How does a clan/ tribe/ nation of people who live on horseback or out of wagons following their herds, forge iron tools and weapons? Did they have forges built at regularly revisited sites; did they devise extremely portable forges; or just make due with crappy iron that could be made in a campfire?
No definitive answer here, but another possibility that should be added to your list is to simply steal them from more settled people in raids, particularly since your main example in the subject line is the Mongols.
Mongols had excellent smiths and farriers. The warriors did ride horses and roamed, but they had wives, support, carts, portable smithing equipment, and most importantly smiths.
Additionally, they did not just raid, rape, pillage and burn. They took control of most of the towns and countries they conquered and took annual tribute from these towns and countries.
Of course Mongols were not strictly nomads.
As to true nomads, it varied by culture. Many did rely on trade and some on theft. Others would also have there own smiths. A good example would be the last of the European nomads, the Romani people (the Gypsies). When they were still roaming the country, they had smiths of various sorts, traded with town’s folk or other bands of Romani.
Jim
I don’t think you can be a truly nomadic society and have advanced metalworking. Remember that the Mongols controlled plenty of cities, though. They recruited engineers, smiths, and other professionals from the nations they conquered, and I assume did most of their advanced metalworking from within the cities they conquered.
In fact, at its height, the Mongol Empire controlled a continuous geographic area larger than any other empire or executive body since, essentially in executive control of nearly all of modern East Asia outside the Indian subcontinent and the Malay Peninsula, the expanses of the Greater Persian Empire except for the Arabian Peninsula, and virtually all that was known twenty years ago as the Soviet Empire, i.e. the -stan republics of Central Asia and substantial portions of the Baltic and, to a lesser degree, Transylvanian states. It absorbed many pre-existing societies and, despite monumental death and destruction waged by the hordes, largely left societies mostly intact as long as they paid tribute, including native technology, culture, art, and architecture, and indeed transferred many of these capabilities back east to the cultually Chinese central Empire.
Later, after the post-Genghis Empire fragmented into individual Khanates, the influence of the Empire declined; China became more insular, the Ottoman Empire succeeded in the European East, the Shi’a Safavid Dynasty took over in Persia, and the northern parts of the Empire became part of the sphere of influence of Tsardom of Rus, later to become the Russian Empire independent Islamic republics of Central Asia. Technological and cultural development languished under nearly all of these groups except the Ottomans, and they declined and allowed domination of Eurasia by the mercantile colonial empires of Western Europe in the post-medieval period.
To characterize the Mongols as primitive nomads is far and away from reality. They brought advanced military tactics, broad strategy, executive management of a non-coastal transcontinental empire, and unprecidented cultural and technological exchange between more isolated empires. There were no more nomads than the Phoenicians, the Greeks, or the Romans.
Stranger
Here’s Genghis Khan’s oxcart – plenty of room for everything!
Well, I’d have to rather strongly disagree with this. The Mongols were quite a bit more nomadic, being generally pastoral nomads :D. That the occasional ruler like Kublai Khan settled down, doesn’t mean the Mongol people themselves did so - by and large they did not.
As to metal - firstly the steppe and desert zones always included permanent oases settlements. These ( usually rather fragile ) statelets or tributaries traded with and regularly paid tribute to the various pastoral people they came into contact with. It was thus quite common for pastoral-based states to maintain settled regions ( almost invariably culturally distinct ) under their control where basic industry could be established. The last great independent Mongol state, that of the Zunghars, was based on pastoral tribesmen, yet various rulers built permanent settlements, often with captured peoples providing the base.
Thus in 1644 one Batur Hongtaiji requested chickens, hogs, carpenters and stonemasons from the Tzar for his newly created settlements ( including a new capital at Kobuk Saur ) and used captured Turks from settled regions to populate them and create an agrarian base. One Swedish Lieutenant G. Renat, captured by the Russians at Poltava in 1711, was drafted into Russian service and sent into Siberia where he was captured by the Zunghars in 1716. There he was drafted into producing fifteen cannon and twenty mortars for the Zunghar army, while various of his fellows were put to work building factories to produce other goods.
