THE STORIES OF THE OLD EAST AND OF THE NEW WEST
The story of the New World before the coming of the Spaniards may be
told shortly because we know so little of it.
At its far north-westerly corner the Continent of America is divided
from Asia by a narrow strait. It is a shallow strip of ocean, and
there is no doubt that there was a time when it did not exist as a
dividing barrier, and that animals--man among the rest--poured into
America from Asia at what was then a point of junction between them.
It is therefore generally thought that it was from the great
birthplace and nursery of the human race, the central and northern
parts of Asia, that the American continent was populated. The
so-called Indian tribes which still exist both in North and South
America are supposed to be the descendants of those Asiatic
immigrants. One might almost say of them that they have no story, in
the sense of any record along the lines of what we know as human
progress in other parts of the world. Apart from what they have
learnt from the white man since the year 1500--and unhappily they
learned from him much evil, as well as good--they still represent
what we imagine mankind generally to have been in nearly the earliest
days of his existence as man and as something better than the apes.
They represent man in the hunting phase: that is to say before he
passed into the second {15} of the three recognised phases and became
pastoral, a keeper of flocks and herds.
[Sidenote: The Red Indian]
Some historians and students of man's story tell us that a principal
reason why the Indians of America had gone so little way in
civilisation was because that great country had been so ill-supplied
by nature with the species of animals which man has domesticated to
his service. It has been said that America has no animals that could
serve to develop the pastoral phase, no sheep or cattle. It may be
so, yet I scarcely think that we can build the explanation very
confidently on that as a foundation, for we do not know what man
might or might not have done, in course of many generations, in
domesticating some of the native animals of America. The only one
that he does seem to have domesticated is the dog, and the dog he may
have brought with him from Asia, or may have domesticated from one or
other species of the American wolf. He had no horses before the
Spaniards came, and it has been conjectured that one of the reasons
why the Indians were conquered so easily is that they then saw for
the first time a man on horseback, and thought that they were meeting
some supernatural creature of unknown powers.
But America had its bison, commonly called buffalo, in countless
numbers. Who can say that they might not have been trained to do
service for man as readily as the wild cattle of Asia? America has
its caribou, a kind of deer closely akin to the reindeer which is the
invaluable servant of the Laplanders. There are native mountain
sheep, and in the south there are the llama and the vicuna, which are
species intermediate between the sheep and the camels.
Therefore it is difficult to be sure that it was any lack of animals
capable of domestication that prevented the early inhabitants of
America from passing into the pastoral stage.
{16}
And then, most interestingly and most strangely, it appears that
there were certain places in which, even before the Spaniards came,
the Indians had cultivated plants--notably that maize, sometimes
called Indian corn, which certainly seems as if it must have been
imported into North America from the south.
[Illustration: MEXICAN PICTURE WRITING.]
Moreover, when the Spaniards came to Mexico, and again, and yet more
strikingly, when they came to Peru, they found evidence of a
civilization very much higher than that to which the great majority
of {17} the inhabitants of the country had attained. They found
finely worked treasures of silver and gold; they found large stone
monuments. One circular stone which I have myself seen in the City
of Mexico, called "The Calendar Stone," was engraved with signs which
showed that the Mexicans had a system of reckoning time and the
seasons of the year. They had a means of communicating thoughts and
of recording facts by picture writing. They had large works in
stone, for the conduct of water and for irrigation. When the
Spaniards came to know something of the ways of thought and of the
religion of the people, they found that the sun was the great god of
their worship. They also had the hideous practice, but a practice
which we saw in the first volume of this Greatest Story to be a very
ancient and universal one, of sacrificing human victims, with the
idea that the blood received into the ground would dispose the Earth
deity to grant them good harvests.
[Sidenote: Egypt and Mexico]
These are ideas and practices which must recall very strikingly much
of what we know about the religion of the ancient Egyptians; and in
Peru, particularly, were found other practices which might be thought
to point to Egypt as their source. Is it at all possible that they
really may have come thence? There is a theory about man's story in
the world which would answer "yes," and it is a theory which seems to
be gaining adherents.
