Many scholars have emphasized the importance of Inner Asia to furthering our understanding of cross-cultural phenomena and their role in the preservation and transmission of historical experience.Footnote ¹ The relevant research has been carried out almost exclusively by scholars trained as sinologists, who have privileged economic exchange and imperial formations.Footnote ² As one moves away from the Chinese sphere of influence, however, the notion of Eurasia as an integrated unit of analysis becomes more problematic.Footnote ³ In what follows, I attempt to bridge the western and eastern edges of the great steppe by highlighting a specific aspect of Inner Asian political culture: the phenomenon of shared sovereignty between military-based ruling dynasties and their urban constituencies, with a focus on the principalities of Rus' and the oases of Transoxiana, from the ninth to the twelfth centuries.Footnote ⁴ Specifically, I propose that the dual administrative government structure that developed in the two regions was an autochthonic, Eurasian state-formation, distinct from the city-state and imperial models, and effected by what Joseph Fletcher defined as “horizontal continuities.”Footnote ⁵

At first there seems to be little to compare. During the tenth and eleventh centuries, the cities of Transoxiana, or Mawarannahr, as the region was known to the Arabs, underwent rapid change and became a cultural melting pot where, according to Tha'ālibī, the best minds of the time gathered.Footnote ⁶ The physician Ibn Sina, his contemporary, claimed to have “mastered what was useful … and discovered the status of each man in his science” in the Bukharan library.Footnote ⁷ According to a rumor, though, the famous physician burned the library down so that no one benefited from the knowledge it contained.Footnote ⁸ Samarqand, Merv, and Balkh—which after the ninth century served as capitals for the region's ruling dynasties—were also known for their intellectual life and flourishing commerce. Muslim by faith, Persian in culture, and cosmopolitan-merchant in daily affairs, the cities of Transoxiana prompted some of the most eminent scientists, philosophers, and poets of the Muslim oicumene to, if not settle there, then at least visit.Footnote ⁹

While Ibn Sina was mastering or perhaps burning the treasures of the Bukharan library, a set of cities emerged at the opposite, westernmost edge of the Eurasian steppe. Known to the Vikings as Gardariki, “the land of the cities,” and to the Arabs as the region bordering the “Land of Darkness,” where the tribes of Gog and Magog await judgment day, these polities called themselves Rus', or “Rus' Land” (russkaia zemlia).Footnote ¹⁰ These developing ninth- and tenth-century East Slavic settlements, built of wood and inhabited by warlike and mostly pagan Slavic and Finno-Ugric tribes, seem to render little basis for comparison with the cities of Transoxiana.Footnote ¹¹ Against this impression, I will propose that strong parallels can in fact be drawn between them.

These parallels are not based on direct borrowings or interactions between the two regions, or at least not the sort attested to in available written sources.Footnote ¹² Although Muslim geographers and merchants knew of Rus', to them the Slavs seemed at most a curiosity.Footnote ¹³ Russians, for their part, did not venture east very far during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Baihaqi, following al-Mas‘ūdī, places Rus’ pirates on the southern shore of the Caspian in the eleventh century, but the incident on which this was based did not reflect a pattern.Footnote ¹⁴ Indirect contacts via trade with the Volga Bulgars were frequent and perhaps regular after the eighth century, since Gardariki constituted an important point on the northern branch of the Silk Road, which was revived around this time. The earliest known documented references to interactions between the regions date to the sixteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵

Geographically, too, the regions were very different. Following David Christian's division of the Eurasian landmass into “inner” and “outer” Eurasia, sedentary and agrarian Mawarannahr has always been associated with the latter, and the forest-steppe belt of Rus', colonized by Slavic migrants around AD 500, with the former.Footnote ¹⁶ Unlike Transoxanian oases, which were dependent on irrigation agriculture confined to specific areas, Gardariki competed for space, contending with the endless forest and river systems that made sustained agriculture there a challenge. Centuries passed before nature was subdued and yielded arable land. A chronicle entry from as late as 1176 mentions two armies, from Moscow and Vladimir, that perished in the woods while marching against one another.Footnote ¹⁷ But once the forest began to give way to more settlements, the expansion of Rus' into its hinterlands proceeded steadily.

Finally, the two areas are marked by significant political differences. From its inception, the “Rus' Land” was synonymous with the Riurikid clan, a point to which I will return.Footnote ¹⁸ Urban centers of Central Asia, by contrast, had as a rule been loosely governed by pastoralist dynasties focused on generating revenue rather than on local politics.Footnote ¹⁹ This pattern is especially evident after the mid-eighth century, when Transoxiana became the center of intricate political rivalries and underwent a series of dynastic changes. While it has been suggested that Gardariki belonged to the Islamic cultural universe, by the ninth century Orthodox Christianity and Byzantine influences held sway over Rus’.Footnote ²⁰ This was quite different from the distinct “Perso-Islamic” cultural milieu of Mawarannahr.

