nomadic and pastoral societies: Europe 779 Most of the animals used in agriculture in medieval Europe had been domesticated in the ancient Near East, but the Sami (sometimes called Lapps) people of northern Scandinavia practiced a form of pastoralism that seems to have evolved from hunting At one time the Sami must have followed herds of reindeer and lived by hunting them, together with gathering any other resources they could from the wilderness Eventually, the Sami began to domesticate the herds The Sami took some animals and isolated them, either for milking or for use as draft animals to pull sledges Some Sami still live in this way Nomadism is a type of pastoralism in which the herders follow the animals across vast distances as they graze on arid or semiarid plains (steppe) The herders, who by the Middle Ages were usually mounted on horses, drove herds of fully domesticated animals such as horses or cattle in a seasonal cycle, always seeking fresh pasturage The exploitation of the animal herds is far more intensive in this type of nomadism Every product of every animal was used: meat and skin (for leather) and also secondary products, such as milk, fur, and blood (as a foodstuff) Even animal dung was used as fuel for fires The animals were both ridden and used to haul wagons or carry packs In Europe nomadism of this kind was limited to the steppes of the Ukraine and Caucasus in southern Russia, the western edge of the vast inner Asian ecosystem and cultural system, where this type life was common Out-migration from inner Asia by nomadic Altaic and Finno-Ugric tribes, however, caused waves first of displaced Germans and then of Huns, Magyars, and Turks to invade Europe throughout the Middle Ages, bringing about the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (476), the Viking Age (ca 400–600), and the conquest of Russia by the Mongols (1223) and of the Byzantine Empire by the Ottoman Turks (1453) At the beginning of the Middle Ages the Roman historian Ammianus describes the Huns, who were then living in the eastern Ukraine Their entire way of life and livelihood was tied up with the horses they herded Ammianus expressed amazement that they had no houses of any kind and lived entirely in wagons They dressed in the furs and leathers of the animals from their herds and of the wild animals of the steppe, especially sheep or goatskin chaps Perhaps he exaggerates when he says that they did not understand the purpose of houses or other buildings and so dreaded going into them Naturally they had no specific homeland Because they were constantly moving, they attached no significance even to their places of birth Ammianus describes them as expert foragers, capable of living on a diet consisting almost entirely of wild roots they could find wherever they happened to be They could sleep on Reins guide fitting for a horse harness; Viking; Anga on the island of Gotland, Sweden; ninth to 10th centuries This copper-alloy openwork fitting was used for guiding the reins of a horse when pulling a wagon or sledge. (© The Trustees of the British Museum) their horses Precisely because they were bred in the saddle and spent their lives riding, they made the finest light cavalry that Ammianus, himself an experienced military officer, had ever seen They were fearless in battle and impossible to break If their wedge-shaped formations were broken by heavier troops, they simply use their superior speed to ride off a short distance and then reform and attack again, either with arrows or a saber charge They were also capable of using the lariats with which they controlled their herds to attack and pull down the mounted troops of the enemy The stirrup had been developed in inner Asia at some time in the past and had reached Europe with the Hunnic and other tribes that invaded the Roman Empire throughout the fourth to the sixth centuries, making them far more effective cavalry Steppe tribesmen were unable, however, to attack either fixed or field fortifications The existence of this kind of nomadism made the vast steppes of inner Asia (beginning in southern Russia) into an open highway for trade and the transmission of ideas vital to the development of Europe The trade was possible because of two facets of nomadism The nomads themselves could transport goods across the steppes without an intensive transportation network such as roads, and the absence of fixed settlements across most of inner Asia meant that political and tax barriers to trade did not generally exist However, the Islamic control of inner Asia and the terminus of the trade routes on the Black Sea and the Mediterranean in some periods of the Middle Ages at times made this trade artificially expensive and at others stopped it altogether Commercial items such as silk and porcelain crossed the steppes to Europe, along with inventions such as the spinning wheel and gunpowder So did epidemic diseases, including the bubonic plague that devastated the European population in the