Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present Read Online Free PDF Page B

their unreliability in some respects, are correct in referring to the existence of comitatus
members
in the Sasanid realm, even if they incorrectly use the later non-Persian terms
châkar
or
ghulâm
for them instead of
gyânawspâr, adiyâr,
and so on.
    20. The comitatus of the early Khitan, a Mongolic people, is known from the accounts of An Lu-shan’s Rebellion. For a detailed treatment of the later Liao Dynasty of the Khitan, including discussion of its imperial guard corps, see the outstanding early study by Wittfogel and Fêng (1949). “Each [Khitan Liao] emperor had a separate
ordo,
or camp, with a ‘heart and belly guard’ of 10,000 to 20,000 households…. The members of this guard, particularly the non-Khitans, were the emperor’s private slaves, but their proximity to him gave them high status. After the emperor’s death they guarded his mausoleum while his successor recruited a new
ordo
and guard” (Atwood 2004: 297). The Liao state, with its five capitals
(ordo),
seems to have been organized, theoretically, around the ideal of the “khan and four-bey” system. The khan of the Kereit, who were rivals of Temüjin during his rise to power, “had crack forces of
ba’aturs,
‘heroes’, and a 1,000-man day guard, institutions Chinggis Khan would later imitate” (Atwood 2004: 296), along with the golden tent
(ordo)
connected to them.
    21. The text says that the men who are sacrificed are killed “so that it may not be known in which of the [twenty burial] chambers is his tomb.” A similar remark is made by the Roman who witnessed the burial of Attila. The accounts that claim those executed were killed so as to hide the location of the tomb are hardly to be believed—if even foreigners witnessed the burial (they describe it in great detail), the location of the tomb was no secret. It is certain from solid historical accounts that Central Eurasians bound by the comitatus oath did in fact commit suicide (they were even eager to do so) or were ritually executed, in order to be buried with their lord (Beckwith 1984a).
    22. The Byzantine imperial comitatus, created circa 840, was called the
Hetaireia
and “consisted of three subgroupings, one of which was largely composed of Khazar and Farghânian () mercenaries” (Golden 2004: 283–284). Cf. Constantin Zuckerman, cited by de la Vaissière (2005a: 285 n. 82) and Dunlop (1954: 219). The T’ang emperor T’ai-tsung, who had defeated the Eastern Türk and adopted the title Tängri Kaghan, took many Turkic warriors into the imperial guards. That these were not simply ordinary Chinese-style guards, at least in the minds of the men themselves, is clear from the fact that when he died, his two leading Turkic generals requested permission to commit suicide to be buried with him (Beckwith 1984a: 33–34).
    23. In references “to Činggis Qan’s own residence, especially in his ordinances concerning the Guard
(kešik)
duties, [the term
ordo ger ‘
ordo-tents’] is rendered as ‘Palace tent’…. [The] word
ordo
[is] an important term in Turkic from which it passed into Kitan, Mongolian, etc. In origin,
ordo
designated the camp of the elite cavalry guard [i.e., the comitatus] of the
qan
in the middle of which stood the qan’s tent or yurt” (de Rachewiltz 2004: 453–454).
    24. Compare the Kievan Rus
dru
ž
inniki
‘friends’ (cf. Christian 1998: 390) of the
dru
ž
ina,
or Slavic comitatus, the word for which is in turn cognate to Common Germanic *druhtiz ‘comitatus’, from (traditional) PIE *dhereugh (Lindow 1976: 17–18), that is, PIE *dereug. Old English
gedryht,
the usual word in
Beowulf
for the comitatus (which is also widely referred to as
weored ~ weorod ~ werod)
develops the general meaning ‘army’ and then simply ‘group of men, band’ in later Old English (Lindow 1975: 24–26).
    25. This comitatus, which survived him
(TCTC
220: 7047), was called
i-luo-ho
NMan
yì-luò-hé,
which in “the language of the Hu” means “the strong warriors