LXIV. Of Ana CHAP. kingdoms of Armenia and Anatolia, of which the former was possessed by the Christians, and the latter by the Turks. The sultans of Iconium opposed some resistance to the Mogul arms, till Azzadin sought a refuge among the Greeks of Constantinople, and his feeble successors, the last of the 1272. Seljukian dynasty, were finally extirpated by the khans of Persia. tolia, A. D. 1242... Of Kip sia, Po 1245. III. No sooner had Octai subverted the northern empire zak, Rus- of China, than he resolved to visit with his arms the most land, Hun-remote countries of the West. Fifteen hundred thousand gary, &c. Moguls and Tartars were inscribed on the military roll; of A. D. 1235... these the great khan selected a third, which he entrusted to the command of his nephew Batou, the son of Tuli; who reigned over his father's conquests to the north of the Caspian Sea. After a festival of forty days, Batou set forwards on this great expedition; and such was the speed and ardour of his innumerable squadrons, that in less than six years they had measured a line of ninety degrees of longitude, a fourth part of the circumference of the globe. The great rivers of Asia and Europe, the Volga and Kama, the Don and Borysthenes, the Vistula and Danube, they either swam with their horses, or passed on the ice, or traversed in leathern boats, which followed the camp, and transported their waggons and artillery. By the first victories of Batou, the remains of national freedom were eradicated in the immense plains of Turkestan and Kipzak.27 In his rapid progress, he over-ran the kingdoms, as they are now styled, of Astracan and Cazan; and the troops which he detached towards mount Caucasus, explored the most secret recesses of Georgia and Circassia. The civil discord of the great dukes, or princes, of Russia, betrayed their country to the Tartars. They spread from Livonia to the Black Sea, and both Moscow and Kiow, the modern and the ancient capitals, were reduced to ashes; a temporary ruin, less fatal than the deep, and perhaps indelible, mark, which a servitude of two hundred years has imprinted on the character of the Russians. The Tartars ravaged with equal fury the countries which they hoped to possess, and those which they were hastening 27 The Dashte Kipzak, or plain of Kipzak, extends on either side of the Volga, in a boundless space towards the Jalk and Borysthenes, and is suppos ed to contain the primitive name and nation of the Cosacks. to leave. From the permanent conquest of Russia, they CHAP. made a deadly, though transient, inroad, into the heart of LXIV. Poland, and as far as the borders of Germany. The cities of Lublin and Cracow were obliterated: they approached the shores of the Baltic; and in the battle of Lignitz, they defeated the dukes of Silesia, the Polish palatines, and the great master of the Teutonic order, and filled nine sacks with the right-ears of the slain. From Lignitz, the extreme point of their western march, they turned aside to the invasion of Hungary; and the presence or spirit of Batou inspired the host of five hundred thousand men: the Carpathian hills could not be long impervious to their divided columns; and their approach had been fondly disbelieved till it was irresistibly felt. The king, Bela the fourth, assembled the military force of his counts and bishops: but he had alienated the nation by adopting a vagrant hord of forty thousand families of Comans, and these savage guests were provoked to revolt by the suspicion of treachery and the murder of their prince. The whole country north of the Danube was lost in a day, and depopulated in a summer; and the ruins of cities and churches were overspread with the bones of the natives, who expiated the sins of their Turkish ancestors. An ecclesiastic, who fled from the sack of Waradin, describes the calamities which he had seen or suffered; and the sanguinary rage of sieges and battles is far less atrocious than the treatment of the fugitives, who had been allured from the woods under a promise of peace and pardon, and who were coolly slaughtered as soon as they had performed the labours of the harvest and vintage. In the winter, the Tartars passed the Danube on the ice, and advanced to Gran or Strigonium, a German colony, and the metropolis of the kingdom. Thirty engines were planted against the walls; the ditches were filled with sacks of earth and dead bodies; and after a promiscuous massacre, three hundred noble matrons were slain in the presence of the khan. Of all the cities and fortresses of Hungary, three alone survived the Tartar invasion, and the unfortunate Bela hid his head among the islands of the Adriatic. The Latin world was darkened by this cloud of savage hostility: a Russian fugitive carried the alarm to Sweden; and the remote nations of the Baltic and the ocean trembled LXIV. CHAP. at the approach of the Tartars,28 whom their fear and igno rance were inclined to separate from the human species. Since the invasion of the Arabs in the eighth century, Europe had never been exposed to a similar calamity; and if the disciples of Mahomet would have oppressed her religi on and liberty, it might be aprehended that the shepherds of Scythia would extinguish her cities, her arts, and all the institutions of civil society. The Roman pontiff attempted to appease and convert these invincible Pagans by a mission of Franciscan and Dominican friars; but he was astonished by the reply of the khan, that the sons of God and of Zingis were invested with a divine power to subdue or extirpate the nations; and that the pope would be involved in the universal destruction, unless he visited in person, and as a suppliant, the royal hord. The emperor Frederic the second embraced a more generous mode of defence; and his letters to the kings of France and England, and the princes of Germany, represented the common danger, and urged them to arm their vassals in this just and rational crusade." The Tartars themselves were awed by the fame and valour of the Franks: the town of Newstadt in Austria was bravely defended against them by fifty knights and twenty cross-bows; and they raised the siege on the appear. ance of a German army. After wasting the adjacent kingdoms of Servia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria, Batou slowly retrea ted from the Danube to the Volga to enjoy the rewards of victory in the city and palace of Serai, which started at his command from the midst of the desart. Of Siberia, IV. Even the poor and frozen regions of the North at 28 In the year 1238, the inhabitants of Gothia (Sweden) and Frise were prevented, by their fear of the Tartars, from sending, as usual, their ships to the herring-fishery on the coast of England; and as there was no exportation, forty or fifty of these fish were sold for a shilling (Matthew Paris, p. 396). It is whimsical enough, that the orders of a Mogul khan, who reigned on the borders of China, should have lowered the price of herrings in the English market. 