Authors: Christopher I. Beckwith
Tags: #History, #General, #Asia, #Europe, #Eastern, #Central Asia
Indra speaks:
Where, O Maruts, was that custom with you, when you left me alone in the killing of Ahi? I indeed am terrible, powerful, strong; I escaped from the blows of every enemy.
The Maruts speak:
Thou hast achieved much with us as companions. With equal valour, O hero! Let us achieve then many things, O thou most powerful, O Indra! Whatever we, O Maruts, wish with our mind.
[Indra boasts and complains some more. The Maruts then praise him.]
Indra speaks:
O Maruts, now your praise has pleased me, the glorious hymn which you have made for me, ye men—for me, for Indra, for the joyful hero, as friends for a friend.
The lord and his comitatus formed the heart of every newborn Central Eurasian nation.
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In Central Asia the warriors of a typical ruler’s full comitatus,even that of a mere governor, numbered in the thousands and was extremely expensive to maintain. In the Middle Ages, the comitatus and ideas of rulership gradually changed with the adoption of world religions, which frown on suicide or ritual murder, but they otherwise continued down to the conquest of Central Eurasia by peripheral powers. The traditional heroic ideal of the lord and his comitatus was celebrated by bards in chanted or sung epic poems such as
Beowulf, Janghar, Manas,
and
Gesar,
which have been preserved down to the present as written or oral literature. The tradition was long maintained even among peoples who had left Central Eurasia proper centuries earlier. Both Attila the Hun and Charlemagne were praised by their bards and patronized the regular performance of heroic epic poems.
The comitatus is attested directly or indirectly in historical sources on the Hittites, the Achaemenid Persians,
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the Scythians, the Khwarizmians,
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the Hsiung-nu, the ancient and early medieval Germanic peoples, the Sasanid Persians,
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the Huns,
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the Hephthalites,
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the Koguryo, the early dynastic Japanese,
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the Turks (including at least the Türk, Khazars,
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and Uighurs), the Sogdians, the Tibetans, the Slavs,
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the Khitans,
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the Mongols,
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and others.
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It was adopted briefly by the Byzantines and Chinese,
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and especially by the Arabs, who, after adapting it to Islam, made it a permanent feature of Islamic culture down to early modern times.
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In the early form of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex, the highly trained warrior members of a lord’s comitatus—a guard corps loyal not to the government but to the lord personally—took an oath to defend him to the death. The core members of the comitatus, his sworn friends, committed suicide, or were ritually executed, in order to be buried with him if he happened to predecease them. The peripheral cultures’ historical sources explicitly say so, time and again, as Ibn Faḍlân remarks about the Vikings on the Volga, who were known as Rus:
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One of the customs of the king of the Rus is that with him in his palace he has four hundred men from among his most valiant and trusted men. They die when he dies and are killed for his sake.
Why would anyone willingly do this?
There was a very good reason. The lord in turn rewarded his comitatus, especially the core group of friends, by treating them as his own family, sharing his habitation and worldly goods with them, and bestowing much wealth upon them. Warriors belonging to a comitatus were rewarded with almost unimaginable wealth and honor in their societies, not just once but over and over throughout their lives, as long as they served their lord, and in the afterlife as well.
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They wore silken clothes embroidered with gold, or cloth of gold, decorated with gems, pearls, and gold ornaments; they lived in the same palatial quarters together with their lord; and they ate and drank the same food and drink with him.
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They were his companions in life and in death. Ibn Faḍlân says of the ruler of the Khazars,
When he is buried the heads of those who buried him are struck off…. His grave is called “Paradise,” and they say, He has entered paradise. All the chambers are spread with silk brocade interwoven with gold.
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The reward for absolute loyalty unto death was clear to those who belonged to the comitatus. The punishment for those who were not loyal to their lord was also clear:
You shall have no joy in the homeland you love,
Your farms shall be forfeit, and each man fare
alone and landless when foreign lords
learn of your flight, your failure of faith.
