the Chinese.
Further West, beyond the Himalayas, other Turkic tribes moved North and South with great regularity, into and out of India, all depending on the climate at the time.
I think the big surprise came with the Mongols who lived far to the West of Siberia rode SE to China, and then to India, and West through Russia.
That was a big one!
And Mongolia just suffered a very hard winter. Lost a large percentage of their live stock. Good thing we have tanks now, cause they were unstoppable on their horses.
btt
The expansion of the Vikings, which took them as far as Sicily, North Africa, Russia, and North America, has been linked to a population explosion in Scandinavia due to warmer climate at the time. Under primogeniture, surplus sons could not inherit land and had an incentive to leave home and conquer their own. I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar pattern did not influence the great Mongol and Tatar conquests. Demography is destiny, and cultures often expand when things are good for them, giving them the population and food base for conquest.
Genghis Khan, who led the greatest expansion of the Mongols, became Great Khan in 1206, during the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250 AD), not during a cold period.
I think what the researchers focused on here were the internal Chinese disturbances ~ which took place even under Mongol control.
Yes, and I think that “Mongol build-up over several centuries” coincides with the Medieval Warm Period. Global warming helps people in northern latitudes.
I suspect the lack of competition from Siberia to the East (most of the earlier militarily advanced Yakuts/Sakha having already gone to Korea, and then Japan in the 500/700 AD period) enabled the Mongols to operate in a vacuum and thereby escape Chinese notice until it was all too late.
Of interest ~ recalling that Ghenghis Khan is reputed by Norway’s Keppel family to have visited them in the Sapma.
If that’s the way they depicted the Mongols, I think they were falsely extrapolating from the present poverty and low population of Mongolia. You don’t amass armies of 100,000 unless you have a large healthy population, including huge herds of healthy animals. You don’t crush powerful enemies like the Chinese, Seljuks, Ottomans, Mamluks, etc. with a starving rabble. Mongol armies were huge. There was very likely a population boom in Mongolia and Tartaria. Grass grew more abundantly, horses and cattle were easier to raise, etc.
They learned to become VERY EFFICIENT and EFFECTIVE.
They continued to be quite poor until they began acquiring better weapons. They were fast learners.
NOTE: As you know Hungary, Estonia, Finland, and so forth were earlier conquered by different sorts of Turks and Mongols ~ that went on for a good 6 centuries until one day someone figured out they could invade China successfully, which they did.
Global Warming Stops War!
Now there is a bumper sticker.
I’m just guessing, since I’m an ignoramus on the issue, but it may have gone more like environmental boom, then bust, which drove the Mongols to warpathing.
An extended warm period allows for the build up of populations, both human and feed/travel critter. Then the cold starts. At first it’s ignored, then it starts getting real bad. Critters and folk start dying, then the push comes to move to better places.
The push comes while they’ve still got decent enough numbers in both human and livestock to make it work.
That’s my guess, anyway.
Thanks!
There were many ethnic groups in central Eurasia which followed a nomadic culture featuring light cavalry and mounted archery in war. Some were Iranian, some Ugrian, some Turkic or Mongol. Sometimes conquering hordes were ethnically mixed.
Mongolia may have had only a million people, but a much higher proportion of the population was available to fight than in (e.g.) Europe, and they were tougher than people of settled regions. Being nomadic, their entire population could move to support the army. Europeans, Persians, etc. could not compete with that strategy. Also, they had absorbed people from other groups into their conquering hordes. They were almost impossible to beat, and were stopped largely because they themselves became the soft, luxury-loving aristocracy in places like India, China, and Ottoman Turkey. The Mongols proper apparently became more peaceful after taking up Buddhism. (Timur was a Muslim, with all the propensity for violence and intolerance that entails; he performed his genocidal atrocities in the name of Islam, although he killed many Muslims.)
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