18. A Tough Life on the Steppe Made its Warriors Formidable and Fearsome
The final and greatest advantage enjoyed by the Steppe nomads was their very persons. Their upbringing in the harsh Steppe, with much of their lives spent on horseback, created a deep pool of hardy warriors. In the settled lands, only a minority of the population could be mobilized as fighters, because most people are needed in the fields and workshops. The Steppe nomads had no fields and little manufacture, while their food source, their animal flocks and herds, could be tended to by children and women.
That left nearly the entire adult male population of fighting age available as warriors. The one saving grace that allowed civilization to survive is that it was difficult to unite the Steppe clans and tribes. To bring together the fractious nomads in sufficiently large numbers to overwhelm their civilized neighbors was a bit like herding cats. While small-scale raids on settled lands were a near-constant, leaders of the caliber of a Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, who could realize the Steppe’s full and horrific potential, were few and far in between.
