I went through a phase of watching post-apocalyptic drama series a few years ago. I quite enjoyed the adventurous plotlines and the ubiquitous zombies (although personally, dragons would be my monster of choice), but really I was looking for insights into how humans deal with survival scenarios and how they organise themselves when every social safety net is torn down.

In the event I got fairly bored, fairly quickly, and the insights were disappointingly thin, but one thing stuck with me – a pattern common to almost every film or programme I watched. Whenever the hardy band of survivors ran out of AK-47 ammunition and gobbled down their last tin of pineapple cubes they always fall back on the same contingency: they start growing vegetables.

I have never seen any variation from this pattern. The basic point is simple; when everything else is stripped away, our society’s underlying assumption is that it will fall back on agriculture. By contrast, I’ve never seen anyone suggest that people would rediscover nomadism. Some TV series might feature marauders or raiders, but they aren’t the same – they gather resources by preying on others; they’re not self-supporting.

This pattern stuck with me and kept coming to mind while I was researching my recent book The Mongol Storm, in which I explore the Middle East during the 13^th century, a time of endemic and chaotic conflict between many local states linked to a massive invasion by the Mongols out of the Central Asian Steppe. Reflecting on this period I noticed that the area’s agricultural societies fared very badly during these wars, far more so than many of their nomadic neighbours. They could find little answer to large nomadic armies, which found it painfully easy to circumvent their strongholds and then graze their herds on their crops. Castle garrisons could hold out for a while – like islands surrounded by a rising tide – but they did so knowing that no help would be coming and that the stores in their cellars would dwindle by the day. Nomadic societies, however, whether they were the invaders or the invaded often fared much better.

It took a while for this pattern to sink in. Why should agricultural societies collapse so easily? Why should they prove so much more fragile than other types of state? I found this pattern difficult to understand because I think somewhere deep in my psyche I had absorbed the idea that tillers-of-the-soil produce more powerful and durable societies than their nomadic neighbours. After all, the world today is dominated by agricultural societies, not by nomadic communities.

My presumption was wrong. Before the advent of gunpowder weapons, nomadic societies often proved more durable, more hardy, and more competent in warfare than their farming-based counterparts. Let me give a comparison from the medieval period – placing the wars conducted by an agricultural society and the wars conducted by two nomadic societies side-by-side – to show you what I mean.

Irrespective of what you think of the Crusaders from Western Christendom, they are generally considered to have been conspicuously successful in warfare, especially during the First Crusade (1095-99). In this campaign the Crusaders won a string of battles and conquered three major cities, Nicaea (restored to the Byzantine Empire), Antioch and Jerusalem, as well as many smaller towns. Their early conquests later morphed into the Crusader States, a cluster of four territories, which, in some cases, survived for almost two centuries. In the years following the First Crusade, their armies conquered more towns and cities, expanding their territories along the coastal regions of the Eastern Mediterranean.

For comparison, during the early 13th century the Mongol Empire conquered the greater part of the entire Eurasian continent, from the Pacific seaboard all the way to the borders of Poland, and from the coniferous forest belt on the margins of the Arctic circle in the north to the jungles of South-east Asia. Likewise, two centuries before the Mongols, the Seljuk Turks (another largely nomadic people) conquered a vast span of territory, from the borders of the Central Asian Steppe all the way to western Syria. Set against these two examples of nomadic conquests, the Crusaders’ wars look small-scale by comparison. No agricultural society of this era even came close to empire-building on this scale.

There is a reason for this. During this time, nomadic societies raised their children to ride, shoot and conduct large-scale hunts almost from birth. These are all skills and abilities with military applications. All men and many women were trained in arms and their soldiers did not generally require pay. When a nomadic society entered a new area of land it typically brought along its families, wagons, and herds – the basic infrastructure of its society. This enabled nomadic communities to consolidate their control over large areas of land in a short space of time.

By contrast, agricultural societies supported only a small number of fighters and their armies depended on long, vulnerable supply lines. They struggled to conquer new territory and, on campaign, their warriors – mostly marching on foot – proved far slower than their mounted nomadic counterparts. Even if they proved successful, most of their warriors tended to want to return home at the conclusion of a campaign, making it difficult to hold territory permanently.

The Mongols could raise armies of over 100,000 troops; conversely most western European societies of the same era could only manage a few thousand – 10-20,000 at most – hardly surprising then that nomadic armies so frequently proved superior to their agricultural neighbours.

The only thing holding back nomadic armies in this era – preventing them from sweeping across the entire globe – was their dependency on flocks and herds. Areas of thick forest, jungle, desert, and obviously ocean, posed difficult or impassable obstacles, given that they did not provide adequate grazing. Agricultural societies knew this, so they were just as likely to keep out nomadic invaders by planting dense belts of woodland on their borders, as they were to build walls. The Egyptian Mamluk Empire even went to the trouble of burning grasslands facing the Mongol Empire, in their efforts to create an adverse environment for nomadic invaders.

Another strand in this equation is that even those nomadic societies which did not seek to conquer their neighbours (or lacked the numbers to do so) still tended to fair better during a time of endemic conflict than their agricultural neighbours. Farmers cannot move their fields when they come under attack and, when their crops get destroyed or stolen, they face a bitter time of starvation. Nomadic communities, however, can simply pack up their belongings and move out of the way. So, for example, when the Mongols invaded Anatolia (modern Türkiye) during the 13th century, many of the area’s Turcoman nomads simply evaded their attacks and moved to a different area. They did offer considerable resistance, but often at a time and place of their own choosing, and their resistance proved very difficult for the Mongols to suppress. Similarly, once the time of trouble had passed, their communities could simply return to their former grazing grounds. Incidentally, the early Ottomans rose to prominence in this environment, in the north-western part of Anatolia.

Those finding themselves in the unfortunate situation of living in a post-apocalyptic world – where all the conveniences, safeguards, and technologies of the modern world have been stripped away – would find nomadism a surer path to survival. Whether your instinct is to conquer your neighbours or simply to get out of the way, finding animals to herd rather than seeds to plant would give you a greater chance of success.