What does the word “barbarian” bring to mind? What mental images surface when you hear it? Do you picture some uncivilized, fur-wearing, sword-swinging, ale-chugging pseudo-human ready at a moment’s notice to raid, pillage, plunder, and rape? Or perhaps, if you’re my age you see a young Arnold Schwarzenegger, shackled to a millstone, walking in circles until his inevitable release and quest for vengeance upon those who destroyed his village.
While the word “barbarian” has come to be used as a synonym for an uneducated or unrefined person, in the very beginning—at least in the Western tradition—the Greeks simply used the term to refer to anyone who didn’t speak Greek or share Greek values. In other words, an outsider … and thus someone to be feared.
The Greeks, and then the Romans who took up the mantle of Western Civilization, greatly expanding upon it, labeled a lot of people “barbarian”. Many of these labels persist in the historical records passed down to us today. Traditionally, following the path laid by Greek and Roman writers over a couple millennia, we—the recipients of that gift they called “civilization”—don’t ascribe much to “barbarian” peoples. I take that back … we don’t ascribe much that’s positive to peoples we consider to have been “barbarian”. Yet it doesn’t take much reading to realize that the label was applied, in various forms and languages, to a significant portion of the human race at one time or another.
So, aside from the destruction of Rome, raids into Greece, forays into Persia, and outright invasions of Ancient Egypt, did these “barbarian” peoples actually accomplish anything that lasted? Or were our ancient and medieval forebears correct in ascribing to them only the most negative and bestial of intentions and attributes?
Ignoring for the moment how Germanic tribes essentially rewrote the history and ethnicity of Western Europe after escorting the Western Roman Empire to its grave, I’d like to focus instead on other “barbarians”, namely those who emerged out of East Asia. Specifically, and in order, I’d like to introduce the Huns, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Manchus. These generally nomadic peoples wreaked much havoc across an incredible swath of the globe yet left much in their wake that has helped to shape the modern world around us.
Let’s start with the Huns, much reviled even in relatively modern terms. Virtually synonymous across Europe for mindless savagery, the British conjured up the image of these 4th and 5th Century A.D. raiders to depict the Germans during World War I. Thus, in a lot of minds even today, the Huns are thought of as Germanic though this was hardly the case.
While the Germanic peoples are believed to have emerged out of North and Northeastern Europe, the Huns came from a bit farther away. Thought today to be related to the Xiongnu who once resided north of what would today be considered China, the Huns were an Asiatic people who practiced some fairly unique traditions. The most interesting, perhaps, was the practice of head binding their young children in order to extend the shape of the skull, giving adult Huns an otherworldly appearance that truly frightened the peoples they encountered. Add to the alien-like heads strangely cultivated facial hair and oddly shaped tattoos, and the Huns—even without the raiding and looting—were nightmarish to a great many civilizations.
Han Dynasty China fought off and on with the Xiongnu for almost the entirety of that dynasty’s existence, and it is likely that this pressure, combined with that of the growing Turkish menace to the east (that’s right…the east) forced them to move westward. Regardless of the reason, the Huns appear on the stage of Western history in 370 A.D., roughly the same time that the Xiongnu begin to disappear from Chinese records. Emerging out of the Russian steppe like a plague of locusts, the Huns cut a swath through whatever civilization they encountered, from the Hungarian Plains where they more-or-less settled, to modern France, where they raided with impunity before being defeated by a combined Roman-Visigothic Army near Chalons.
This penultimate battle between civilization and barbarity—as any Roman would tell the story—cost Rome dearly. Some 300,000 men were said to have died during this battle, an incredible number which, even if exaggerated, probably indicates a higher than usual body count. Attila, fearsome and unusually aggressive leader of the Huns, would return to invade the Western Roman Empire again in 452, securing a negotiated truce. Yet the Hunnic invasions constituted a couple more hammer blows striking at an already wobbly imperial Roman foundation that would soon crack and then collapse under the weight of ever-weakening leadership.
We all think of the Turks as the people who eventually conquered and then settled in Anatolia, once the Roman province of Asia, making up what is now called the Republic of Türkiye. Yet the ancestors of the Turkish peoples we know today also once resided in Northeast Asia and had long-term contact with the Xiongnu and the Chinese dynasties that rose and fell to the south. By 11th Century, after pushing the Xiongnu out of the way, Turkish tribes inhabited lands stretching in an arc from Mongolia in the east to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in the West. Given their humble origins, the Turks win my vote for the most underrated and under-studied people in all the world.
From their original homeland east of modern Mongolia, the Turks had adopted an equestrian, nomadic lifestyle already by the 1st Millennium B.C. The spread of Turkish peoples and culture appears to have flowed westward like slow-moving lava, raising little in the way of historical reference to help us understand how the disparate early Turkish tribes achieved so much influence across the region. That said, remember that this area was for hundreds of years a virtual black hole between East Asian records and those of the literate cultures to the west including the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Yet we know that by 305 A.D. there was a Turkish kingdom established in modern Kazakhstan.
