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The Eurasian Steppe
The grass corridor that carried empires from Hungary to Manchuria
Grass, and the horse that eats it, once redrew the map of the world. The Eurasian Steppe is a corridor of temperate grassland running some 8,000 kilometers from the Hungarian plain to Manchuria, hemmed by forest to the north and by desert and mountains to the south. It is treeless because it is dry, and it is dry because the mountain walls of Asia wring the moisture from the air long before it arrives. For three thousand years this belt worked as a highway: whoever mastered mounted archery on it could reach Beijing or Budapest, and Scythians, Huns, Turks and Mongols each did. No other landscape has moved so many people so far.
The belt narrows and widens, pinched by the Urals and the Altai, and it shades gradually into forest-steppe to the north and into the semi-desert of Central Asia to the south, which is why its edges are argued over. It crosses Hungary, Ukraine, southern Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and northern China, and it holds some of the most fertile soil anywhere: the black earth, or chernozem, of Ukraine and southern Russia. Rainfall is meager and unreliable, winters are bitter, summers hot. The Altai on the southern rim rises to Mount Belukha at 4,506 meters. Saiga antelope, once close to extinction, still migrate across the Kazakh grass in herds tens of thousands strong.
The steppe made empires and then unmade them. Genghis Khan welded its clans into the largest contiguous land empire in history, and the routes his riders secured carried silk, plague and gunpowder alike. Settled states eventually won by planting: Russian and Soviet plows turned the black earth into a granary, and Khrushchev's Virgin Lands campaign broke millions of hectares of Kazakh sod in the 1950s, with mixed harvests and severe erosion. Ukraine and Russia together now supply a large share of the world's wheat and sunflower oil, so drought or war on the steppe registers as hunger elsewhere. Mongolian herders still move with the seasons, though the savage winters called dzud kill livestock by the million.