And yet, despite their ethnic, cultural, and confessional differences, both regions developed remarkably similar political cultures of dual administration, characterized by an uneasy modus vivendi between the civil administrative and military branches of their governments. I will examine the two regions together to argue that these similarities exemplify a “horizontal continuity” in Eurasia, defined by Joseph Fletcher as an economic, social, or cultural phenomenon experienced by two or more societies—between which there need be no communication—which is effected by the same ultimate source.Footnote ²¹

The “source” of the roughly contemporaneous revival of Central Asian cities and the emergence of Gardariki is relatively easy to identify. By the middle of the eighth century, the northern branches of the Silk Road were, after a two-century depression, once again active, now under the auspices of the Khazar Kaghanate. As a result, Mawarannahr became commercially linked to the coastal cities of the Black Sea, while the cities of Mesopotamia established trade connections with the Baltic and Northern Europe. The waterways of Rus' thereby acquired great importance, and increasing commerce facilitated the development of cities that served as trading posts and manufacturing centers.Footnote ²² Much like their predecessors the Gök Türk, the Khazars provided security in the steppe, enabling exchanges between the eastern and western parts of Eurasia. In other words, booming commerce created a vast geographical space accessible to every participating community, even if the space itself was the subject of political and religious tensions.Footnote ²³

The more difficult question is whether this “historical continuity” was indeed the cause of similarities in the socio-political structures that developed in Gardariki and in Mawarannahr. But before I discuss parallels and continuities, I must explain what I mean by “dual administration,” since the term is often utilized differently by scholars of different regions and periods.Footnote ²⁴ The term's ambiguity as well as the relative ease with which it has been used to describe government structures in polities from China to Russia derives from the fact that divisions between military and civil administration existed, at one time or another, in most of the Inner Asian polities. The term should not be applied indiscriminately, of course, and the fraught line between “the men of the sword” and “the men of the pen” was often blurred and varied considerably across space and time. In very general terms, dual administration denotes separation of political power between the often “alien” ruling dynasties—that is, dynasties of pastoralist, nomadic background—and their local, or sedentary civil servants who handled the administrative and fiscal affairs of the state. The “dual administration” paradigm is far from uniform, and it is subject to specific historical circumstances that can introduce new elements to the pattern, but it is useful nonetheless as a model for understanding socio-political developments in Eurasia. In this paper I am concerned with what I see to be one variant of the phenomenon, which is found in the urban settings of both Transoxiana and Rus': the involvement of city dwellers in political and military affairs before the Mongol invasion, an event often used as a convenient marker for the emergence of “Eurasian” political institutions in sedentary states such as, for example, Russia and Iran.

In Mawarannahr, this pattern appears to have been already in place by the second century BCE, when Chang Ch'ien described it as a region of autonomous commercial urban centers without a ruler.Footnote ²⁵ The otherwise fundamental changes wrought by the Arab conquest in the eighth century CE did not alter the existing social order. Baghdad-appointed regional governors—amīrs, the title carried by most of the region's subsequent rulers—were confronted with the local understanding of sovereignty, which, despite their attempts to renegotiate the terms, continued to prevail. The amīrs' sphere of influence was limited to military affairs and taxation, while urban administration remained in the hands of the local landowning and merchant families—the aʻyān, or “notables.”Footnote ²⁶

Little is known about the internal composition of Central Asian cities during this period, but sources mention a demarcated social hierarchy, an urban militia, and a sense of solidarity with the adjacent countryside.Footnote ²⁷ The chief of police, overseers of religious endowments and water management (mīrāb), and the judges all came from the local aʻyān families, who often held these posts on a hereditary basis.Footnote ²⁸ A thirteenth-century waqfiyya from Bukhara, and inscriptions preserved on gravestones, the “qairaqs” (), confirm the hereditary nature of certain posts and shed light on the social ranks and backgrounds of the Transoxanian urban dwellers.Footnote ²⁹ The “notables” commanded military detachments of slave-soldiers to defend the cities, and Al-Azdi mentions a craftsmen-led urban militia of Bukhara fighting a Mamluk army in 914.Footnote ³⁰

That said, the privileged status of the aʻyān should not be seen to belie the potential for coherence of the broader populace; when necessary, the entire population, including in the countryside, decided matters of defense and joined forces.Footnote ³¹ Narshakhi reports that “people returned to their villages” after defending Bukhara against Husayn b. Ṭāhir in 874.Footnote ³² “Sogdians” and “Bukharans” fought against Samarkand and negotiated with Turkic tribes for assistance against the Arabs.Footnote ³³ And right up to the Mongol invasion Bukharan local authorities retained the right to revoke the khutba (a Friday communal sermon that mentions the name of the ruler).Footnote ³⁴ A strong sense of local autonomy is also evident from refusals to adopt caliphal currency; responding to a demand of the people of Bukhara, governor Ghitrīf b. ‘Atā (792–93) allowed the minting of local coins to be used for transactions within the city,Footnote ³⁵ and Maqdisi and Ibn Hawqal mention similar developments in Khorezm and Samarkand.Footnote ³⁶ The preference for local currencies over silver dirhams is significant, because coinage, like the khutba, was an official marker of political sovereignty in Islam.