According to this theory, explorers, belonging to the date of the
ancient sun-worship in Egypt, pushed out from that country
adventurously in search of certain definite objects. Chief among
those objects were gold and pearls. And they were sought and prized
not only because of their rarity and beauty, but far more because
they were considered to have certain magical qualities, to be great
"life-givers." The theory then is that the explorers--who were {18}
sun-worshippers, who offered human sacrifices, made stone-works,
understood irrigation and were distinguished by other practices and
beliefs--travelled widely in search for these "life-givers." Traces
of their sojourn, it is claimed, are to be found in India, in the
chain of islands which is called Indonesia, thence onwards through
other islands of the Pacific, until finally we find them on the
American continent, in Mexico and Peru, and in various places in
North America. Their traces are in the north of Europe also. These
traces consist chiefly in large stone works. One or other, and in
some places many, of the distinctive elements of the civilisation and
religion of ancient Egypt are to be found among the peoples who live
where the ancient stone works are. Very commonly they have the
belief that there was once among them a ruling family who were
"children of the sun," whose forefather actually was the sun himself,
to whom, according to some legends, they would return at death. It
was the belief that the Spaniards were the sun children, or sun-gods,
come again, which greatly assisted them in their conquest of Mexico,
and perhaps of Peru also. In the latter country there still existed,
at the time of its conquest, the custom common among some of the
Pharaohs of Egypt, for the ruler to take his own sister for his
queen. Besides its interest, this is a theory which gives a
plausible account of facts, such as the stone working and the widely
spread belief in the sun children, which are otherwise very difficult
to explain. But it is not to be taken as proved, nor even as
generally accepted.
In Peru, exceptionally, the Spaniards found a distinct race, the
Incas, supposed to be descended from the sun, still ruling, and
ruling with a singular benevolence. But throughout the whole of the
rest of the continent, North and South, the natives had {19} made
very little progress along any lines of civilisation. Here and there
was some cultivation, chiefly of the Indian corn; but generally the
people were hunters, going nearly naked in the warmer regions, clad
in the skins of beasts in the colder climates, poorly armed with bows
and arrows.
Thus obscure and scanty is the story of this great newly found world
of the Spaniards. In the East, on the other hand, were lands whose
stories dated, with actual records, thousands of years back. There
was one, that wonderland of China, with earliest annals between two
and three thousand years before Christ--by no means the oldest annals
of humanity, but incomparably older than those of any other empire
that still exists.
[Sidenote: The permanence of China]
That has been the chief wonder of the Chinese Empire, its permanence.
And it is wonder that only grows, the more we realise the nature of
that empire and the principles by which the society which has held it
so long together has been guided. Again and again conquerors have
forced their way in upon it from the north--rude, uncivilised tribes
invading a highly civilised land. Again and again the chiefs of the
invaders have established themselves on the throne of China. They
and their sons for many generations have governed the land. But the
country generally, with its vast extent and its large population, has
gone on its way very little troubled by the change of rulers. Those
military conquerors have in fact been themselves conquered by the
higher civilisation in which they have found themselves.
The Chinese themselves appear to have come into the country from the
west. Although they always have been a people who held soldiers and
the military caste in very low esteem, they gradually pushed out the
original natives until their empire had boundaries even more
extensive than its present wide limits. {20} It is one of the many
wonders of this most singular nation, that though it relied so little
on force of arms it gained a very marked respect from all the other
peoples of the East.
[Sidenote: Confucius]
Since the empire grew to be so vast, it is not surprising that the
great men far from the centre became very independent, so that the
social conditions in the sixth century before Christ have been
likened to those feudal conditions which we saw prevailing in Europe
at a much later date. Chinese rulers of provinces have been written
of as "feudal dukes." And just at that time, when the country was in
the disturbed state which such conditions made inevitable, there
arose two great teachers of whom the younger, Confucius, exercised a
very extraordinary influence over all China, an influence that has
force even to-day.
He expounded sage maxims for man's conduct towards his fellow-men,
maxims not necessarily of his own invention but taken from wise men
before him. "Do good," he enjoined, "not only to those who do good
to you, but to those who do you injury." It had been said even
before him. But to "do unto others as you would they should do unto
you" may be taken as the principal basis of his own teaching, and the
Christian goes no further, in respect of man's "duty to his
neighbour." But about man's duty towards God Confucius had nothing
to say. Obedience and piety of the son towards the father were,
according to him, "the beginning of virtue, that which distinguishes
man from the brutes."
And this relation and piety he conceived ought to prevail all through
the State. The Emperor ought to act as the father of his people, and
the people ought to be obedient to him, like his sons. But he
naïvely qualified this, in a way calculated to prevent the Emperor's
acting as a tyrannical parent, by saying {21} that he forfeited his
claim on this obedience if he governed wrongly.
