While the pressures of this age, especially the direct and indirect consequences of the Mongol invasions, were similar for most of east and south Asia, the responses differed considerably, even in purely military terms. This reflected in part the very different place that warriors held in the social and political hierarchies of China, Japan, and India (see the Issues box “Warrior Elites”). In turn, the differing military responses of each area meant that each would face the new challenges of an age of even greater global contact after 1500 in different ways. The weight of China and India in global systems of trade would give worldwide significance to how they met those challenges.
Successive Chinese dynasties struggled with a serious problem: Too much civilian control of the army, and military effectiveness suffered; too little control, and overmighty generals could threaten the stability of the government. A similar struggle between military and civil aristocrats dominated Japanese politics for centuries. These two cases highlight what was, in fact, a general problem in traditional societies: the place of warriors among a civilization’s elites. For the military historian, this is a rich theme whose outlines we can only sketch here.
Because of their ability to wield force directly, warriors formed at least a portion of the sociopolitical ruling class in nearly every traditional society, sedentary or nomadic. (Warriors, conceived here as elites whose lifestyle and values were military, are to be distinguished from soldiers, the mass of non-elite members of a military system. The distinction is one of individual status, not necessarily military function.) Warrior elites were often, though not always, rural-based landholders. This was in part because land was necessary for raising horses and horsemen, and warrior elites tended to be horsemen because of the status, prestige, and individual military advantage that ownership of horses (large, expensive, mobile commodities) conveyed. This rural bias set up one potential conflict with other elites, civil or religious, who tended to be city-based: the tension between rural warrior values and urban civilian values.
This tension often exacerbated a deeper structural problem. Warriors might have wielded power and influence, but they rarely wielded, strictly as warriors, legitimate authority. In other words, claiming “might makes right” was recognized as a limited and inadequate justification of social or state power, even if the might lay behind some other form of legitimation. The Chinese proverb that one could win but not govern an empire from horseback expresses this problem neatly. The question, therefore, became this: What connected military force to the philosophical and religious justifications of social and state power? In practice, this was often expressed in terms of the relationship of warrior elites to civil and religious elites.
The answers to this problem proved manifold. In China, civilian control was generally dominant, while in Japan, the practical triumph of the warriors led to instability, military transformation, and a search for legitimacy (see this chapter and Chapter 19). Balance initially, but eventually destructive conflict, between military and civil aristocrats was central to Byzantium’s history (see Chapter 8). A long but more creative conflict between states dominated by a warrior aristocracy and a separate church hierarchy defined crucial aspects of western Europe’s development (see Chapter 12). Islam seemed to have the most difficulty with this issue, as the widespread use of slave soldiers (who at times came to rule, as in Mamluk Egypt) attests (see Chapters 8 and 11). The division of legitimacy in the Hindu tradition between religious and military leaders, at the other extreme, proved uncontentious within the culture but failed to provide either political stability or military effectiveness in the face of Muslim invasions (as we discussed in this chapter). Perhaps only in the societies of horsed nomads, where military authority, lifestyle, and social structure came together seamlessly and pervaded the entire society, not just its elites, was this issue not problematic—and, then, only until a successful nomad group conquered a sedentary area and set themselves up as a rural warrior elite. Then, as the Yuan emperors of China and the Ottoman emperors discovered, the same issues reappeared.
Clearly, the integration of warriors and military force into a stable and legitimate hierarchy was one of the enduring problems for traditional civilizations. There is plenty of room for further comparative exploration of the dynamics of this problem.
TheCambridgeHistoryofJapan, Vol. 3: Medieval Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Not focused on military history, but the standard wide-ranging introduction to this period in Japan.
Chan, Albert. The Glory and Fall of the Ming Dynasty. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Includes several chapters dealing specifically with the organization and use of the armies of the Ming dynasty.
Dreyer, Edward L. Early Ming China: A Political History, 1355—1435. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982. An excellent discussion of the early Ming military system, including some information on the early campaigns.
Friday, Karl. Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan. London: Routledge, 2004. An excellent reinterpretation of Japanese warfare up to 1400; stresses the intimate connection of war and politics. See also his Hired Swords: The Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), which reassesses the growth of warrior power, emphasizing legitimate ties to civil government.
Hsiao, Ch’i Ch’ing. The Military Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. Mostly a translation of the military sections of the official history of the Yuan dynasty, with some commentary.
Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Contains an enormous amount of information on the political intrigue of this complicated era in India’s history.
Mass, Jeffrey. Warrior Government in Early Medieval Japan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. A detailed examination of the administrative and political structures of the Kamakura bakufu.
Rossabi, Morris. Qubilai Khan: His Life and Times. See Chapter 13.
Tillman, Hoyt T., and Stephen H. West, eds. China Under Jurchen Rule. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995. Discusses the reaction of Song Chinese to the Jurchen invasions, with some excellent sections on military responses.
Turnbull, Stephen. The Samurai. A Military History. London: Routledge, 1987. A straightforward narrative account of the wars of the period, based closely on primary sources.
Varley, Paul. Warriors of Japan as Portrayed in the War Tales. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. Analyzes the culture, values, and methods of warfare of the warrior class through their literature.
Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India, 5 th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. A generally good narrative overview of India, including the political, religious, and military problems associated with the Muslim invasions.