While Baghdad's religious authority was eventually recognized, the caliph's involvement in local politics remained nominal at best.Footnote ³⁷ Even at the early stages of the conquest, when the Caliphate was at the height of its strength, the people of Samarkand successfully petitioned Caliph ‘Abd al-Mālik to remove a governor they disliked.Footnote ³⁸ As internal strife weakened the Caliphate, the amīrs of Transoxiana, although invested by the Commander of the Faithful, became de facto rulers in the region, and the urban constituency often decided the outcomes of incessant intra- and inter-dynastic warfare that ensued.

An excellent illustration of this pattern is the Samanid dynasty, which ruled Mawarannahr during the late ninth and tenth centuries. In 874, the dissatisfied population of Bukhara invited Nasr b. Aḥmad, a member of the Samanid family, to replace Husayn b. Tahir, a representative of the reigning Tahirid dynasty. When Nasr's brother Ismā’īl challenged his rule, Transoxanian cities sided with Nasr and refused to provision Ismā'īl's army on the grounds that his bid for power was illegitimate.Footnote ³⁹ Although Ismā'īl won the struggle, his rule was not accepted in Samarqand, whose population threw its support behind the rival branches of the Samanid family.Footnote ⁴⁰ It would seem that their sentiment was shared by the people of Bukhara, where Ismā'īl's son and successor Aḥmad was killed by his discontented subjects in 914.Footnote ⁴¹

Aḥmad's son, Nasr II b. Aḥmad, also had difficulties managing what contemporary court historians described as the “rebellious elements.” In 930, while he was suppressing a rebellion in Nishapur, Bukharans freed three of his brothers who were imprisoned in the city citadel, and after negotiating terms, installed them as the joint rulers of the city. Nasr was able to return, but in 943 he was accused of heresy and deposed by his son, Nūḥ. It would appear that Nūḥ won the population over, since Bukharans stood by his side when his uncle, Ibrahim b. Aḥmad, took the city for himself. In 947, the people ousted Ibrahim b. Ahmad and invited Nūḥ back. Fully aware of the centrifugal tendencies wrought by succession practices, Nūḥ tried to secure his family's standing by exacting from the army and the urban populations of Mawarannahr an oath of allegiance to his five sons, who according to his will would succeed one another. Predictably, the plan failed: after Nūḥ's eldest son ‘Abd al-Mālik died in 961, power was transferred to his son Nasr, but Nasr ruled for just one day before his uncle Mansūr took over. The reign of Mansūr's own son, Abul-Qasim Nūḥ, was characterized by a never-ending struggle for power between the dynasty's various branches. The last Samanid ruler of Mawarannahr, Muntasir, was killed in 1005, and it comes as little surprise that the Samanids’ political successors, the Karakhanids, were invited in by the region's urban populations.Footnote ⁴²

Native Persian Samanids, along with the Tahirids they replaced, were a rare exception among the dynasties that ruled Mawarannahr throughout its history, and most of the preceding, and all of the region's later rulers reveled in their connection to the steppe. From a comparative perspective, their Persian background seems to have been the only distinct feature of their rule. Much like Qarakhanids and Seljuks, Qara-Qitai and Chinggisids, the Samanids did not try to alter the political order; they left administration in the hands of the urban bureaucracy and restricted themselves to military affairs, the dispensation of justice, and taxation.Footnote ⁴³ Furthermore, as Nūḥ's failed effort to regulate succession in 947 indicates, Samanids tried to follow the principal of lateral succession whereby the right to rule is inherited by brothers rather than by sons, and political sovereignty was viewed as a collective prerogative of the entire clan. The Samanid political repertoire would therefore have been a tough sell at the Sassanid court from which these Transoxanian rulers claimed descent, based as it was on the notion of monotheistic kinship. That repertoire would, however, have been readily understood by the nomadic Turks, who had practiced lateral succession for centuries.

Historians often attribute the rise and fall of nomadic polities in Eurasia to the succession struggles that were an inevitable outcome of collective sovereignty, and to the inability of the Turks to understand sedentary institutions, which compelled them to rely on local administrative specialists.Footnote ⁴⁴ Adherence by Persian Samanids to what seems a Turkic pattern of government therefore raises the question of whether the amīr-aʻyān dichotomy in Transoxiana was generated by the city notables and their understanding of sovereignty, rather than shaped by the ethnicity and lifestyle of the rulers. The Turks, and later the Mongols, initially lacked the skills needed to create integrated states, but it was the Ottomans and the Moghuls who built two of the greatest empires the world has known.Footnote ⁴⁵

Further, though the “Persianate” Samanid model of government may have been transplanted to the Delhi Sultanate, Indian cities never developed the institutions characteristic of their Central Asian neighbors.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly, the pattern of dual administration practiced by “conquest” dynasties in China did not result in the disintegration of the Chinese empire or the emergence of commercial cities.Footnote ⁴⁷ The amīr-aʻyān symbiosis appears to have developed in urban settings and in places that, in one way or another, participated in the Silk Road trade.

