Over the centuries a number of nomadic empires had formed and dissolved on the steppes, tribal confederacies that had no core principle of unity to hold them together. In the days of the Roman republic, a group of Turko-Mongol tribes called the Hsiung-nu congealed into a force so fearsome that the first emperor of a united China put about a million men to work building the Great Wall to keep them out. Once they couldn’t raid eastward, the Hsiung-nu turned west and by the time they got to Europe these steppe nomads were known as the Huns. Under Attila they swept all the way to Rome before they
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