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 PËre 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 ‡ canon et d'autres compositions inflammantes,
dont ils se servent pour construire des piËces d'artifice d'un effet
suprenant, leur Ètaient connues depuis trËs long-temps, et l'on croit
que des bombardes et des pierriers, dont ils avaient enseignÈ l'usage
aux Tartares, ont pu donner en Europe l'idÈe d'artillerie, quoique la
forme des fusils et des canons dont ils se servent actuellement, leur
ait ÈtÈ apportÈe par les Francs, ainsi que l'attestent les noms mÍmes
qu'ils donnent ‡ ces sortes d'armes. Abel Remusat, MÈlanges 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; [* 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]
[Footnote 231: See the curious account of the expedition of Holagou,
translated from the Chinese, by M. Abel Remusat, MÈlanges Asiat. 2d ser.
tom. i. p. 171.--M.]
[Footnote 24: 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 _MÈmoires_ 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.]
[Footnote 25: 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.]
[Footnote 251: Compare Von Hammer, Geschichte der Assassinen, p. 283, 307.
Wilken, Geschichte der Kreuzz¸ge, vol. vii. p. 406. Price, Chronological
Retrospect, vol. ii. p. 217--223.--M.]
[Footnote 26: 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.)]
[Footnote 261: Compare Wilken, vol. vii. p. 410.--M.]
[Footnote 262: On the friendly relations of the Armenians with the Mongols
see Wilken, Geschichte der Kreuzz¸ge, vol. vii. p. 402. They eagerly
desired an alliance against the Mahometan powers.--M.]
[Footnote 263: 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.
[Footnote 264: See the curious extracts from the Mahometan writers, Hist.
des Mongols, p. 707.--M.]
[Footnote 27: The _DashtÈ 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.]
[Footnote 271: 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]
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 29: I shall copy his characteristic or flattering epithets of
the different countries of Europe: Furens ac fervens ad arma Germania,
strenuÊ militiÊ 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 GrÊci, Adriatici et Tyrrheni
insulis pyraticis et invictis, Cret‚, Cypro, Sicili‚, 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.)]
[Footnote 291: 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]
[Footnote 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 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.
[Footnote 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 Selinginsky and Pekin is near 2000 Russian versts,
between 1300 and 1400 English miles, (Bell's Travels, vol. ii. p. 67.)]
[Footnote 32: 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.]
[Footnote 321: 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.]
[Footnote 322: Compare Hist. des Mongols, p. 616.--M.]
[Footnote 33: 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.]
Chapter LXIV: Moguls, Ottoman Turks.--Part III.