From the Tarim basin to eastern Iran, urban notables exercised great political power.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Beatrice Manz has observed, popular urban support often determined the outcome of dynastic struggles, and it was the possession of cities that defined the power of rulers.Footnote ⁴⁹ We may never know how the rulers felt about sharing authority with their urban subjects, but the frustration for amīrs' that could result is betrayed by Seljuk Sultan Sanjar's outburst against the people of Nishapur: “Is this city yours or mine? If it's mine, get out! If it's yours, get ready to fight me for it.” Their attempts at state-building were repeatedly thwarted by urban constituents.Footnote ⁵⁰ The failure of Transoxanian rulers to consolidate their authority cannot, then, be attributed simply to a lack of political acumen. While Samanids claimed descent from Sassanids, Turkic Ghaznavids and Seljuks styled themselves as defenders of the faith, yet these strategies of legitimation, while effective elsewhere, did not produce the desired outcomes in Central Asia.Footnote ⁵¹

As Jürgen Paul warned, “The much-debated question of ‘urban autonomy’ is not a fit subject of comparison as long as we have no real understanding of how a town interrelated with the central government, the surrounding countryside and so on, and above all, how it functioned intra muros, how social action and activity was organized.”Footnote ⁵² In this respect, the case of Gardariki is highly informative, because there, too, the Viking Riurikid dynasty adopted steppe institutions and practices in order to maintain control over a conglomeration of urban commercial centers. In fact, early East Slavic history—as far as the term is related to the existence of written language—commences with a well-known episode in which the people of Novgorod invited a Varangian (Viking) band of warriors to rule their land, “Our land is vast and rich,” they said, “but there is no order in it. Come and rule [over us].”Footnote ⁵³ Whether the chronicle reflects an actual event or an early-twelfth-century anachronistic projection by the Riurikids themselves is debated to this day.

What is important in the present context is the contractual nature of the account that was preserved by the pro-Riurikid chronicler.Footnote ⁵⁴ To rule was not a privilege but rather a set of responsibilities. In Novgorod, these translated into maintaining order, loyalty to the city, and military success. In 1137, the Novgorodians expelled the prince Vsevolod Ol'govich, accusing him of not watching over the poor (smerdy), of (secretly) seeking the “seat” (rule) of Pereiaslavl', and of having lost a battle by issuing confusing commands.Footnote ⁵⁵ The sources are not always as detailed as they are for that case, and usually the reasons for expulsion of particular princes are difficult to discern even in Novgorod, where, some argue, the chronicles were not commissioned by the members of the dynasty and thus may have been more candid.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet even the annals written at the behest of the Riurikids are full of examples of “the people's” role in choosing or rejecting prospective rulers.

In 1146, townsfolk of Kiev expelled and later killed Igor Ol'govich because he reneged on his promise to fire two unpopular officials (tiuns). This was despite some local support for his position and attempts by another Riurikid from the rival branch of the clan to calm people down. His murder seems particularly violent when we consider that Igor had some time before renounced his political claims and become a monk.Footnote ⁵⁷ That the people acted on their own accord is indicated by the fact that Igor's brother Svyatoslav did not seek retribution on Izyaslav Mstislavich, who had usurped the Kievan seat a few months earlier. An even more striking incident occurred in Halych (Galicia) in 1210, when three princes—Roman, Vladimir, and Svyatoslav—were hanged for the murder of five hundred city boyars.Footnote ⁵⁸

Halych also provides us with an example of urban elders interfering in a ruler's personal life, when the prince Yaroslav Osmomysl's behavior breached social norms as his subjects understood them. In 1172, the prince left his wife for a common woman and fathered by her an illegitimate son, Oleg, whom he designated as his heir at the expense of Volodimerko, his son born in legal marriage. Not only did the Halych folk force Yaroslav to return to his wife, but they also poisoned Oleg and installed Volodimerko as a ruler of the city.

Less violent examples of princes' acquiescence to demands made by the urban populations of Rus' are so numerous that this appears, along with intra-dynastic warfare and ecclesiastic affairs, to have been a central aspect of Rus' political culture. Nonetheless, the majority of cases suggest that a community would remain loyal so long as the princes guaranteed its independence and security. When Riurikids kept true to their end of the bargain, the “people” demonstrated remarkable integrity. The population of Putivl', for example, refused to surrender to a rival princely faction, declaring, “We kissed the Holy Cross to our prince and cannot violate our oath. But you are breaking your oaths to your brothers and placing your hope in your military might.… Princes, consider your own conduct! We, however, will not violate the oaths we've made … for as long as we live.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The abundance of episodes related to the ruler-“people” dichotomy stands in contrast to the generally uneven distribution of data preserved in the chronicles. The chroniclers, usually influenced by the Byzantine notion of kingship, rarely recorded events that were not directly linked to members of the ruling dynasty or that occurred outside of their city.Footnote ⁶⁰ That the episodes of cities' humiliating expulsions of princes and their “invitations” to them have been preserved, including in the Muscovite compilations, suggests that shared sovereignty between the Riurikids and their urban subjects was the norm rather than the exception.Footnote ⁶¹ The cities of Kievan Rus' are described as coherent political units, with powerful militias and a marked social hierarchy,Footnote ⁶² and the chronicles mention urban military detachments participating in raids and dynastic warfare. We also hear about mayors (posadniki), revenue collectors (dvoriane), and other officials who played important roles in city affairs.

