Chapter LXIV: Moguls, Ottoman Turks.—Part II

The arms of Zingis and his lieutenants successively reduced the
hordes of the desert, who pitched their tents between the wall of
China and the Volga; and the Mogul emperor became the monarch of
the pastoral world, the lord of many millions of shepherds and
soldiers, who felt their united strength, and were impatient to
rush on the mild and wealthy climates of the south. His ancestors
had been the tributaries of the Chinese emperors; and Temugin
himself had been disgraced by a title of honor and servitude. The
court of Pekin was astonished by an embassy from its former
vassal, who, in the tone of the king of nations, exacted the
tribute and obedience which he had paid, and who affected to
treat the _son of heaven_ as the most contemptible of mankind. A
haughty answer disguised their secret apprehensions; and their
fears were soon justified by the march of innumerable squadrons,
who pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall.
Ninety cities were stormed, or starved, by the Moguls; ten only
escaped; and Zingis, from a knowledge of the filial piety of the
Chinese, covered his vanguard with their captive parents; an
unworthy, and by degrees a fruitless, abuse of the virtue of his
enemies. His invasion was supported by the revolt of a hundred
thousand Khitans, who guarded the frontier: yet he listened to a
treaty; and a princess of China, three thousand horses, five
hundred youths, and as many virgins, and a tribute of gold and
silk, were the price of his retreat. In his second expedition, he
compelled the Chinese emperor to retire beyond the yellow river
to a more southern residence. The siege of Pekin 19 was long and
laborious: the inhabitants were reduced by famine to decimate and
devour their fellow-citizens; when their ammunition was spent,
they discharged ingots of gold and silver from their engines; but
the Moguls introduced a mine to the centre of the capital; and
the conflagration of the palace burnt above thirty days. China
was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction; and the five
northern provinces were added to the empire of Zingis.

19 (return) [ More properly _Yen-king_, an ancient city, whose
ruins still appear some furlongs to the south-east of the modern
_Pekin_, which was built by Cublai Khan, (Gaubel, p. 146.)
Pe-king and Nan-king are vague titles, the courts of the north
and of the south. The identity and change of names perplex the
most skilful readers of the Chinese geography, (p. 177.) * Note:
And likewise in Chinese history—see Abel Remusat, Mel. Asiat. 2d
tom. ii. p. 5.—M.]

