Imperial Itinerance and Mobile Pastoralism

Abstract

Mobility in pastoral societies has often been treated as either a necessity for efficient pastoral production or else as a method of avoiding state power. Yet both the examples of itinerance in medieval Europe and the attested itineraries of medieval Inner Asian rulers suggest that power projection, not power avoidance, was a key component of Turco-Mongolian imperial mobility. By using new historico-geographical evidence, the itineraries of several pre-Chinggisid and Mongol empire figures—Ong Qa’an, Batu, Ögedei, and Möngke—may be mapped. The results show that imperial itinerance must be distinguished from pastoral mobility. They also show that movement in vast agglomerations of mob-grazing herds was not just a temporary response to military crisis but continued long into the peacetime of the Mongol empire. These results challenge a functionalist understanding of mobility and state structures in Inner Asia.