Confucius never claimed, as did Mahomet, for instance, to be divinely
inspired. He came as a mere man, preaching unselfishness and filial
piety and the duty of obedience and the beauty of goodness. Those to
whom he preached accepted his words, and certainly in some large
measure formed their conduct accordingly. It was a sermon advocating
peace in a country distracted by disturbances; and its ultimate
effect is that the Chinese even to-day are a peace-loving nation.
For all that, the great empire has been the scene of very frequent
war, both by invaders from without and rebels within; but unhappily
that is the state which has been usual throughout man's history
everywhere.
Confucius put the highest value on education. In the second century
B.C. competitive examinations began to be held for selecting
ministers to posts in the Government--a curiously democratic measure,
and perhaps possible in no other country than China. Some of the
scientific inventions, which have made much difference in the story
of the West, were known in China far earlier than elsewhere--the
power and use of gunpowder, for instance, and the art and craft of
printing. China discovered them early; but after their first
discovery she did not develop them at all, as did the Western nations
when they relearned them or took them from her.
It was in the third century B.C. that one of the world's wonders, the
Great Wall of China, was built--running west from the sea to a length
of a thousand and four hundred miles, and going over mountain and
valley without deviation. Its purpose was to act as a barrier, easy
of defence, against the wild tribes that pressed in from the north.
The Emperor under whom this mighty, though not wholly effective,
obstacle {22} was raised, was powerful enough to put down most of the
feudal dukes, and, much as the feudal dukes and lords in Europe were
replaced by the king's official tax collectors, so in China, Viceroys
of provinces, appointed by the Emperor, took the place of the dukes.
The Viceroys also were not always obedient to the central power, but
on the whole the change made for peace within the empire.
Confucianism then, as the doctrine of that great teacher was called,
was not a religion, but merely a system for the ordinance of man's
life on earth, without reference to a God; but about the same time as
Confucius, Buddha lived and founded the religion of Buddhism in
India; and in the first century A.D. Buddhist missionaries came to
China. It is to this influence that the pagoda-shaped temples are
due which are a prominent feature in Chinese scenery, for it was in
this form that the Buddhist temples were roofed. The new religion
gained numerous converts, and its monasteries are many in China to
this day; but it really seems to have made but little difference in
the lives of the people--for two reasons. First because the Chinese
are least ready to change their way of life of any people in the
world, and secondly because the unselfishness, which is the leading
principle in the religion of Buddha, had been already preached as a
leading principle in the maxims of Confucius and of wise men of China
before him.
The general story of China nevertheless continues to be the story of
dissensions within the empire and of uncivilised tribes threatening
its borders on the north and west. Among these we may notice that
there were Huns, akin to those who threatened, and from time to time
overran, parts of Europe also.
[Sidenote: The Nestorians]
Christianity was brought into the country probably in the sixth
century, by members of a Christian sect called Nestorians, after a
certain bishop Nestorius, {23} their founder. His doctrine
respecting the divine and human natures of Christ was condemned as
unorthodox both by the Church of Rome and also by the head of the
Eastern Church, at Constantinople. The sect had its headquarters in
Syria, and was dispersed by order of the Eastern Emperor. The result
was that its members travelled and settled in Central and Eastern
Asia. They were Asiatics and found themselves among peoples well
disposed towards them. By this violent dispersal of them the Emperor
helped their doctrines to prevail as he never could have helped their
prevalence by his greatest favours. Incidentally, one of the results
of his action was that silkworms, as we are told, were first carried
to the West by some of the Nestorians returning from the far
East--the ancient land whence silk had been brought for many
centuries.
Mahommedanism was introduced not very long after, and the most
interesting point to note about these successively introduced
religions is that all seem to have been permitted and even encouraged
with equal favour, or with equal indifference, by the Chinese rulers.
This was in strict accord with the counsel of the sage Confucius,
whose expressed opinion was that the ruler should interfere as little
as might be with the life of his people. And that life was still
principally influenced by the doctrines of Confucius, no matter what
religions were brought in.
Thus went the story of China through century after century, with
violent dissensions, yet never dissensions deep enough or wide enough
to create a real change in an empire so vast and in a people so
unwilling to change. We have to picture them living chiefly along
the river banks, cultivating the rice which was their principal food,
and with unwearied patience and industry making their silk, from the
cocoons spun by the caterpillars, their beautiful porcelain, their
lacquered {24} furniture and vessels, their ivory carvings, and so on.