29 I shall copy his characteristic or flattering epithets of the different coun tries of Europe: Furens ac fervens ad arma Germania, strenuæ militiæ genetrix et alumna Francia, bellicosa et audax Hispania, virtuosa viris et classe munita fertilis Anglia, impetuosis bellatoribus referta Alemannia, navalis Dacia, indomita Italia, pacis ignara Burgundia, inquieta Apulia, cum maris Græci, Adriatici et Tyrrheni insulis pyraticis et invictis, Cretâ, Cypro, Siciliâ, cum Oceano conterminis insulis, et regionibus, cruenta Hybernia, cum agili Wallia, palustris Scotia, glacialis Norwegia suam electam militiam sub vexillo Crucis destinabunt, &c. (Matthew Paris, p. 498). LXIV. A. D. tracted the arms of the Moguls: Sheibani Khan, the brother CHAP. of the great Batou, led an hord of fifteen thousand families into the wilds of Siberia; and his descendants reigned at Tobolskoy above three centuries, till the Russian conquest. 1242, &c. The spirit of enterprise which pursued the course of the Oby and Yenisei must have led to the discovery of the icy sea. After brushing away the monstrous fables, of men with dogs heads and cloven feet, we shall find, that, fifteen years after the death of Zingis, the Moguls were informed of the name and manners of the Samoyedes in the neighbourhood of the polar circle, who dwelt in subterraneous huts, and derived their furs and their food from the sole occupation of hunting.30 ...1259, While China, Syria, and Poland, were invaded at the The sucsame time by the Moguls and Tartars, the authors of the Cessors of Zingis, mighty mischief were content with the knowledge and de- A. Ď.1227 claration, that their word was the sword of death. Like the first caliphs, the first successors of Zingis seldom appeared in person at the head of their victorious armies. On the banks of the Onon and Selinga, the royal or golden hord exhibited the contrast of simplicity and greatness; of the roasted sheep and mare's milk which composed their banquets ; and of a distribution in one day of five hundred waggons of gold and silver. The ambassadors and princes of Europe and Asia were compelled to undertake this distant and laborious pilgrimage; and the life and reign of the great dukes of Russia, the kings of Georgia and Armenia, the sultans of Iconium, and the emirs of Persia, were decided by the frown or smile of the great khan. The sons and grandsons of Zingis had been accustomed to the pastoral life; but the village of Caracorum3 was gradually ennobled by their election and residence. A change of manners is implied in the removal of Octai and Mangou from a tent to an house; and their example was imitated by the princes of their fa mily and the great officers of the empire. Instead of the 30 See Carpin's relation in Hackluyt vol. i. p. 30. The pedigree of the khans of Siberia is given by Abulghazi (part viii. p. 485...495). Have the Russians found no Tartar chronicles at Tobolski? 31 The Map of d'Anville, and the Chinese Itineraries (de Guignes, tom. i. part ii. p. 57), seem to mark the position of Holin, or Caracorum, about six hundred miles to the north-west of Pekin. The distance between Se inginsky and Pekin is near 2000 Russian versts, between 1300 and 1400 English miles (Bell's Travels, vol. ii. p. 67). VOL. VII. LXIV. CHAP. boundless forest, the inclosure of a park afforded the more indolent pleasures of the chace; their new habitations were decorated with painting and sculpture; their superfluous treagures were cast in fountains, and basons, and statues of massy silver; and the artists of China and Paris vied with each other in the service of the great khan.32 Caracorum contained two streets, the one of Chinese mechanics, the other of Mahometan traders; and the places of religious worship, one Nestorian church, two moschs, and twelve temples of various idols, may represent in some degree the number and division of inhabitants. Yet a French missionary deelares, that the town of St. Denys, near Paris, was more considerable than the Tartar capital; and that the whole palace of Mangou was scarcely equal to a tenth part of that Benedictine abbey. The conquests of Russia and Syria might amuse the vanity of the great khans; but they were seated on the borders of China; the acquisition of that empire was the nearest and most interesting object; and they might learn from their pastoral economy, that it is for the advantage of the shepherd to protect and propagate his flock. adopt the I have already celebrated the wisdom and virtue of a Manof China, darin, who prevented the desolation of five populous and A. D. 1259 cultivated provinces. In a spotless administration of thirty manners ...1368. years, this friend of his country and of mankind continually laboured to mitigate, or suspend, the havock of war; to save the monuments, and to rekindle the flame, of science; to restrain the military commander by the restoration of civil magistrates; and to instil the love of peace and justice into the minds of the Moguls. He struggled with the barbarism of the first conquerors; but his salutary lessons produced a rich harvest in the second generation. The northern, and by degrees the southern, empire, acquiesced in the government of Cublai, the lieutenant, and afterwards the successor, of Mangou; and the nation was loyal to a prince who had been educated in the manners of China. He restored the forms of her venerable constitution; and the victors submitted to the laws, the fashions, and even the prejudices, 32 Rubruquis found at Caracorum his countryman Guillaume Boucher or fevre de Paris, who had executed for the khan a silver tree, supported by four Hons, and ejecting four different liquors. Abulghazi (part iv. p. 336.) mentions the painters of Kitay or China. |