Geography Question: Correlation Between Mountains and Good Pastureland?

[Tjakari]

I'm asking mostly in regards to the Iranian plateau and Anatolia; both places throughout history have hosted large horseriding cultures and both are fairly mountainous.

My question is if there's a relation between the two things, are the hardier environments only good for grass or is it usually a case of people molding the environment to suit their cultural and military needs?

A secondary question that mostly concerns Iran is where does the desert fit into this, Iran throughout antiquity depended far more on cavalry than their western neighbours but they also had a lot of mountains and desert in their core territory. That arrangement always struck me as strange cause on one hand, it's Persia, Persia has lots of people and lots of people need food. You don't get surplus to the cities and countryside by turning all the good farmland to pasture like the Turks did in Anatolia. On the other hand, the numbers speaks for themselves in regards to the cavalry the Persians and Parthians relied on throughout their wars with the Romans and I have to ask where they found the room at all.

Feel free to pick apart my question and answer just one part or throw in a snippet of information. I don't expect the whole thing to be answered.

 

[carlton_bach]

The correlation only applies in otherwise hot, dry climates. Mountainous areas tend to be cooler and wetter than the surrounding flat land. Plateaus are also much better than actual mountains. Greece and Italy are both fairly mountainous, and quite sucky for horses.

If you want a horse-based nomadic culture, you need a reasonably temperate climate that allows for grass and a landscape that does not produce excessive natural obstacles. In climates that would otherwise produce scrub or desert - like Iran and Anatolia - high plateus are good. In temperate zones like Southern Russia, you want plains. In cool areas, you need somewhere with not too many trees. The Pannonian basin or the North German plain are examples, though the latter is largely man-made.

North America is actually a good study in the kind of terrain horses prefer to settle if left to their own devices. They seem to like the upland valleys of the Rockies, but not the really steep bits (the mountain chains formed an effective barrier), really enjoyed the plains, but not the forested areas.