And then, towards the end of the twelfth century, began to rise to
great power in Asia a people called the Mongols. Huns, Tartars, and
Mongols we have to look on as closely related; and to some degree the
last two names are interchangeable. They were divided into tribes
under the rule of chieftains called Khans; and over the whole was a
chosen ruler named the Khakan--the Khan of Khans. Their numbers
grew. They led the pastoral life. As conquerors they were as
ruthless as the Huns from whom they were descended, and at length,
under the famous Kublai Khan, they possessed by far the greater
portion of Asia and Europe as far as the boundaries of Poland.
Before the end of the thirteenth century Kublai Khan, with his palace
at Peking, dominated the whole of China, and a vast portion of the
earth's surface besides. It was to his court that the famous
Venetian traveller, Marco Polo, made his way. He lived there no less
than seventeen years in all, and probably at no other time was it so
easy for a western traveller to go to China overland, because at no
other time has there been a single power which could ensure his
safety on so long a journey through lands in possession of such
lawless people.
On land, Kublai and his Mongols were irresistible, but they failed
entirely by sea in two expeditions sent out to attempt the conquest
of Japan.
Kublai's successors had little of what must have been his very
extraordinary genius, both for government and war. In the middle of
the fourteenth century a Buddhist monk headed a revolution in China
which was completely successful, and ended with the expulsion of the
Mongol conquerors and the establishment of the monk on the throne as
Emperor, the first of the great Ming dynasty which lasted till {25}
1626. It was the last native dynasty to rule in China, for in that
year, 1626, the Manchus came in as conquerors, and are there still.
The first of the Mings not only drove the Mongols out of China, but
defeated their principal armies so decisively that it was the
beginning of the end of their power in other parts of Asia and in
Europe. The tribes broke away from their dependence on the Khakan,
or central ruler, and with that loss of union their military
predominance was lost and they ceased to take nearly so large a part
in our story.
[Sidenote: Japan]
In striking contrast with China, Japan is a land of no ancient story,
and of recent civilisation. It was not until near the end of the
third century A.D. that Chinese writing and letters were brought into
the islands. They were brought in from the independent kingdom of
Korea which we may see on the map running down southward from
Manchuria, that northern province from which the Manchus came to
conquer China. It shows how little we really know of Japanese
history, that though there is a legend that Korea was conquered by
Japan about the beginning of the third century, modern historians are
in much doubt whether any such conquest actually occurred. It was,
at all events, but temporary, and Korea soon regained independence.
Its fortunes, or misfortunes, however, play a very small part in this
Greatest Story.
Thus Chinese civilisation came to Japan, and was followed by Buddhism
replacing the ancient religion of Shinto in which ancestor worship
was the principal element.
Buddhism was essentially a religion of peace, and all the teaching of
Chinese civilisation was opposed to war. The Chinese held the
profession of arms, the military caste, in the lowest esteem.
Therefore {26} it is very singular that Japan, in spite of Buddhism
and of this Chinese civilisation, gave highest possible honour to her
soldiers. The Japanese had the greatest reverence for their
aristocracy, moreover---for their highly born--and the real
government was in the hands of one or other of the noble families.
The country was distracted for years and years by perpetual fighting
between two of these great families and their followers. It is a
story which may recall our Wars of the Roses.
The conclusion of that long conflict was brought about in what
certainly was the greatest of naval battles ever fought up to that
time in any Asiatic sea. It is called the Battle of Dannoura and its
date is 1188. More than a thousand junks, as the native vessels are
still called, took part in it, and by the slaughter, both in the
actual fighting and afterwards, the defeated clan was all but wiped
out of existence.
It was cruel work, but it opened the way for a period of comparative
peace. The mode of government was reformed. There was the Mikado,
the Emperor, by whom all power was supposed to be wielded, and there
was also an official called the Shogun, the head of the army.
Perhaps we may best designate his powers by calling him
Commander-in-Chief. But his authority was far more independent than
that of our highest military officer. For centuries the Shogun
appears as the real power in the land, although in theory his power
is derived from the Mikado.
After the victorious repulse of the great Kublai Khan, above
mentioned, the Daimios, as the great nobles were called, again became
powerful and turbulent and the condition of the country when the
Portuguese first visited it, in the early years of the sixteenth
century, seems to have been not very unlike {27} that of Europe in
the worst days of the fighting among the feudal barons.