Better to die than dwell in disgrace.
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According to a story in the
Secret History,
a comitatus warrior abandoned his defeated Kereit lord, who could no longer provide him with good food, gilt clothing, and high status, and he went to serve the victor—Chinggis Khan—instead. Chinggis rightly declared that the man had abandoned his liege lord and could not be trusted to become a companion
(nöker);
he ordered him to be executed.
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There are descriptions of the early form of the comitatus system, or mention of its members, from the North Sea to the Japan Sea and from the sub-Arctic to the Himalayas—in other words, throughout Central Eurasia and among all well-described Central Eurasian peoples from at least the Hittites down to the adoption of world religions in the Middle Ages. By contrast, the true comitatus is unknown among non–Central Eurasian peoples, who tend to express astonishment in their descriptions of it.
The earliest clear account of the comitatus (and first usage of the term
comitatus
to refer to it) is in the
Germania
(completed in
AD
98), where Tacitus describes its basic elements among the early Germanic peoples in the West. Of the lord, he says, “Both prestige and power depend on being continually attended by a large train of picked young warriors, which is a distinction in peace and a protection in war.” Of the comitatus structure he notes that there are “grades of rank” within it, and of its members he says, “to leave a battle alive after their chief has fallen means lifelong infamy and shame.” He also remarks, “They are always making demands on the generosity of their chief.”
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This characterization is equally true of the Mongol comitatus of Chinggis Khan, which included the small core comitatus group—his
nökers
or ‘friends’—and the extended comitatus, mainly a large imperial bodyguard, the
kesig
or
kesigten,
which numbered 10,000 by the end of his life. It is described quite accurately by Marco Polo, who provides the additional detail that the comitatus of Khubilai, which numbered 12,000 horsemen, was divided into four units with one “captain” over each.
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The comitatus survived well into the Middle Ages in Europe. In England it is referred to as late as in
Beowulf,
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which includes references to the comitatus oath and the lord’s payment of wealth to his companions, who lived in the same hall with him. In Scandinavia and the steppe zone, it lasted longer still.
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One of the crucial elements of the comitatus was that it was the lord’s personal guard corps. The warriors stayed near him day and night, no further than the door of his splendid golden hall or yurt,
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which stood in the center of the
ordo,
the camp of the ruler’s comitatus and capital of the realm.
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The specific day-to-day duties of the comitatus of the Huns, the Turks, and other Central Eurasian peoples, whose versions of the system were described and are therefore known to a certain extent, are virtually identical to those of the Mongols, about whom more is known than any other premodern steppe people. Chinggis Khan’s comitatus was carefully structured and regulated by ordinances decreed by the khan himself.
Chinggis khan organized his armies on the decimal system, [and] also created a personal bodyguard
(kesig).
As originally constituted, the guard consisted of a day watch
(turgha’ud)
of seventy men, a night watch
(kebte’üd)
of eighty, and a detachment of braves
(ba’aturs)
numbering one thousand. The
kesig
… was recruited from his
nökers
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… guardsmen
(kesigten)
served simultaneously as protectors of the khan’s person and as domestics who tended his private needs and looked after his possessions. In this latter capacity,
kesigten
held appointments as chamberlains
(cherbi),
stewards
(ba’urchi),
quiver bearers
(khorchi),
doorkeepers
(e’ütenchi),
and grooms
(aghtachi).
The guards, moreover, supervised the activities of the female attendants and minor functionaries such as camel herders and cowherds; took care of the khan’s tents, carts, weapons, musical instruments, and regalia; and prepared his food and drink…. And because the guard/household establishment provided both personal service and the machinery through which Chinggis khan administered his rapidly multiplying subjects, territories, and economic interests, it accompanied him wherever he went—on a campaign or on a hunting trip.
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The detail available about the Mongol comitatus allows inferences to be made about the system as practiced among Central Eurasian peoples who are much less well known.
