Military history remains an underdeveloped topic in Middle Eastern and especially Iranian history for reasons that have little to do with a lack of material—after all war takes up the bulk of attention in the indigenous sources written under the typical premodern regime (even if these tend to be sparing in their information on the technicalities of warfare and issues of tactics and strategy). A more plausible reason for the paucity of studies on the military in Middle Eastern history is a general lack of attention to, and even a disregard for, warfare in modern academia, which is surely attributable in part to a certain urban bias combined with an aversion in modern scholarship to the “archaic” “tribal” element inherent in premodern military matters.
This book is thus a most welcome addition to a bookshelf that has few titles on it. The essays it brings together investigate the nature and composition of armies and their business—warfare—on the Iranian plateau and the surrounding lands in the millennium between the rise of Islam and the onset of the modern period. In addressing these issues, the authors go well beyond the one topic that has received more than rudimentary attention in modern scholarship, that of the so-called slave soldiers, mamluks and ghulams, to examine the contribution of nomadic forces in this long period.
Beatrice Manz opens the book with an essay on nomadic conquerors—the Seljuqs and the Mongols—and their military relationship with the lands they seized and ruled. She argues against the prevailing notion that nomads, enjoying military superiority, did not have to recruit military manpower from the subjugated populations. Surveying various parts of Iran in the two centuries prior to the Mongol invasion, from Mazandaran and Khorasan to Sistan, Fars and Luristan, she finds that, all along, soldiers were conscripted to fight under their own leaders as these had become nominal vassals of the victorious dynasties. The Mongols, too, their ranks constantly depleted, depended on this local military bazaar for supplementary military manpower. The benefits of this practice were obvious and worked two ways: the conquerors replenished the ranks of their warriors, while for the conquered military recruitment was a path toward advancement.
Kurt Franz follows with a sprawling essay that, with seventy densely argued pages approaches the heft of a minor monograph. He offers a diachronic study of the entanglement between various sedentary regimes, from the Umayyads to the Mamluks, and the nomadic-Bedouin forces on the Syrian periphery. Peripheral tribal peoples—the Kurds in eastern Anatolia, the Arab Bedouins in southern Iraq—sandwiched between more powerful, often imperial, neighbors warring amongst themselves, were typically known and often despised for their “swing” loyalty. The imperial powers saw such willingness to switch sides as fickleness. But for the liminal groups in question the same willingness to collaborate with, or be coopted by, one dominant polity or another was natural; their ability to choose sides was, after all, their only asset and they had no other way of gaining leverage over neighbors of superior manpower and fire power. Seeking to identify push and pull factors in the loyalty game played by the Bedouins, the author distinguishes four types of tribal “triangulation”: what he calls “inclusion,” a condition in which the Bedouins were part of a single state, as in the case of the Umayyads; “unitary adjacency,” with the Bedouins adjoining a single state, which was typical in the early Abbasid as well as in the Ottoman period; “segmentary adjacency,” in which the Bedouins adjoined largely coexisting states, which occurred quite frequently in any given period; and “overlap,” when the Bedouin areas were located between territorially conflicting states, such as in the period when the Mamluks and the Mongols vied for supremacy. The essay ultimately demonstrates that here, too, both parties benefited: lacking the resources to patrol its borderlands, the empire needed the Bedouins; the latter received land grants and titles.
David Durand-Guédy's essay on the role of the Turkmen in Seljuq warfare nicely dovetails with that of Franz in that it examines the role of tribal Turkmen forces after the Seljuq conquest. This issue is rarely examined in detail by scholars—who tend to focus on the role of the mamluks or ghulams as the forces that typically sidelined and marginalized the unruly tribal forces once political order was established, and who see this as part and parcel of a linear shift from “Turkic” military power to Persian-dominated bureaucratic rule. The author argues that tribesmen continued to play a significant role, both as a fighting force at the core of Seljuq power, assisting them in their expansion, and in the rebellions that shook that same power after the reign of Malikshah (d. 1092), during which their amirs set out to recreate a version of the Seljuq dispensation. The Seljuqs may have gravitated toward an “Iranian,” sedentary way of life and rule but this process was not linear and it did not make them turn their backs on the Turkmen, with whom they maintained an affinity in their language and peripatetic lifestyle.
Jürgen Paul next focuses on the period immediately following Seljuq rule. Like Franz, he investigates the interaction between the state and the nomads, in their case the twelfth-century Khwarazmshahs and various ambient groups, such as the Qarluq and the Qipchaq. In keeping with the supposition that the state's need for the military service of the nomads gave the latter a modicum of leverage and thus power, which they used to their advantage, Paul, too, sensibly concludes that the relationship was not a one-sided but a mutually beneficial one.
