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

m 154 n John Masson Smith, Jr. Since horses could not be raised on the steppe, the Mongols sought them elsewhere. Some were acquired through conquest and some from trade or as gifts. The Mongols campaigning in Russia and Hungary plundered more elegant arms and better horses 1 . Qubilai received a gift of 100000 white horses (but perhaps ponies) every year at the New Year 2 ; and the Yuan shih mentions, from what was probably a more extensive record, now lost, four presentations over about a one-year period, 2/10/1326 to 4/5/1327, by the Ilkhan Abu Sa’id to the Yuan emperor, consisting of, or including, “horses”, or “western horses” 3 . The “western horses” must really have been horses, not ponies (ponies for Mongo- lia would have been the equine equivalent of coal for Newcastle) probably the sort of “better horses” mentioned by King Frederick, imported from Europe to China 4 ; or an export version of the “fat horses” kept by Ghazan Khan’s soldiers 5 . But only with Qubilai’s resizing of his army and radical transformation of its ecology for the Song war, was a considerable portion of the Mongol army positioned to obtain horses 6 . Preparing for his Song war, Qubilai, who had conducted sieges as a general in Möngke Qan’s Song war, resized some units to enhance the cavalry’s tactical utility, and to ease its logistics. Instead of mobilizing tümens with (nominally) ten thousand men, he called up only one man from households with two or three adult males, 2 from 4–5, and 3 from 6–7 7 . These men were assigned to newly-defined portions of the conventional tümen, which now became an “upper tümen” with at least 7000 men 8 (the oth- er 3000 were probably its a ’ urugh guards 9 , who would not have campaigned with the rest). A “middle” tümen with 5000 men was probably two half-sized 1 Benson, 372–373. 2 Polo, 139. 3 Allsen, Culture, 44, table 2. 4 Via Iran, or even the Golden Horde: hostilities between India and adjacent Mongols did not inhibit large-scale Indian imports of horses (doubtless ponies because of the large num- bers) from the Golden Horde. See Ibn Ba ããåã a, The Travels of Ibn Ba ããåã a , H.A.R. Gibb trans. (Cambridge UK: Cambridge UP, 1962), II, 478. 5 RaD, III, 731: “When they have straw and barley ... every one will be able to tether two or three horses and keep them fatted ...”. 6 See Smith, “Manger”, 63–73. 7 According to a Yuan record from early 1267, the year preceding his main campaign against the Song : see Ch’i-ch’ing Hsiao, The Military Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1978), 78. 8 Hsiao, 72, from a document of 1284 in Yuan Shih 98, The Military Establishment; see also n. 27 (on p. 170–171).The three grades have suggested to many that tümens, nominally of 10,000 men, often had only 7000, 5000, or 3000, owing to a shortage of soldiers: see Mor- gan, 89; Allsen, 193–94; Amitai, Mongols and Mamluks , 15 and n. 43; Biran, 84f and n. 64. 9 There were significant numbers in these guards. Ariq Böke, preparing to dispute Qubi- lai’s claim to the throne, mobilized the day-guards ( turqaq s) left in Mongolia to guard the a ’ urugh s of the armies campaigning in China: see RaD, II, 425–26.