The mechanism through which the urban populace articulated its decisions has often been referred to as the veche—an old-Russian noun that in the chronicles appears interchangeably with “people,” “elders,” and toponymic nouns to denote public gatherings.Footnote ⁶³ Given the semantic instability and the nature of the sources, it is impossible to determine whether these popular assemblies—which decided on matters of defense and submission, the appointment of officials, and the regulation of trade—formed the veche, or instead constituted an informal structure in which decision-making, while a shared prerogative of the prince and his subjects, was done on a case-by-case basis. The issue remains unresolved and its discussion “would necessarily immerse us in the murky waters of historiography and the paradigms of democracy and oligarchy.”Footnote ⁶⁴ What is important, and what the sources suggest, is that the princes served a primarily military function, insuring internal security and external protection. After all, the cities' hinterlands, and expansionist ambitions directed against Finno-Ugric, Turkic, and Bulgarian neighbors, required a military expertise that the dynasty could and did deliver.

The relative autonomy of Russian cities is also implied by tenth-century treaties concluded with Byzantium. Although demands were delivered by the “princes,” the Rus' stipulated an annual payment for Kiev, Chernigov, and Pereiaslavl', among other cities, as well as provisions for Rus' merchants staying in Constantinople.Footnote ⁶⁵ In this bargaining process the princes appear to have acted not as initiators of negotiations but rather as agents on behalf of urban polities. Final ratification of the treaties occurred only when Byzantine ambassadors traveled to Kiev to get “the people's” approval. We cannot know whether ratification actually took place because we lack corroborative Byzantine evidence, but that Kievan chroniclers chose to present it in this manner illuminates the local understanding of Rus' political culture.

The prominent position of the cities has led one group of historians to interpret East Slavic history as an age of city-states, during which the princes were mere executors of popular will. The incessant intra-dynastic warfare the chronicles describe, they argue, displayed the tensions between the older, established cities and their suburbs, which recruited Riurikids in their search for autonomy and independence.Footnote ⁶⁶ This depiction obscures the process through which political sovereignty was negotiated in pre-Mongol Russia. We cannot read an absence of authority into the fact that the Riurikids focused on exaction of tribute rather than on creation of a bureaucratic polity, or the lack of any sustained colonization program that characterized their reign during the period I consider here. Nor do these imply that the Riurikids simply took it upon themselves to defend and rule Russian cities because the position was vacant; that could have been achieved with variable degrees of success by anyone who could provide brute military strength. Instead, as the chronicles suggest, the clan offered them a legitimizing purpose—the “Rus' Land” was wherever a Riurikid ruled.Footnote ⁶⁷

In an environment of flickering loyalties and shifting political boundaries, one constant remained: the “people” sought out and recognized the Riurikids as the only legitimate rulers. In Kiev and Novgorod, the population negotiated with princes on a term basis, but Suzdal', Kursk, Polotsk, Chernigov, and others pledged their allegiance to a particular branch of the clan. When Suzdalians realized that Yurii Dolgorukii's ambitions lay in Kiev, they expelled him, but, loyal to the Monomashichi branch, they replaced Yurii with his son Andrei.Footnote ⁶⁸ Similarly, Kurchanians refused to open the city gates to princes from the Ol'govichi branch due to a standing agreement with the Monomashichi.Footnote ⁶⁹ When Halych was attacked by Izyaslav of Kiev in 1153, the boiare told their prince, Volodimerko, to hide while they organized the defense; the city having a Riurikid line of its own enhanced its standing vis-à-vis other urban centers.Footnote ⁷⁰ Similarly, when intra-dynastic conflicts left Kiev without a ruler, the people freed Vseslav Briachislavich of Polotsk (who had been imprisoned by his Riurikid relatives) and offered him the city if he promised to defend it against the nomads.Footnote ⁷¹ Even in Novgorod, one of the wealthiest and most powerful cities in Rus' “it was intolerable for the [people] to be without a prince.”Footnote ⁷² These examples point to a close connection between the dynasty and the region it ruled, and also to well-formulated notions of sovereignty as something shared between the military and commercial specialists. In a manner similar to Transoxiana, this resulted in a symbiotic relationship of princes—the veche mode of government.

Although the titles and functions of certain city officials are known, the “software” of medieval Russian urban society remains elusive.Footnote ⁷³ Novgorodian birch bark documents reveal that residents of one city communicated with their relatives, associates, and debtors from other parts of Gardariki, but whether this signals existence of inter-urban networks is difficult to determine.Footnote ⁷⁴ In addition, the lion's share of evidence comes from archaeological rather than written sources. For instance, we know from Pravda Russkaia that peasants and slaves constituted a sizable proportion of the Rus' population. But we can only assume that, as in Transoxiana, landowners and merchants (not mutually exclusive categories) were the elements that made up the veche.Footnote ⁷⁵ While the social fabric of East Slavic and Transoxanian cities needs further study, the issue at hand is not who constituted the veche, or the ranks of the a'yān and how their decisions were communicated, but rather why such displays of popular opinion were possible at all. Why did the rulers of the two regions more often than not acquiesce to such an arrangement?

