The Nomads and Ethnopolitical Realities of Trnascaucasia in the 11Th-14Th Centuries

Abstract

The I Ith 14th centuries constitute the unique period in a millennium-long history of Transcaucasia with the emerging complicated and contradictory relationships between the two worlds: the local agricultural one and the incoming nomadic one. Those relationships embraced the political, economic and cultural domains, they were practically universal. Evidently, an indepth research of this exciting problem is a matter of the future. What I would like to do is to dwell upon the processes and phenomena of the ethnopolitical historv of Transcaucasia that would most convincingly show the effect of the nomadic factor in the fortunes of the region. In the first place, I want to underscore the following crucial fact. In contrast to the neighbouring Iran and Byzantium having had long-time close contacts with the nomadic world, the Transcaucasian countries lacked consistent traditions for contacting the nomads. The Transcaucasian peoples Armenians, Georgians and Caucasian Albanians sporadically contacted the prairie-type nomads of the pre-Caucasus the Huns and Khazars; however, those contacts had a limited nature, embracing mostly military and diplomatic spheres. The matter is that in early Middle Ages, the routes of Western advancement of a number of nomadic peoples were located to the North of the Caspian Sea and the Great Caucasus Range, so that only individual groups of nomads occasionally appeared in the lands of Transcaucasia without settling there. Yet, starting from the I 1th century and throughout the subsequent ages, the nomadic peoples chose the Southern routes for their massive intrusions, resulting in new waves of nomads repetitively invading the Transcaucasia to produce substantial effects upon the course of events in that part of the world. Reports by the Armenian and Georgian authors provide a general picture of the shock that befell the local communities from the massive intrusion of the nomads. The contemporaries were stunned by an alien way of life, military tactics and even by the exterior of the nomads. True, the nomads first penetrated into the lands of Transcaucasta as early as during the political supremacy of the Arabs, but that phenomenon was then limited in scale. Still not the least important is another substantial detail. The Arab nomadism is very different from the Turkic or Mongolian nomadic systems. The Arab nomads used to penetrate into spaces unfit for farming rather than to seize the already used lands. That was in the cities, since the area owned by them outside the cities was insignificant.' In contrast to them, the Turkic nomads and Mongols coming to Transcaucasia from Central Asia had had little to do with land tillers or urban life in their home countries.2 Visible in the 11th 14th centuries was a fundamentally new process with very far-reaching consequences. The Seljuk Turks had initiated a practically unending inflow of the nomadic masses. The Seljuks were followed by the Mongols in the 13th century who were trailed by new Turkic tribes. As became clear later, the westward displacement of the Turkic ethnic masses was an incremental process. It is remarkable that the Armenian and Georgian lands were being invaded not only from the East. Weakening of the Georgian kingdom in the 30s of the 13th century aggravated the vulnerability of its Western boundaries. The second largest ethnic mass of nomads was moved from the South. The nomadic Kurds infiltrated into the Transcaucasian ethnocultural world~as mercenaries, and, as a rule, settled in urban areas. Inter alia, some individual groups of Kurds penetrated into Dvin and Ganja just in this way.3 They continued to maintain contact with their vernacular ethnicity remaining faithful to the traditional ancestral and tribal organization. The Kurdish penetration occurred from Northern Mesopotamia and Upper Syria where the revival of nomadism was conspicuous in the 10th 11th centuries.4 Evidently the nomadic Kurds were in the first place attracted by the