Charles Melville takes on the relationship between text and illustration in the depiction of the horrors of war. He starts with the observation that serious Persian painting only developed after the Mongol conquest and that illustrations accompanying historical texts rarely deal with contemporary history. He then analyzes the few works that form the exception by depicting actual battles, focusing on the rare instances when war was realistically rendered by way of showing heads severed from bodies and gruesome towers of skulls of the slain. The Safavid period, Melville concludes, with few exceptions saw the loss of any direct connection between texts and contemporary warfare, including the depiction of new weaponry—firearms and cannon. Painters persisted in a make-believe world, aided and abetted in their aloofness from the raw reality of warfare by the peace the Safavids concluded with their Ottoman adversaries in 1639.
Reuven Amitai wonders whether Ibn Khaldun's powerful thesis about the flux and reflux of dynasties must be seen in the context of his time and place or can teach us something about tribal societies at large, and in particular about the Mongols. The conclusion of this preliminary study is that ʿasabiyya, tribal solidarity or loyalty, played a crucial role in the success of the Mongols, but that Ibn Khaldun can only serve as a heuristic explanatory model for their victories.
Michele Bernardini next offers a dense essay about the armies of Timur Lang, in which he discusses, first, the tangled question of the meaning of the term “Turkmen,” concluding that it is rarely used to refer to an ethnic group and often means a person of low standing, someone barely adhering to Islam. In the second half of the essay he analyzes the many facets of the composition of the warlord's military apparatus.
Irene Schneider moves the discussion up by four centuries by addressing the symbiotic relationship between the early Qajar state and the Yamut Turkmen of Khorasan. She shows how the two were partners and even allies as long as the Qajars were engaged in state formation, to the point of forging marriage alliances and collaborating in capturing Astarabad in 1744. Their relations grew antagonistic in the period 1784‒92, and the Qajars failed to integrate the Yamut into their emerging state framework. Seeking to account for the marginalization of the Yamut, Schneider points to the rise to power of Aqa Mohammad Khan and the attendant shift in the constellation of tribal power relations. The Yamut lost in the process, but so did the Qajars, for the loss of alignment deprived them of recruits, tax income and, above all, security on a sensitive frontier, which would remain unstable well into the twentieth century.
The Safavid army and the role the Turkmen Qizilbash played in it is the subject of a wide-ranging, insightful essay by Giorgio Rota. He begins by balancing the reasons why the Safavid armies were able to withstand the logistically and numerically superior Ottomans as demonstrated during the war they fought between 1578 and 1590—a familiarity with the topography, hit and run tactics, speed, skills—against the drawbacks of the Qizilbash way of fighting—the absence of a central command structure, a lack of discipline verging on anarchy, their reckless willingness to die in battle. These latter traits made them badly prepared for pitched battles and siege warfare, both of which they consequently sought to avoid. The impetuosity and death-defying recklessness of the Qizilbash, Rota argues, may point to pre-Islamic, Central or Inner Asian roots, begging the question of why the Ottomans did not follow this tradition. ʿAbbas I's reforms, including the formation of a corps of musketeers, tufangchis, were not just not new but did little to alter this mode of fighting. Of low status and poorly integrated into the existing military structure, by themselves they were unable to alter the Safavid manner of fighting wars.
Wolfgang Holzwarth closes the volume with a well-researched, groundbreaking essay on the transformation of the relationship between political power and the military in Uzbek Central Asia between the late seventeenth and the late nineteenth century, and in particular the ways in which the emerging Uzbek rulers sought to create their own military power base. His main question concerns the traditional dilemma of successful nomadic conquerors: what to do with the tribal forces that brought them to power and how to organize and finance a professional military without being dependent on these same unruly forces—in other words, how to overcome their Chingissid legacy and create an Uzbek power base in conditions where many if not most Uzbeks retained a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle. While pondering this question the author offers much valuable information on the introduction of new weaponry and the limited role firearms continued to play in the Uzbek armies. He also draws attention to the important effect the confrontation with Nader Shah's well-organized armies had on the Uzbeks, whose armies at the time still consisted mostly of mounted archers fighting in the traditional hit-and-run manner. Nader's defeat of the Chingissids, followed by his seizure of Bukhara, not only triggered the downfall of the Chingissid dynasty and the emergence of a tribal Uzbek dynasty, but helped introduce a multi-ethnic military bazaar of armed forces composed of Afghan nawkars, as opposed to the old tribal formations complemented by slave guards, a model pioneered by Nader and subsequently by Mohammad Rahim, the founder of the Manghanids. This transformation enabled the new regime to cope with the typical tribal uprisings in its domain, yet proved inadequate against the encroaching Russians.
This is a rich collection that is diverse as well as cohesive. Its contributors convincingly demonstrate that the premodern states of West and Central Asia did not have a monopoly over military manpower and that their mobilization of warriors, before and after conquest, was a complex and often decentralized affair. As all good studies do, the various essays collected here raise as many questions as they answer, and thus whet the appetite of the scholar interested in what was the most popular pastime of the regimes that fought over the Iranian plateau in the premodern period.
