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

Mongol Warfare and the Creation of the Mongol Empire m 155 n tümens drawn from a full-sized one and operating separately. Ghazan Khan used this arrangement in 1299, campaigning with eleven half-strength tümens, while the other halves remained guarding the frontiers 1 ; similarly, Marco Polo describes what were probably two half-sized tümens drawn from a full-sized one and alternating between China garrison and inner Mongolian home base: [Armies] are stationed in the open country four or five miles from the cities...These armies the Great Khan changes every two years, and so likewise the captains who command them... these armies live on the immense herds of cattle that are assigned to them and the milk which they send into the towns to sell in return for necessary provisions 2 . As an example of the “lower” tümen, we have the “3,000 iron [-clad] caval- rymen” led by Bayan, Qubilai’s best general 3 . Qubilai needed such units to adapt cavalry to siege warfare: it was easier to provide armor for small numbers, and easier to find and feed the horses they required for effective mounted operation 4 . Qubilai arranged for those horses by a radical and unprecedented transformation of the army’s economy, from pastoral to agricultural. He assigned each Mongol soldier 75 acres for the support of himself, his family, and his mounts (“seventy- five acres and a warhorse”, one might say) 5 . Farmed, this acreage could provide food for the Mongol family, for the several Chinese families doing the actual cultivation, and enough fodder for some warhorses and brood mares. As pasture, however, it could not support the 100 sheep needed to keep the Mongol family in traditional fashion. The Mongols obtained the horses they had always wished for, but their subsistence animals had to be given up — along with nomadism and its skills in the management and movement of animals 6 . 1 Vassaf, 373. 2 Polo, 115. 3 Francis W. Cleaves, “The Biography of Bayan of the Barîn in the Yuan shih”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 19: 3–4 (1956), 219. 4 As Hülegü began his siege of the Assassins in Maymun Diz, his generals, commanding conventional tümens, were already complaining that “the horses are lean. Fodder has to be transported from [the regions] from Armenia to Kirman”: RaD, II, 484. 5 Hsiao, 21, and note 173 to p. 21 on p. 140. Ghazan’s horse-keeping plan, mentioned above, was probably modelled on Qubilai’s, with the important difference that Ghazan’s soldiers and families continued to migrate. 6 Tammachi units, the kind Polo describes above, managed to escape denomadization, as shown by their escape from the Ming as the Yuan collapsed, which the 75-acre tümens’ some thirteen of them (Hsiao, 55) — could not manage.