Кочевники Средневековья

With the appearance of permanent settlements, the rich began to isolate their homes with walls and moats. They stationed their ails on naturally fortified terrain, such as river banks or hills, turning them into a kind of steppe castle. These were winter residencies; in summe their owners roamed the steppe. With time settlements arose around the castles, steppe towns that were to become administrative, handicrafts and trading centres. Naturally, not every castle developed into a town; much depended on its geographic location (at a crossroads, on the seashore) and on the political influence of the owner, his ability to protect the neighbouring steppe population.

Agriculture and a settled way of life brought with them crafts and, hence a new material culture which, while remaining syncretic, already had its own identity. The new, unified culture, internal trade and the rudiments of government stimulated the dissemination and consolidation of a common spoken language, and the development also of a written language on an original or a borrowed basis. These were all signposts on the road to statehood.

In the early state, the aristocratic element became the feudal nobility. In keeping with an ancient nomad custom the head of state was elected at assemblies of the nobility, but candidates were chosen from the ruling clan, usually a relative (brother, son) of the desceased ruler: state power had acquired a heritary character. Next came the bureaucratic machinery (judges, tax collectors, police) and, more important, a regular army (supplemented by detachments the feudal lords were under obligation to provide in times of war). And the nature of wars had changed: they were no longer invasions or raids, but pursued political aims. Conquered regions were not plundered, heavy indemnities were imposed and they were incorporated in the state. Political alliances with neighbouring states and joint wars againts common enemies (armies of semi-nomad states were no longer mercenaries but allies) helped to strengthen a country's international status.

More or less organised states of the third stage of nomadism are known from written sources as kaganats and their rulers as kagans. Ethnic consolidation processes which had began at the second stage became more pronounced at the third. For in well-organised kaganats conditions favoured the gradual formation of a people out of different ethnic groups. Not infrequently the ruling clan, though not ethnic majority of the kaganat, gave its name to the state and the maturing ethnic communities; in other cases the ethnonym was derived from the name of the biggest ethnic group.

A unified ideology in the form of a state religion shared by all the population of the state played a major role, together with the material culture, in the state and, hence, in ethnic consolidation. Centralisation in the religious sphere took a form of the Tenghri-Khan (God of Heaven) cult, which for some time coexisted with the leader cult, the cult of famous ancestors or of legendary heroes inherited from the second stage. A new social group, the priests, arose in all class states, and the world regions (Islam, Christianity and others) with their dominating image of a single God, gained ground in all communities.

Though the kaganats were the subject of many works by Mediaeval authors, and historical documents in their languages are not infrequently met with, the main source for the study of their culture and history are archaeological monuments. And these are not only the rare remains of first and second stage winter camps and burial grounds spread over the endless steppe, but also a wide variety of monuments presenting a broad picture of the economic and cultural life. First of all, there are the remains of large settlements, their cultural layers abounding in pottery sherds and bones, remnants of dwellings and their auxiliary biuldings. Most of these communities were in areas suitable for crop farming and gardening. They formed groups with common centres, a castle or a town surrounded by a network of irrigation canals. These are described in ancient sources as typical of many arid steppe regions.

Social, political and ethnic processes characteristic of the emergence and consolidation of the steppe states are strikingly uniform despite chronological and regional differences. The same may be said of the decay and disintegration processes, the causes of which can be classified into four groups.

The first group — external political causes, i. е., defeat in a war with a more powerful neighbour with resultant economic devastation — ruined crops, stolen herds, burned settlements.