Tamerlane Swoops In
THE THING ABOUT being in a “central” location is that everything else is “out there.”
Europe, for instance, on the edge of the great central continent, is definitely “out there,” as is China. Even though the Chinese call China “Central Country,” deep in their hearts they know that geography makes them peripheral.
Peripheral to what? To Central Asia, of course. The middle of everything.
For three millennia successive nomad groups would find a new military innovation and ride the technique to conquest of the periphery. It was never the other way around. The periphery’s efforts against the center were always defensive. They lacked the resources and methods to chase the nomads all over the place, so all they could do was resist. Sometimes that worked, sometimes not.
The Mongols were the last and greatest of the nomad expansions. Only the hazards of dynastic succession stopped them, and turns of fate like the Divine Wind (kamikaze) that wrecked the Mongol fleet on its way to Japan.
Then, of course, they destroyed their empire with dynastic succession wars. There is a book that describes a sort of law of dynastic succession. It is called Muqaddimah, by Ibn Khaldun. It is right up there with Macchiavelli’s Prince in the field of political theory. Basically, it says that the offspring are always unworthy.
Chingis Khan’s Empire