In the West, he touched the dominions of Mohammed, sultan of
Carizme, who reigned from the Persian Gulf to the borders of
India and Turkestan; and who, in the proud imitation of Alexander
the Great, forgot the servitude and ingratitude of his fathers to
the house of Seljuk. It was the wish of Zingis to establish a
friendly and commercial intercourse with the most powerful of the
Moslem princes: nor could he be tempted by the secret
solicitations of the caliph of Bagdad, who sacrificed to his
personal wrongs the safety of the church and state. A rash and
inhuman deed provoked and justified the Tartar arms in the
invasion of the southern Asia. 191 A caravan of three ambassadors
and one hundred and fifty merchants were arrested and murdered at
Otrar, by the command of Mohammed; nor was it till after a demand
and denial of justice, till he had prayed and fasted three nights
on a mountain, that the Mogul emperor appealed to the judgment of
God and his sword. Our European battles, says a philosophic
writer, 20 are petty skirmishes, if compared to the numbers that
have fought and fallen in the fields of Asia. Seven hundred
thousand Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the
standard of Zingis and his four sons. In the vast plains that
extend to the north of the Sihon or Jaxartes, they were
encountered by four hundred thousand soldiers of the sultan; and
in the first battle, which was suspended by the night, one
hundred and sixty thousand Carizmians were slain. Mohammed was
astonished by the multitude and valor of his enemies: he withdrew
from the scene of danger, and distributed his troops in the
frontier towns; trusting that the Barbarians, invincible in the
field, would be repulsed by the length and difficulty of so many
regular sieges. But the prudence of Zingis had formed a body of
Chinese engineers, skilled in the mechanic arts; informed perhaps
of the secret of gunpowder, and capable, under his discipline, of
attacking a foreign country with more vigor and success than they
had defended their own. The Persian historians will relate the
sieges and reduction of Otrar, Cogende, Bochara, Samarcand,
Carizme, Herat, Merou, Nisabour, Balch, and Candahar; and the
conquest of the rich and populous countries of Transoxiana,
Carizme, and Chorazan. 204 The destructive hostilities of Attila
and the Huns have long since been elucidated by the example of
Zingis and the Moguls; and in this more proper place I shall be
content to observe, that, from the Caspian to the Indus, they
ruined a tract of many hundred miles, which was adorned with the
habitations and labors of mankind, and that five centuries have
not been sufficient to repair the ravages of four years. The
Mogul emperor encouraged or indulged the fury of his troops: the
hope of future possession was lost in the ardor of rapine and
slaughter; and the cause of the war exasperated their native
fierceness by the pretence of justice and revenge. The downfall
and death of the sultan Mohammed, who expired, unpitied and
alone, in a desert island of the Caspian Sea, is a poor atonement
for the calamities of which he was the author. Could the
Carizmian empire have been saved by a single hero, it would have
been saved by his son Gelaleddin, whose active valor repeatedly
checked the Moguls in the career of victory. Retreating, as he
fought, to the banks of the Indus, he was oppressed by their
innumerable host, till, in the last moment of despair, Gelaleddin
spurred his horse into the waves, swam one of the broadest and
most rapid rivers of Asia, and extorted the admiration and
applause of Zingis himself. It was in this camp that the Mogul
conqueror yielded with reluctance to the murmurs of his weary and
wealthy troops, who sighed for the enjoyment of their native
land. Eucumbered with the spoils of Asia, he slowly measured back
his footsteps, betrayed some pity for the misery of the
vanquished, and declared his intention of rebuilding the cities
which had been swept away by the tempest of his arms. After he
had repassed the Oxus and Jaxartes, he was joined by two
generals, whom he had detached with thirty thousand horse, to
subdue the western provinces of Persia. They had trampled on the
nations which opposed their passage, penetrated through the gates
of Derbent, traversed the Volga and the desert, and accomplished
the circuit of the Caspian Sea, by an expedition which had never
been attempted, and has never been repeated. The return of Zingis
was signalized by the overthrow of the rebellious or independent
kingdoms of Tartary; and he died in the fulness of years and
glory, with his last breath exhorting and instructing his sons to
achieve the conquest of the Chinese empire. 205

191 (return) [ See the particular account of this transaction,
from the Kholauesut el Akbaur, in Price, vol. ii. p. 402.—M.]

20 (return) [ M. de Voltaire, Essai sur l’Histoire Générale, tom.
iii. c. 60, p. 8. His account of Zingis and the Moguls contains,
as usual, much general sense and truth, with some particular
errors.]

204 (return) [ Every where they massacred all classes, except the
artisans, whom they made slaves. Hist. des Mongols.—M.]

205 (return) [ Their first duty, which he bequeathed to them, was
to massacre the king of Tangcoute and all the inhabitants of
Ninhia, the surrender of the city being already agreed upon,
Hist. des Mongols. vol. i. p. 286.—M.]

The harem of Zingis was composed of five hundred wives and
concubines; and of his numerous progeny, four sons, illustrious
by their birth and merit, exercised under their father the
principal offices of peace and war. Toushi was his great
huntsman, Zagatai 21 his judge, Octai his minister, and Tuli his
general; and their names and actions are often conspicuous in the
history of his conquests. Firmly united for their own and the
public interest, the three brothers and their families were
content with dependent sceptres; and Octai, by general consent,
was proclaimed great khan, or emperor of the Moguls and Tartars.
He was succeeded by his son Gayuk, after whose death the empire
devolved to his cousins Mangou and Cublai, the sons of Tuli, and
the grandsons of Zingis. In the sixty-eight years of his four
first successors, the Mogul subdued almost all Asia, and a large
portion of Europe. Without confining myself to the order of time,
without expatiating on the detail of events, I shall present a
general picture of the progress of their arms; I. In the East;
II. In the South; III. In the West; and IV. In the North.

21 (return) [ Zagatai gave his name to his dominions of
Maurenahar, or Transoxiana; and the Moguls of Hindostan, who
emigrated from that country, are styled Zagatais by the Persians.
This certain etymology, and the similar example of Uzbek, Nogai,
&c., may warn us not absolutely to reject the derivations of a
national, from a personal, name. * Note: See a curious anecdote
of Tschagatai. Hist. des Mongols, p. 370.—M.]