In this respect, it is instructive that Viking Riurikids adopted Turkic nomadic customs and practices. The princes of Rus' fought and often lived on horseback, referred to themselves as kaghans, adopted the trident as the clan's tamga, and understood the “Rus' Land” as an indivisible domain of the entire family governed by lateral succession.Footnote ⁷⁶ On one hand, as Cherie Woodworth wrote, the system was an adaptation to high mortality rates, “widespread violence and frequent death among a warrior class” who spent most of their life in the saddle.Footnote ⁷⁷ On the other, the princes also had to adapt to the expectations of their constituencies—urban peoples—that they would provide the protection and security essential to conducting trade. This protection was not restricted to military affairs but extended to the spiritual realm as well, since the dynasty, also in line with Eurasian nomadic practices, promoted itself as a “chosen” clan linked to the “Rus' Land.” Cryptic references to sacral rites performed by the princes, the ancestral cult, and the sanctity of Riurikid blood suggest a well-calculated “technology of domination” designed to legitimate Riurikid presence in Gardariki. The “Rus' Land” could be guarded exclusively by the members of the clan and was thus synonymous with the ruling family.Footnote ⁷⁸

This association held true so long as cities were the primary source of wealth and required the military expertise of the princes to sustain them. The decline of commerce and increase in agrarian production, which were accompanied by gradual but systematic expansion into the hinterlands, resulted in the emergence of a new bureaucratic polity based on monotheistic kingship rather than rooted in the sanctity of the ruling clan.Footnote ⁷⁹ Paradoxically, the Riurikids did not survive this transition, which ushered in the imperial stage of Russian history. Succession by primogeniture introduced by the Muscovite branch of the clan, along with the notion of sacred kingship, ended the dynasty that had survived the violent practice of lateral succession for five hundred years.Footnote ⁸⁰

In other words, once trade ceased to be the raison d'être of the “Rus' Land,” the potential for violence in the region was reduced and the government no longer had to be militarized.Footnote ⁸¹ As Edward Keenan pointed out, urban violence was conspicuously absent during the “Time of Troubles,” a period of interregnum and civil war that resulted in the legitimation of the Romanov dynasty in the early decades of the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁸² In the cities of Transoxiana the transition to an agrarian economy was limited since the steppe and the desert were natural barriers of expansion, and so the potential for violence remained high, reinforcing the system of dual administration.Footnote ⁸³ Though the ruling dynasties tried to convert arable land into a commodity via religious patronage, the proximity of the steppe and internal rivalries prevented the emergence of lasting political formations.Footnote ⁸⁴ The case of Gardariki thus helps to illuminate some aspects of the amīr-aʻyān political structure, and brings us back to the question of “continuities” in Eurasia.

Historians of both regions have written about the peculiar system of government in medieval Central Asia and Rus’, yet none has attempted an integrative history.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Russian studies, interpretations of the veche have ranged from the mere recognition of the phenomenon to assertions that medieval Russia consisted of autonomous, democratic city-republics governed by an all-inclusive popular assembly. Analogies with ancient Greek poleis and the Maya towns of Central America have been proposed,Footnote ⁸⁶ and though those are too distant in time and space to be analytically very useful, the proposals are scholarly acknowledgement that medieval East Slavic history needs to be situated within a broader, comparative theoretical framework.Footnote ⁸⁷ But too often this undertaking has excluded the Rus' eastern connections, and the veche remains at the center of debate—some scholars insist that it never existed, while another group sees it as an indigenous outgrowth of the tribal past, and as a principal governing institution of feudal pre-Muscovite society.

Just as historians of the Middle East attribute political decentralization and civil unrest in Transoxiana to the succession disputes between members of Turkic ruling dynasties, scholars of medieval Russia explain the decline of Kievan Rus' and the “appanage” period that followed as due to the Riurikids' inability to compromise and consolidate power. The rise of Moscow is seen as less a transition to a new phase than a reunification of the “Rus' Land.” This implies that the period between the fall of Kievan Rus' and the rise of Moscow was a static one, marked by the failure of the princes to transform the ideal of a united Kievan state into reality. The problem is that such an ideal did not exist in trade-oriented Gardariki, and it was aspired to, not by Kievan rulers, but rather the later Muscovite ones. Since the princes constantly rotated between cities, no branch of the dynasty could claim Kiev on a hereditary basis. Riurikids were rarely able to form durable bonds with local populations, whose devotion, as we have seen, was to the entire family or one of its branches rather than to individual members. Moreover, during the time being discussed here, the princes derived their wealth from raids, taxation, trade, and perhaps money-lending, rather than from landed property that would tie them to a territorial base.Footnote ⁸⁸

