Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
east-west temperate zone of Eurasia. For these Turkic nomads constituted the bulk of the
tribes under the infamous Mongol armies (the Mongols themselves, in any case, were a
relatively small elite). We will deal with the Mongol hordes and their geopolitical signi-
ficance later, but it is interesting here to note Hodgson's view that the horse nomadism
of the Mongols and Turkic peoples was ultimately more crucial to history than the camel
nomadism of the Arabs. Because horses could not endure the aridity of Middle Eastern
deserts, and the sheep with which these nomads often traveled required relatively dense
forage, the Mongol-led armies avoided distant Arabia, and instead ravaged nearer and more
environmentally friendly Eastern Europe, Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia and Iran, Cent-
ral Asia, India, and China: territories that, taken together, would be of overwhelming stra-
tegic importance on the map of Eurasia just prior to the advent of gunpowder warfare. The
Mongol-Turkic invasions were arguably the most significant event in world history in the
second millennium of the common era, and it was mainly because of the use of certain an-
imals tied to geography.
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Hodgson's discussion of the Mongols shows how
The Venture of Islam
is far more than
a work of area expertise. To call Hodgson an Arabist or an Islamicist is to inaccurately
diminish him. For in his hands, Islam is a vehicle to reveal the most pivotal intellectual,
cultural, and geographical trends affecting Afro-Eurasian societies, the entire Old World,
in fact, with the Oikoumene of antiquity at its heart. This is not a work of geography per se.
Hodgson spends as much time defining Sufi mysticism as he does landscape, to say nothing
of the other intellectual and sectarian traditions he unravels. And yet in bringing geography
into the discussion in the way that he does, he demonstrates how it interacts with politics
and ideology to produce the very texture of history. Take the Ottoman Turks, who eventu-
ally replaced their Turkic brethren, the Seljuks, in Anatolia in the late thirteenth century.
The “monolithic military caste system” of the Ottomans placed “inherent geographical lim-
its” on the area under their control, in contrast to that of Russia, say, or even of the primitive
Mongols. The Ottomans were accustomed to a single grand army, in which the
padishah
,
or emperor, must always be present. At the same time, they had to operate out of a single
capital city, Constantinople, in the northeastern Mediterranean by the Black Sea, where the
sultanate's vast bureaucratic structure was headquartered. “As a result, a major campaign
could be carried only so far as a single season's marching would allow”: Vienna to the
northwest and Mosul to the southeast were consequently the geographical limits of stable
Ottoman expansion on land. The army could winter in some years at Sofia or Aleppo, ex-
tending its range, though miring it in great logistical difficulties. In general, however, this
absolutist system with all the power, both personal and bureaucratic, concentrated in Con-
stantinople had the effect of taking the capital's geographical situation and making it an
all-determining factor. This was, after a fashion, the inverse of human agency. And it had
the effect of leading to the decay of this military state, since once the Ottoman military's