I. Before the invasion of Zingis, China was divided into two
empires or dynasties of the North and South; 22 and the
difference of origin and interest was smoothed by a general
conformity of laws, language, and national manners. The Northern
empire, which had been dismembered by Zingis, was finally subdued
seven years after his death. After the loss of Pekin, the emperor
had fixed his residence at Kaifong, a city many leagues in
circumference, and which contained, according to the Chinese
annals, fourteen hundred thousand families of inhabitants and
fugitives. He escaped from thence with only seven horsemen, and
made his last stand in a third capital, till at length the
hopeless monarch, protesting his innocence and accusing his
fortune, ascended a funeral pile, and gave orders, that, as soon
as he had stabbed himself, the fire should be kindled by his
attendants. The dynasty of the _Song_, the native and ancient
sovereigns of the whole empire, survived about forty-five years
the fall of the Northern usurpers; and the perfect conquest was
reserved for the arms of Cublai. During this interval, the Moguls
were often diverted by foreign wars; and, if the Chinese seldom
dared to meet their victors in the field, their passive courage
presented and endless succession of cities to storm and of
millions to slaughter. In the attack and defence of places, the
engines of antiquity and the Greek fire were alternately
employed: the use of gunpowder in cannon and bombs appears as a
familiar practice; 23 and the sieges were conducted by the
Mahometans and Franks, who had been liberally invited into the
service of Cublai. After passing the great river, the troops and
artillery were conveyed along a series of canals, till they
invested the royal residence of Hamcheu, or Quinsay, in the
country of silk, the most delicious climate of China. The
emperor, a defenceless youth, surrendered his person and sceptre;
and before he was sent in exile into Tartary, he struck nine
times the ground with his forehead, to adore in prayer or
thanksgiving the mercy of the great khan. Yet the war (it was now
styled a rebellion) was still maintained in the southern
provinces from Hamcheu to Canton; and the obstinate remnant of
independence and hostility was transported from the land to the
sea. But when the fleet of the _Song_ was surrounded and
oppressed by a superior armament, their last champion leaped into
the waves with his infant emperor in his arms. “It is more
glorious,” he cried, “to die a prince, than to live a slave.” A
hundred thousand Chinese imitated his example; and the whole
empire, from Tonkin to the great wall, submitted to the dominion
of Cublai. His boundless ambition aspired to the conquest of
Japan: his fleet was twice shipwrecked; and the lives of a
hundred thousand Moguls and Chinese were sacrificed in the
fruitless expedition. But the circumjacent kingdoms, Corea,
Tonkin, Cochinchina, Pegu, Bengal, and Thibet, were reduced in
different degrees of tribute and obedience by the effort or
terror of his arms. He explored the Indian Ocean with a fleet of
a thousand ships: they sailed in sixty-eight days, most probably
to the Isle of Borneo, under the equinoctial line; and though
they returned not without spoil or glory, the emperor was
dissatisfied that the savage king had escaped from their hands.

22 (return) [ In Marco Polo, and the Oriental geographers, the
names of Cathay and Mangi distinguish the northern and southern
empires, which, from A.D. 1234 to 1279, were those of the great
khan, and of the Chinese. The search of Cathay, after China had
been found, excited and misled our navigators of the sixteenth
century, in their attempts to discover the north-east passage.]