Even when the tenth-century reforms promulgated by Yaroslav the Wise permanently linked several branches of the clan to specific territories, the drama of princely rotation and dynastic rivalries continued to unfold, and the concept of “land” was now minimized in relation to the localized communities. The ever-smaller patrimonies ruled by the Riurikids were in fact understood as viable and sustainable entities for as long as a member of the clan ruled it. To interpret their existence as incessant competition for the “Rus' Land” is to miss the point. The “Rus' Land,” however one chooses to define it, had never been united in the modern sense of the word, and a one-man reign was the exception rather than a rule.Footnote ⁸⁹

In the field of the Middle Eastern studies, by contrast, the dual administration in pre-Mongol Transoxiana has attracted little attention.Footnote ⁹⁰ Despite the region's rise to global significance in the ninth and tenth centuries, most specialists concentrate on the better-documented later period, when Samarqand briefly became the capital of Timur's empire (1369–1405).Footnote ⁹¹ In part, this is a result of the imposition of state-borders onto the once coherent cultural unit, and the consequent division of its past into separate “national” histories. Also, since a substantial part of the region fell under Soviet control, important studies on Transoxanian cities appeared in Russian, a language that the field did not usually require knowledge of. Another obstacle has been sources; much of what is known about the area comes from later compilations produced at the Mongol and Timurid courts, which, though they often rely on earlier writings, tend to privilege dynastic histories over social and economic phenomena.Footnote ⁹² Most importantly, since Islamic civilization is often conceived as urban, to examine the cities of Mawarannahr separately has seemed unnecessary.Footnote ⁹³ Instead, studies of local politics in Transoxiana and neighboring oases of what is today eastern Iran and parts of Afghanistan have considered the roles of the urban notables within the “Islamic” conceptual framework.

Several Soviet historians have pointed out that during certain periods Central Asian cities were self-governing, but the majority of scholars have continued to subscribe to the view that in Transoxiana political sovereignty has always been synonymous with the ruling dynasty.Footnote ⁹⁴ They argue that Islamic cities, of which those of Mawarannahr are but examples, could not have developed a socio-political organization that would enable autonomy or any resistance to external military pressures, because they lacked internal solidarity.Footnote ⁹⁵ Since Islamic society is cosmopolitan and generally promotes social mobility, various social groups residing in the cities are seen as having been connected to elements in other cities rather than to some internal organization. While this “social networks” paradigm has been challenged, studies of the cities within the Muslim oicumene continue to be informed by the perception that local power was undermined by a “double pull” toward both internal plurality and external solidarity.Footnote ⁹⁶

Militarization of the government and emergence of the amīr-aʻyān dichotomy has therefore been attributed to the displacement of “traditional” agrarian societies that in the merchant-oriented Islamic culture fell under Muslim control. Since neither mercantile nor agrarian power could dominate, nomadic military specialists served as mediators, limiting the destructive tendencies inherent in the impasse between the two.Footnote ⁹⁷ Because most of the amīrs were Turks who entered the dar al-Islam as slaves, or as a result of the steppe “domino-effect,” the military-civil split acquired ethnic connotations.

Marshall Hodgson, the architect of the amīr-aʻyān paradigm, concluded that Turkic dynasts, who were often recent converts to Islam, could not complete the transition to a sedentary lifestyle. The basis of their power rested on tribal affiliation and precluded the emergence of a political force capable of transcending the sense of tribal solidarity. The nomadic governments were therefore rooted in the charisma of the amīrs rather than in enduring political ideals. As the state became increasingly decentralized, and as more land was granted away to support the military, the local population began to convert their land-holdings into waqf—an Islamic charitable endowment—to avoid their confiscation or destruction. Consequently, religious authorities and notables, whose wealth was now tied to these endowments, found their positions independent but complementary to those of the amīrs, and they were thus willing to sanction the system as a whole, further undermining efforts of the central government.Footnote ⁹⁸

Hodgson's paradigm is an ideal type devised to explain events that occurred after the breakdown of the caliphal imperial structure. The emergence of the military-civil dichotomy, he argued, was the unintended result of the Seljuk sultans' attempts to restore the Caliphate in the eleventh century, and therefore an Islamic development.Footnote ⁹⁹ As we have seen, though, the system of dual administration existed in Mawarannahr long before the Seljuks, and was neither Turkic, as exemplified by the Samanids, nor Islamic, if the case of East Slavic Gardariki is considered. And, as Hodgson admitted, the amīr-aʻyān paradigm is valid only for Central Asia and the Iranian highlands, since dual administration did not develop in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, or Iran proper.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

I propose that the absence of the amīr-a'yān pattern in Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well as the development of monotheistic kingships in medieval Poland and Hungary but not Kievan Rus', had less to do with the ethnic composition of the populations than with the factor that these regions relied on agriculture rather than commerce as a major source of subsistence.Footnote ¹⁰¹ However, mutatis mutandis, Hodgson's paradigm may be extended to include Gardariki, and in fact it echoes the explanation given by Russian historians who see the competition between older and newly emerged cities as one of the defining characteristics of the medieval Russian political landscape.

