«Тахиййат»: Сборник статей в честь Н. Н. Дьякова

m 134 n John Masson Smith, Jr. took position as the rear line of the light cavalry, after covering, in less than a minute, some 480 yards in the course of the attack 1 . Each of the four lines attacked several times, as Plano Carpini indicates, “each one shooting three or four arrows at their adversaries” (one shot per charge). These three or four attacks may be called an “attack sequence”; during a four-shot sequence (tak- ing some fifteen minutes) the four lines would shoot a total of (4 × 22 × 4 =) 352 arrows. The ponies would need rest or replacement after, if not during, each sequence. At the battle of Mt. Naqu against the Naimans, Temüchin placed the reserve ponies behind his two combat units, the Vanguard (under his own command), with the Center behind it 2 . Since the size of Temüchin’s army is not known, it is not clear how accessible these remounts were to the retiring attackers; similar placement in a unit with ten Thousands deeply “stacked” would seem to put them out of reach. The equine effort and endurance required by these tactics is suggested by the equestrian game of polo. Polo has six periods of play, “chukkas”; the modern chuk- ka lasts 7 to 7½ minutes, with four-minute intervals between chukkas. A player needs at minimum two “ponies” (now always horses), ridden in alternation for a total of three chukkas (20 minutes) each, so as to have at least a somewhat rested mount in each chukka. Six horses, one for each chukka, make a decent string; at high levels of competition, players are apt to have still more, and better, horses, and to ride several in each chukka. Strenuous equine activity, sporting or military, can be sustained only briefly: in the case of polo, for a matter of minutes. The Mongols’ mounts, real ponies, would have reached exhaustion even sooner. SelçuklularÌ Devleti Tarihi , III, Histoire des Seldjoukides D ’ Asie Mineure par un anonyme (Ankara, 1952), 32: At the battle of Köse DaÅ in 1243, “The Mongols all with one voice shouting zev, zev like dogs, rained arrows on the Muslims”. 1 20 mph, the pace assumed here, equals 586 yards per minute; 480 yards at 9.8 yards/ sec takes 49 seconds. This procedure resembles the European cavalry maneuver called “caracole”, as depicted in an early seventeenth century work reproduced in Kate Van Orden, Music, Discipline and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2005, fig 6.4: “The Caracole. In Johann Jacobi von Wallhausen, L ’ art militaire à cheval (1616)”. This depiction resembles the view of the Mongol procedure presented in Smith, “‘Ayn Jalut”, 318; also Smith/ Lev, 251–52; and in my paper for the 1998 international conference on Military Archaeology in St. Petersburg, Russia, opining that the dimen- sions and lay-out of the “racetrack” in Abbasid Samarra suggest that it was a training course for this style of mounted archery. See Alastair Northedge, “The Racecourses at Sāmarrā’”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 53:1 (1990), and idem , The historical topography of Samarra (London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 2005). Cf. May 44, 72–74. Note that the Mongols could try this attack procedure at home, practicing with only three or four riders, the men and boys perhaps of even a single nomad family. 2 SH , § 195. The mention of the reserve ponies’ position is unusual, perhaps unique.