23 (return) [ I depend on the knowledge and fidelity of the Père
Gaubil, who translates the Chinese text of the annals of the
Moguls or Yuen, (p. 71, 93, 153;) but I am ignorant at what time
these annals were composed and published. The two uncles of Marco
Polo, who served as engineers at the siege of Siengyangfou, * (l.
ii. 61, in Ramusio, tom. ii. See Gaubil, p. 155, 157) must have
felt and related the effects of this destructive powder, and
their silence is a weighty, and almost decisive objection. I
entertain a suspicion, that their recent discovery was carried
from Europe to China by the caravans of the xvth century and
falsely adopted as an old national discovery before the arrival
of the Portuguese and Jesuits in the xvith. Yet the Père Gaubil
affirms, that the use of gunpowder has been known to the Chinese
above 1600 years. ** Note: * Sou-houng-kian-lou. Abel Remusat.—M.
Note: ** La poudre à canon et d’autres compositions inflammantes,
dont ils se servent pour construire des pièces d’artifice d’un
effet suprenant, leur étaient connues depuis très long-temps, et
l’on croit que des bombardes et des pierriers, dont ils avaient
enseigné l’usage aux Tartares, ont pu donner en Europe l’idée
d’artillerie, quoique la forme des fusils et des canons dont ils
se servent actuellement, leur ait été apportée par les Francs,
ainsi que l’attestent les noms mêmes qu’ils donnent à ces sortes
d’armes. Abel Remusat, Mélanges Asiat. 2d ser. tom. i. p. 23.—M.]

II. The conquest of Hindostan by the Moguls was reserved in a
later period for the house of Timour; but that of Iran, or
Persia, was achieved by Holagou Khan, 231 the grandson of Zingis,
the brother and lieutenant of the two successive emperors, Mangou
and Cublai. I shall not enumerate the crowd of sultans, emirs,
and atabeks, whom he trampled into dust; but the extirpation of
the _Assassins_, or Ismaelians 24 of Persia, may be considered as
a service to mankind. Among the hills to the south of the
Caspian, these odious sectaries had reigned with impunity above a
hundred and sixty years; and their prince, or Imam, established
his lieutenant to lead and govern the colony of Mount Libanus, so
famous and formidable in the history of the crusades. 25 With the
fanaticism of the Koran the Ismaelians had blended the Indian
transmigration, and the visions of their own prophets; and it was
their first duty to devote their souls and bodies in blind
obedience to the vicar of God. The daggers of his missionaries
were felt both in the East and West: the Christians and the
Moslems enumerate, and persons multiply, the illustrious victims
that were sacrificed to the zeal, avarice, or resentment of _the
old man_ (as he was corruptly styled) _of the mountain_. But
these daggers, his only arms, were broken by the sword of
Holagou, and not a vestige is left of the enemies of mankind,
except the word _assassin_, which, in the most odious sense, has
been adopted in the languages of Europe. The extinction of the
Abbassides cannot be indifferent to the spectators of their
greatness and decline. Since the fall of their Seljukian tyrants
the caliphs had recovered their lawful dominion of Bagdad and the
Arabian Irak; but the city was distracted by theological
factions, and the commander of the faithful was lost in a harem
of seven hundred concubines. The invasion of the Moguls he
encountered with feeble arms and haughty embassies. “On the
divine decree,” said the caliph Mostasem, “is founded the throne
of the sons of Abbas: and their foes shall surely be destroyed in
this world and in the next. Who is this Holagou that dares to
rise against them? If he be desirous of peace, let him instantly
depart from the sacred territory; and perhaps he may obtain from
our clemency the pardon of his fault.” This presumption was
cherished by a perfidious vizier, who assured his master, that,
even if the Barbarians had entered the city, the women and
children, from the terraces, would be sufficient to overwhelm
them with stones. But when Holagou touched the phantom, it
instantly vanished into smoke. After a siege of two months,
Bagdad was stormed and sacked by the Moguls; 251 and their savage
commander pronounced the death of the caliph Mostasem, the last
of the temporal successors of Mahomet; whose noble kinsmen, of
the race of Abbas, had reigned in Asia above five hundred years.
Whatever might be the designs of the conqueror, the holy cities
of Mecca and Medina 26 were protected by the Arabian desert; but
the Moguls spread beyond the Tigris and Euphrates, pillaged
Aleppo and Damascus, and threatened to join the Franks in the
deliverance of Jerusalem. Egypt was lost, had she been defended
only by her feeble offspring; but the Mamalukes had breathed in
their infancy the keenness of a Scythian air: equal in valor,
superior in discipline, they met the Moguls in many a well-fought
field; and drove back the stream of hostility to the eastward of
the Euphrates. 261 But it overflowed with resistless violence the
kingdoms of Armenia 262 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 Seljukian dynasty,
were finally extirpated by the khans of Persia. 263

231 (return) [ See the curious account of the expedition of
Holagou, translated from the Chinese, by M. Abel Remusat,
Mélanges Asiat. 2d ser. tom. i. p. 171.—M.]