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Scattered remarks in ancient Chinese and Greek sources, and the distribution of the comitatus system all over Central Eurasia, demonstrate that it was a fundamental feature of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex. Procopius says of the Hephthalites on the northeastern frontier of the Sasanid Persian Empire:
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Moreover, the wealthy citizens are in the habit of attaching to themselves friends to the number of twenty or more, as the case may be, and these become permanently their banquet-companions, and have a share in all their property, enjoying some kind of a common right in this matter. Then, when a man who has gathered such a company together comes to die, it is the custom that all these men be borne alive into the tomb with him.
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Of the early Tibetan Empire the Chinese sources say:
The lord and his ministers—five or six persons called “common-fated ones”—make friends with each other. When the lord dies, they all commit suicide to be buried with him, and the things he wore, trinkets he used, and horses he rode, all are buried with him.
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These reports are reminiscent of the accounts in the
Secret History of the Mongols
in which Temüjin and a
nöker
‘friend’ swear to “share one life.” The centrality of friendship is attested to in the names of several well-known variants of the system, including the Slavic
dru
ž
ina
‘comitatus’ (Russian
drug
‘friend’ and
dru
ž
ba
‘friendship’),
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and the Mongol
nöker
‘friend; core comitatus member’.
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Similarly, Marwazî describes the comitatus of the kaghan of the Uighur Empire in the Eastern Steppe:
Their king is named Toghuz Qaghan, and he has many soldiers. Of old their king had a thousand
châkars,
and four hundred maidens. The
châkars
would eat meals at his place three times each day, and they would be given drink three times after the meal.
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The Chinese—like the Classical and later Greeks
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—did not themselves have the comitatus tradition, but Central Eurasians in Chinese service continued to practice it. Upon the death of T’ai-tsung, the second emperor of the T’ang Dynasty, several Turkic generals he had defeated, who had submitted to him, requested permission to commit suicide to be buried with him. Though they were denied permission, one did so anyway. The half-Sogdian, half-Turkic general An Lu-shan,
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who rebelled against the T’ang in 755 and almost brought down the dynasty, had a personal comitatus of eight thousand warriors of Tongra (Turkic), Tatabï, and Khitan (Mongolic) origin, whom he treated as his own sons.
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The lords of the Central Eurasian states, whether nomadic like the Turkic kaghans or settled like the Sogdian princes, typically had thousands of
châkars,
or comitatus warriors,
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though it seems likely that, as in early Germanic Europe and the early Tibetan Empire, only a relatively small number of them were bound by a common-fate oath. Their continued loyalty and commitment
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depended upon their lord sticking to his side of the bargain, which was to honor them and frequently give them great wealth, especially in the form of precious silk garments and gold objects that could be worn or otherwise easily transported. The descriptions of early Central Eurasian courts comment on the splendid silks worn by the companions of the lord.
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The Chinese monk Hsüan Tsang, who traveled from China to India via Central Asia in the early seventh century and wrote a detailed account of his journey, describes the nominal ruler of the Western Turks, Tung Yabghu Kaghan, wearing a green satin robe and a long band of white silk on his head. His “ministers,” over 200 strong, all wore embroidered silk robes. The early Byzantine Greek visitors to the Western Turkic court describe with astonishment the Turks’ wealth in gold and silk.
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Marco Polo describes the silk robes bestowed on Khubilai Khan’s twelve thousand bodyguards.
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“To each of these he has given thirteen robes, every one of a different colour. They are splendidly adorned with pearls and gems and other adornments and are of immense value…. The cost of these robes, to the number of 156,000 in all, amounts to a quantity of treasure that is almost past computation.”
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Indeed, it must have required around a million yards of fine silk, plus vast quantities of gold and jewels, to make the robes. The tremendous quantity of them, many if not most of which were made of gold brocade, was noted by nearly every foreign traveler to the Mongol courts.
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