Central Asia in World History. (The New Oxford World History.)

"Central Asia", for Golden's purposes, comprises the newly independent states that emerged with the break-up of the Soviet Union; the forest-steppe regions between the Volga and western Siberia; Afghanistan; the Chinese province of Xinjiang; and Mongolia - although, as the author observes (p. 3), Central Asia has also extended politically and culturally into Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Another is the often symbiotic relationship between pastoralist societies and their sedentary neighbours, on the one hand, and between pastoralists and merchants on the other; the nomads needed the goods supplied by agrarian society and protected long-distance trade routes in order to secure other, less immediately available commodities. [...]describing the Mongols' patronage of wrestling bouts and games of polo, Golden engagingly describes them as "the first promoters of international championship sports competitions" (p. 89); though it might also have been worth noting the staging of more glaringly bloody gladiatorial contests like the one in 1243, when captured Frankish mercenaries in Anatolia, ordered to fight to the death, turned on their Mongol audience and killed several of them before being overwhelmed.