24 (return) [ All that can be known of the Assassins of Persia
and Syria is poured from the copious, and even profuse, erudition
of M. Falconet, in two _Mémoires_ read before the Academy of
Inscriptions, (tom. xvii. p. 127—170.) * Note: Von Hammer’s
History of the Assassins has now thrown Falconet’s Dissertation
into the shade.—M.]

25 (return) [ The Ismaelians of Syria, 40,000 Assassins, had
acquired or founded ten castles in the hills above Tortosa. About
the year 1280, they were extirpated by the Mamalukes.]

251 (return) [ Compare Von Hammer, Geschichte der Assassinen, p.
283, 307. Wilken, Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, vol. vii. p. 406.
Price, Chronological Retrospect, vol. ii. p. 217—223.—M.]

26 (return) [ As a proof of the ignorance of the Chinese in
foreign transactions, I must observe, that some of their
historians extend the conquest of Zingis himself to Medina, the
country of Mahomet, (Gaubil p. 42.)]

261 (return) [ Compare Wilken, vol. vii. p. 410.—M.]

262 (return) [ On the friendly relations of the Armenians with
the Mongols see Wilken, Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, vol. vii. p.
402. They eagerly desired an alliance against the Mahometan
powers.—M.]

263 (return) [ Trebizond escaped, apparently by the dexterous
politics of the sovereign, but it acknowledged the Mogul
supremacy. Falmerayer, p. 172.—M.]

III. No sooner had Octai subverted the northern empire of China,
than he resolved to visit with his arms the most remote countries
of the West. Fifteen hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars were
inscribed on the military roll: of these the great khan selected
a third, which he intrusted 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. 264 After a festival of forty days,
Batou set forwards on this great expedition; and such was the
speed and ardor of his innumerable squadrons, than 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 wagons 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 overran 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 to leave. From the
permanent conquest of Russia they made a deadly, though
transient, inroad into the heart of Poland, and as far as the
borders of Germany. The cities of Lublin and Cracow were
obliterated: 271 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 horde 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
labors 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 Bata hid
his head among the islands of the Adriatic.

264 (return) [ See the curious extracts from the Mahometan
writers, Hist. des Mongols, p. 707.—M.]

27 (return) [ The _Dashté Kipzak_, or plain of Kipzak, extends on
either side of the Volga, in a boundless space towards the Jaik
and Borysthenes, and is supposed to contain the primitive name
and nation of the Cossacks.]

271 (return) [ Olmutz was gallantly and successfully defended by
Stenberg, Hist. des Mongols, p. 396.—M.]

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 at the approach of
the Tartars, 28 whom their fear and ignorance 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 religion and liberty, it might be apprehended 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 horde.
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. 29
The Tartars themselves were awed by the fame and valor of the
Franks; the town of Newstadt in Austria was bravely defended
against them by fifty knights and twenty crossbows; and they
raised the siege on the appearance of a German army. After
wasting the adjacent kingdoms of Servia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria,
Batou slowly retreated from the Danube to the Volga to enjoyed
the rewards of victory in the city and palace of Serai, which
started at his command from the midst of the desert. 291

28 (return) [ 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 (return) [ I shall copy his characteristic or flattering
epithets of the different countries of Europe: Furens ac fervens
ad arma Germania, strenuæ militiæ genitrix 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 conterterminis
insulis, et regionibus, cruenta Hybernia, cum agili Wallia
palustris Scotia, glacialis Norwegia, suam electam militiam sub
vexillo Crucis destinabunt, &c. (Matthew Paris, p. 498.)]

291 (return) [ He was recalled by the death of Octai.—M.]

IV. Even the poor and frozen regions of the north attracted the
arms of the Moguls: Sheibani khan, the brother of the great
Batou, led a horde of fifteen thousand families into the wilds of
Siberia; and his descendants reigned at Tobolskoi above three
centuries, till the Russian conquest. 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
neighborhood of the polar circle, who dwelt in subterraneous
huts, and derived their furs and their food from the sole
occupation of hunting. 30

30 (return) [ 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 Tobolskoi? * Note: * See the account of the Mongol library in
Bergman, Nomadische Streifereyen, vol. iii. p. 185, 205, and
Remusat, Hist. des Langues Tartares, p. 327, and preface to
Schmidt, Geschichte der Ost-Mongolen.—M.]