Even beyonds internal sources of metal from controlled populations, pastoral peoples regularly engaged in trade with settled states. The one thing the steppe could produce in great quantity that sedentary agricultural states of the east could not ( except at truly prohibitive expense and burden ) was large numbers of calvary-capable horses. So pastoralists would trade horses ( and other herd animals, particularly sheep and goats ) for various goods.
Julia Lovell explicates this point rather well in The Great Wall, pointing out that when Chinese rulers were farsighted enough to allow it, the steppe nomads could be seduced and “tamed” by free trade, since they coveted products of settled civilization (grain, silk, and metal) that they couldn’t produce on their own. Unfortunately, most Chinese emperors were not sufficiently farsighted and either forbade trade or restricted it to cumbersome “tribute missions” that often satisfied neither side. In retaliation the Mongols resorted to conquest and plunder, forcing the Chinese in turn into expensive and futile wall-building.
To clarify, are you asking about forges or bloomeries?
How portable a forge is really depends on what exactly the smith is usually making. A forge for making horse shoes, arrow heads, and spear points wouldn’t need to be very big at all. Here’s one from the Wikipedia article on horseshoes. It’s what a foot or so across? Size sorta becomes a issue when it comes time to heat treating steel, only because you need to get the entire object up to critical temperature, then bigger isn’t necessarily better, just easier. You just move the steel back and forth over the forge (or these days the heat back and forth over the steel).
The largest item would be the anvil, but even that doesn’t have to be that big. I’ve a friend who sets up a complete shop for weekend renfaires by himself, he’s in his late 60’s!
Here’s a link to the Wealden Iron Research Group’s recreation of a period bloomery, made from local materials (sandy clay). The only thing you’d need to carry with you is the bellows.
The real issue AFAICT for nomads is carrying around ore until you’ve got enough together to make it worth the trouble to smelt. They only got a 1.5kg bloom from 15kg of ore.
CMC +fnord!
Most modern day farriers are still nomadic; they travel daily to horse farms, and work out of the back of a pickup. Nothing in there that couldn’t have fit in a Mongol cart. In fact, about the only equipment that would be much different for the modern farrier would be an electric blower motor for the forge, and possibly a propane gas fire.
And modern farriers, just like Mongol ones, obtain their iron (or steel) pre-made by someone else.
I get it; smelting iron is one thing. Once you have some iron, reworking it requires a lot less. Thanks.
Hi there! Sorry for reviving this old thread, but I have a question related to that of Lumpy and I can’t find the answer anywhere - this thread is honestly the closest I’ve come to finding the answer.
Specifically I’d like to ask how a nomadic society gets hold of metal in the first place? It would be difficult, if not impossible, for a nomadic society to maintain a mine, as mines don’t move around, require a lot of labour to work, and tend to be rather deadly in ancient/medieval times (these last two are less of an issue for sedantry societies, because their increased food production means they have spare, expendable labour). Would they mostly trade for it?
Vikings were not nomads, more like touchy land explorers and developers. Their trade route for sword-quality metal started in northern Russia, going down the Volga, and on to Persia.
My understanding is that iron ore occurs pretty frequently on or near the surface, so for the needs a primitive society, major mining operations aren’t really necessary.
And it’s not true that smelting is the tough part of it. It’s the easiest, assuming you have good magnetite sand. Sword-quality steel is either created by a precise mix of pig iron, charcoal and sand in a ceramic crucible, or you you take the individual lumps from the smelting furnace and test each one for carbon content. And then you forge your steel.
Well there’s meteoric iron, and I think there are a couple of types of iron oxide that occur near/on the surface, but then what about other metals like copper, gold, silver, etc.?
Nomads or more accurately nomadic pastorialists usually don’t travel that far. Basically they go between the same winter and summering grounds. Or at least this is the case with Tibetan pastorialists, which I have spent time with. Therefore, one of your bases could have ore that is worked.