The Khwarazmian Empire, stretching from Central Kazakhstan to the Red Sea, was an incredibly powerful Turkish state. Strong and apparently confident enough to kill Mongol ambassadors sent to establish trade, this act provided the Mongols a reason to go to war, leading to invasion and utter destruction by the rising power to the east.
While the Mongols trampled many civilizations into dust, never again to surface in the historical record, this tragedy for the Turks was but a milestone, a bump on the road to greatness. The Turks, by this time greatly influenced by Persian culture and capitalizing upon the second Mongol invasion of Anatolia, seized and settled large tracts of former Byzantine lands. In fact, so many Turks arrived there that Europeans began calling Anatolia “The Land of the Turks”. By the 13th Century, with Mongol power receding everywhere, local Turkish rulers reasserted control, eventually coalescing into the Ottoman Turkish Empire.
Constantinople would fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, putting an end to the Eastern Roman Empire. That Turkish state would survive through the end of World War I when, in 1922 the Young Turk Movement forced the dissolution of the Empire. The Republic of Turkey—as it was officially named until this very year—remains a testament to a people’s long struggle to survive and thrive in a very dangerous part of the world. That said, Turkish peoples today constitute ethnic majorities in Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan and significant minorities in both Georgia and Tajikistan.
The Mongols who did so much to both hurt and, inadvertently help the far-flung Turks build their empire, are probably the most well-known to casual students of history. After all, the Mongol invasions affected civilizations from the shores of Japan to the plains of Poland and Hungary. Yet they too originated from northeast of what we would today call China, forever, it seems, locked in mortal combat with a whole host of other Northeast Asian tribes. Yet by the time of Temujin’s birth in 1162, peoples sharing in Mongol culture and speaking dialects of the same Tungusic language were numerous if politically divided. Temujin, known to history as Ghenghis Khan, would forge them into an army of epic stature and unmatched effectiveness.
Most of you are familiar enough with the Mongol invasions of … well … most of Asia and Eastern Europe, that I won’t go into any real detail here. That said, and to put the Mongol invasions into a nutshell, by 1200 A.D. the Mongols ruled the largest contiguous empire the world has ever seen. It stretched from Eastern Siberia all the way to Hungary in the west and far enough south to include all of Iran, northern India, and all of what was then considered “China”. A phenomenal accomplishment for a nomadic people, the Mongols created a way of fighting that was almost modern. Historical podcaster Dan Carlin opined that the Mongols assembled the greatest army of all time.
The Manchus derived from the same Jurchen tribes of Northeastern Manchuria that had once seized most of China north of the Yangtze River, establishing the Jin Dynasty from 1115 to 1234. These people, unlike the others we’ve discussed thus far, were only semi-nomadic, and seemed to use that cultural flexibility to their greatest advantage. The Jurchen and their predecessors were often mentioned in early Korean and Chinese records and the mercurial ups and downs of their power created waves that rippled across both those more sedentary societies. Yet it wasn’t until the convergence of a great leader and the right circumstances that the Jurchen, calling themselves Manchu, would step into the limelight. And what a step it was!
As discussed at length in my previous post, “China vs the Chinese”, it was the Manchus who created the modern China we see on a map today. Exploding onto the scene and into a virtual power vacuum, the Jurchen tribes came together under their leader Nurhaci at a time when the Ming Dynasty was in decline and Joseon Korea was still recovering from Japanese invasions (1592-98). Thus, the Jurchen coalesced into the hard riding, tough-fighting Manchus at a time when the traditional restraints to Jurchen power were weakened. Nurhaci meant to capitalize upon this and did so in style, invading Ming China in 1618 and then Joseon in 1627 and 1636, establishing the Qing Dynasty with its capital at first Shenyang and then Beijing.
Over the succeeding century Qing armies would press to the boundaries of modern China, making incursions into Vietnam, Tibet, Nepal, and as far into modern Kazakhstan as Lake Balkhash and Dushanbe while swallowing Mongolia whole. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, and thus Manchu domination of the Chinese, the Republic of China still owned all but Mongolia and Western Nepal.
These four peoples, considered “barbarians” by those outsiders who told their story, did much to shape the modern world we live in today. Whether that took the form of eliminating older power structures or building new nations and borders, these largely nomadic peoples ironically created much that lasted through the years. Their impact upon the world—even our digital, modern world—is something we should all be aware of.
As well, the human tendency to look down on “others” to characterize different as “barbarian” or otherwise lacking value, is something to keep in mind as well. As useful as it may be to politicians to dehumanize enemies and potential threats, never forget that there are flesh and blood people behind each and every “barbarian” label. Older than time itself, perhaps, this tendency to stick with what and whom we already know is strong, and keeps us, at times, from really seeing others for who and what they are.
Something to think about, perhaps, as we continually evolve our view of this vast planet we all share.
M. G. Haynes
** Title image courtesy of Drawing Now at: https://www.drawingnow.com/tutorials/121996/how-to-draw-clash-of-clans-barbarian/.