Nomad Aristocrats in a World of Empires

The papers in the present volume go back to a conference held November 2011 in Hamburg. This conference was built around a central subject, domination, in the interaction between nomadic and sedentary groups and policies, but it also considered internal hierarchies within the nomadic groups. The contributions published here concentrate on Inner Eurasia and the Turko-Iranian world, the Xiongnu, the Seljuqs, and the early Ottomans until ca. 1500 CE. Some contributions take a more general stance and discuss subjects such as “tribalism” in a theoretical framework; one contribution is on the place of the Eurasian steppe nomads in world military history.
One of the central issues is the uneasy relationship between a royal or imperial ruler or dynasty and a stratum of local lords or leaders; in many cases, these local (“aristocratic”) leaders do not owe the power they wielded to some delegation or appointment from “above”. Another question in this context is the problem of fission – how an empire may fall apart along fault lines that may be perceptible even when the empire is strong.
Another major probem is the old question of “tribalism”. What is the idiom of domination in the field? Is it kinship, and might the way in which some of the nomads studied here organise themselves therefore be called “tribalism”? Even though there is no single and consensual answer to this question in the present volume, a number of papers adduce new evidence which supports a negative answer.