Might it be the case that the “new wealth” generated by booming commerce in the Kievan cities was competing with well-established landholding families residing in the older cities, and thus reached a stalemate that could only be resolved by the militarization of the government? The answer is complicated by the fact that in both historiographical traditions—Russian and Middle Eastern—dual administration is understood as an aberration, a temporary phase that led to the restoration of the “ideal” state.Footnote ¹⁰² This search for integrated political structures, and the attribution of imperial ambitions to rulers who understood sovereignty in very different terms, are not new. While Chang Ch'ien looked for a “great ruler” in Transoxiana, Ibn Khaldun calculated that the life of a town was equal in duration to that of its ruling dynasty.Footnote ¹⁰³ Similarly, Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus took the absence of princes among the Slavs to be a sign of their barbarism: “Princes, as they say,” he wrote, “these nations had none, but only ‘zupans,’ elders, as is the rule on the other Slavonic regions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It is hardly surprising that the political imaginations of ancient and medieval observers, and even of modern historians, have been informed by empires, which dominated the world's political landscape for several millennia. I propose that a viable alternative existed in medieval Eurasia, and that it is possible to speak of Central Asian and Kievan Rus' cities and the dual administrative structure of governments as an autochthonic, Eurasian development that emerged as a result of “horizontal continuities” facilitated by the trade along the Silk Roads.

In this respect, it is important to note that “local” historians, the Rus' and Persian chroniclers, had developed understandings of the past that were diametrically opposed to that of their imperial observers and, in turn, remarkably similar to one another. Perhaps the absence of general histories in the two regions during this period, not unlike the absence of great rulers, had little to do with either a “parochial” outlook of the chroniclers or their “monumental patriotism,” but instead displayed a perception of history generated by a sense of space rather than chronology and particular subject.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Historians of medieval Iran have long been attentive to the distinction between “local history” as a genre and as a “focus of concern,” and similar arguments are appearing in writings of Russian medievalists.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The remarkable continuity in local history writing in Iran cannot be written off as a consequence of the Caliphate's disintegration, if only because this type of literature did not emerge in other areas affected by the decentralization of government. Furthermore, it would appear that local histories dominated literary output in general, and in any event they pre-date the Caliphs' demise.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

A very similar phenomenon can be observed in Rus', where local chronicles made up a disproportionate share of literary production. Each city recorded foundation legends if they were known, as well as the building and destruction of churches, specificities of topography, the piety of particular individuals and princes, prices of food and other commodities, and so forth. In other words, the city, as a well-defined space, was the fons et origo of historical inquiry. It would follow that the people residing in a city were related to one another by their common place of residence rather than by common ancestry. But does this mean that there were particular societal forces at work that were responsible for the production of local histories? And what factors framed the geographical and intellectual borders of the chronicles' regionalism?Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Might horizontal continuities in Eurasia also have generated a particular historiographical genre? At present these questions must remain open, but perhaps part of their answer has already been proposed by Charles Melville, who suggested that numerous histories produced in eastern Iran during the Middle Ages were meant to celebrate individual cities and their success in order to create an identity that could survive the endless cycle of warlords.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Be that as it may, the hypothesis certainly calls for further inquiries into the history of Eurasian urban culture. Additional clues for understanding sovereignty in the western steppe may be found in the cities of the Golden Horde, which like Gardariki sprang up “like bubbles in yeast,” had populations organized in what appeared to Ibn Batutta as the futuwwa, and whose armed detachments participated in raids conducted by the Khan's army. At the same time, discussion of the cities of the Tarim Basin may help us assess the degree of continuity in urban administration in the east.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Finally, a brief but necessary element of this “urban” puzzle is the notion of the medieval Western European city-states and the distinction to be made, if any, between these and their Eurasian counterparts. While this question must be addressed through a number of theoretical and methodological approaches, I want to conclude with a few preliminary remarks on the subject, and by calling attention to significant qualitative differences between the European city-states and Eurasian urban polities.

Among the most important of these differences is that Eurasian cities do not appear to have been independent from imperial rule—only with the emergence of the so-called “nomadic” empires, which promoted and depended on trade, did an urban renaissance occur across the continent. In Western Europe an opposite process may be discerned. The ninth-century annual fairs of Bruges and Ghent, and later the thirteenth-century regional markets of Brie and Champagne, emerged at moments marked by the absence of imperial rule. As Janet Abu-Lughod has demonstrated, cities tended to lose their significance as soon as they fell under royal jurisdiction.Footnote ¹¹¹ The Italian republics of Venice and Genoa, on the other hand, developed into fully independent states, and ostensibly present us with another parallel. But we must keep in mind that the potential for violence in medieval Europe was miniscule when compared to Eurasia, and had never reached a level requiring militarization of the government.Footnote ¹¹² Moreover, in the European case the propensity toward violence in general was mitigated by the legacy of the Roman Empire, Christianity, Latin language, and law, constituting a uniformity that did not exist in Eurasia during the period I have considered here. Lastly, no European polity before the Age of Discoveries ever tried to regulate world trade, while every steppe empire aspired to, even if only the Mongol one briefly succeeded.

The cities are but one example of Eurasian “horizontal continuities” that require additional study, but they will provide historians with a starting point for further research and discussion.