While China, Syria, and Poland, were invaded at the same time by
the Moguls and Tartars, the authors of the mighty mischief were
content with the knowledge and declaration, 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 horde_ 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
wagons 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 Caracorum 31 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 a
house; and their example was imitated by the princes of their
family and the great officers of the empire. Instead of the
boundless forest, the enclosure of a park afforded the more
indolent pleasures of the chase; their new habitations were
decorated with painting and sculpture; their superfluous
treasures were cast in fountains, and basins, 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 mosques, and twelve temples of various idols, may
represent in some degree the number and division of inhabitants.
Yet a French missionary declares, 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. I have already
celebrated the wisdom and virtue of a Mandarin who prevented the
desolation of five populous and cultivated provinces. In a
spotless administration of thirty years, this friend of his
country and of mankind continually labored to mitigate, or
suspend, the havoc 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. 321 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, of the vanquished
people. This peaceful triumph, which has been more than once
repeated, may be ascribed, in a great measure, to the numbers and
servitude of the Chinese. The Mogul army was dissolved in a vast
and populous country; and their emperors adopted with pleasure a
political system, which gives to the prince the solid substance
of despotism, and leaves to the subject the empty names of
philosophy, freedom, and filial obedience. 322 Under the reign of
Cublai, letters and commerce, peace and justice, were restored;
the great canal, of five hundred miles, was opened from Nankin to
the capital: he fixed his residence at Pekin; and displayed in
his court the magnificence of the greatest monarch of Asia. Yet
this learned prince declined from the pure and simple religion of
his great ancestor: he sacrificed to the idol Fo; and his blind
attachment to the lamas of Thibet and the bonzes of China 33
provoked the censure of the disciples of Confucius. His
successors polluted the palace with a crowd of eunuchs,
physicians, and astrologers, while thirteen millions of their
subjects were consumed in the provinces by famine. One hundred
and forty years after the death of Zingis, his degenerate race,
the dynasty of the Yuen, was expelled by a revolt of the native
Chinese; and the Mogul emperors were lost in the oblivion of the
desert. Before this revolution, they had forfeited their
supremacy over the dependent branches of their house, the khans
of Kipzak and Russia, the khans of Zagatai, or Transoxiana, and
the khans of Iran or Persia. By their distance and power, these
royal lieutenants had soon been released from the duties of
obedience; and after the death of Cublai, they scorned to accept
a sceptre or a title from his unworthy successors. According to
their respective situations, they maintained the simplicity of
the pastoral life, or assumed the luxury of the cities of Asia;
but the princes and their hordes were alike disposed for the
reception of a foreign worship. After some hesitation between the
Gospel and the Koran, they conformed to the religion of Mahomet;
and while they adopted for their brethren the Arabs and Persians,
they renounced all intercourse with the ancient Moguls, the
idolaters of China.

31 (return) [ 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 Selinginsky and Pekin is near 2000
Russian versts, between 1300 and 1400 English miles, (Bell’s
Travels, vol. ii. p. 67.)]

32 (return) [ Rubruquis found at Caracorum his _countryman
Guillaume Boucher, orfevre de Paris_, who had executed for the
khan a silver tree supported by four lions, and ejecting four
different liquors. Abulghazi (part iv. p. 366) mentions the
painters of Kitay or China.]

321 (return) [ See the interesting sketch of the life of this
minister (Yelin-Thsouthsai) in the second volume of the second
series of Recherches Asiatiques, par A Remusat, p. 64.—M.]

322 (return) [ Compare Hist. des Mongols, p. 616.—M.]

33 (return) [ The attachment of the khans, and the hatred of the
mandarins, to the bonzes and lamas (Duhalde, Hist. de la Chine,
tom. i. p. 502, 503) seems to represent them as the priests of
the same god, of the Indian _Fo_, whose worship prevails among
the sects of Hindostan Siam, Thibet, China, and Japan. But this
mysterious subject is still lost in a cloud, which the
researchers of our Asiatic Society may gradually dispel.]