The nomadic peoples of Asia exerted an enormous impact on the shape and direction of cultural contacts in Old World history. As military conquerors, as the hosts of foreign travellers, and as traders, they controlled the overland transmission of goods and ideas between the great Old World civilisations. They made original contributions to the flow – for example, by domesticating the horse and camel – and imported alien products into their own cultures in the process.

The periodic surges of armed horsemen from the Asian steppes had little to do with any innate desire on the part of the so-called "barbarian hordes" to occupy fertile foreign lands on which they could settle as "civilised" farmers. The movements were a function of the vast expanses of land on which nomadic herders relied in times of both peace and war. The Mongols' economic dependence on the commercial networks threaded through their homelands also served as a catalyst for war, as did the warrior ethos that underlined tribal concepts of leadership and political power, and the very human desire to acquire material comforts and badges of wealth and status that the Mongols themselves could not produce.

The nature of the military campaigns which Tamerlane conducted in the late 1300s, and the events that triggered them provide one clear illustration of the subtle ways in which armed conflict, trade and commerce, and the movement of settlers are linked together as agents of cross-cultural contact and change. Tamerlane’s reasons for military aggression derived from a complex blend of personal beliefs and the cultural conditions in which he grew up. Economic motives, however, clearly contributed to the direction of the warrior’s campaign.

When Genghis Khan established his Mongol empire, he instituted a terror-enforced peace so effective that merchants under the normal protection of the Great Khan could journey across the Asian steppes in relative safety. By the late 1300s, people moving between the Islamic West, India, and China enjoyed no such umbrella of protection. In selecting targets for his armies of conquest, Tamerlane sought in part to secure the commercial infrastructure on which his Chagatai Khanate depended. He honed in on warlords who attacked trade communities and caravans, and foreign rulers who mistreated Chagatai merchants and thus threatened the Chagatai economic livelihood.

The Empire of Tamerlane (Timur the Lame) in 1405
© The Applied History Research Group

	The Khanate of Genghis Khan
	The Chagatai Khanate

Although his attacks on individual targets unfolded as merciless reigns of terror, Tamerlane planned both his invasions and his subsequent massacres of foreign victims with care. His military staff included a contingent of spies who travelled in advance to potential targets, often under the guise of merchants. Before unleashing his soldiers on the cities he stormed, moreover, Tamerlane carefully isolated scholars and artisans, whom he incarcerated and removed to his capital, Samarkand, to manufacture weapons, construct elegant buildings, and enrich the local culture.

Once begun, Tamerlane’s campaigns took on a life of their own, partly because the Chagatai leader’s political prestige rested on a successful record of military victories that would ensure the continued allegiance of his troops. It was, moreover, the continuing infusion of the territorial and material spoils of war that enabled Tamerlane to maintain his vast standing army, which included a huge entourage of labourers, charioteers, cooks, millers, siege engineers and craftsmen, in addition to the all-important nucleus of fast-moving cavalry. As did other medieval military commanders, Tamerlane fed and rewarded his army by unleashing them in conquered territory to pillage and plunder. Because it required pasturage for massive numbers of cavalry mounts and packhorses, moreover, the army needed constantly to be on the move.