[Sidenote: India]
In that disordered condition we have to leave, for the time being,
the story of the Yellow Race in the Farthest East, and pass to the
story of India previous to the epoch-making voyage of da Gama.
In a former volume we noticed the "Indo-European" as one of the great
human families. It is a word which indicates an immigration of a
people from Central Asia into India and also into Europe. The
kinship of Indians with Europeans is testified by the likeness of
many words in the languages of both. Especially is this likeness
apparent in the words which express simple things, conveying ideas
which people would be likely to wish to communicate to each other in
a primitive state of society.
The immigrants found a people in the land before them, and remnants
of that people still remain. In India itself those survivors are
called Dravidians, and the Tamils of Ceylon are probably of the same
race.
The Indians or Hindus appear to have lived, from their first coming
into the land that we call India, in village communities, each
community independent of the rest and producing all that its members
needed. It is very like the way in which we have seen that the
Germanic or Gothic tribes lived.
What is unlike those tribes is the "caste" system which still
prevails in India. Their highest "caste" was that of the Brahmans or
priests who kept in their own families the many secrets of a
mysterious religion. It consisted in "Nature worship," especially
worship of the forces that produce human food, and more particularly
worship of the sun. Our knowledge of it is derived from their sacred
books, the Vedas and others. The Brahmans claimed that they were
formed by the Creator of the world from his mouth; the {28} caste of
soldiers, the military caste, from his arm; the farmer caste from his
thigh, and the tillers of the soil from his feet. There were other
castes. The divisions were so very rigid that it was unlawful and
irreligious for one caste to do the work of another, to eat with
another, or to inter-marry. The restrictions were many and severe,
and are but little relaxed even now. They exist still as we find
them laid down in a Brahmany code called "The Laws of Manu," which is
supposed to date from the fifth century B.C.
[Sidenote: Buddha]
The institutions and manners of life in the East have been very slow
to change, in comparison with the West, and it is likely that the
life of these village communities continued for many centuries to be
much as it had been when the immigrants first came down from the
north to that valley of the Indus river which seems to have been
their earliest place of settlement. And then, about 550 years before
Christ, or a little earlier, was born a wonderful man Buddha, son of
the Rajah of a small territory which is now Nepal. Here and there
the headman of a village more powerful than those about him had begun
to exercise some authority over more villages than one and to be
called a rajah: and of one such Buddha was born.
[Illustration: STATUE OF BUDDHA.]
When he came to manhood he was struck by the misery of man's life in
the world. It appeared to him that the first cause of all that
misery was man's selfish wishes, and his desire for all kinds of
pleasure. He arrived at the belief that if man could rid himself of
these desires his misery would cease. One might think that if this
were so the simple remedy for it all would be death. But that was no
remedy in the eyes of Buddha, for he firmly believed that this life
which we lead here is but one in a cycle, or succession, of lives
which each soul has to live through. The only way then by which
man's misery could be relieved {29} was that he should strive by all
means to rid himself of his desires, to become, as it were, selfless,
that is to say a creature not taking any satisfaction in gratifying
his natural desires. And so convinced was this young prince, or
rajah, that it was thus and thus only that man's grief could be
assuaged, that he gave up his princely position, he left wife and
child and all {30} his wealth and wandered in poverty about the world
preaching this doctrine.
No doubt it was developed by his followers--for he quickly gained a
numerous following--beyond his own first ideas. It taught that the
final satisfaction and peace of the soul of man was only to be won,
after many re-incarnations--that is to say, after living again and
again on the earth in different human bodies--by being absorbed into
some kind of universal or divine soul which was called Nirvana. In
that state the individual self of each soul would be lost, at length,
and it might know peace because all selfish desires had gone from it.
[Sidenote: Buddhism]
What he preached, then, was not quite unselfishness as we understand
it; for our unselfishness seems to imply an active concern for the
selves of other people. Buddha's idea was much more passive than
active. We might better call it selflessness. His great thought was
how to get rid of all self, both a man's own self and that of all
others. He did, however, devote himself to what we may describe even
in our sense as a perfectly unselfish life, for he not only denied
himself all but the barest necessities, but went through northern
India trying to save other men from what he considered, and pitied,
as their misery, by explaining to them how he thought they might
escape from it.
The theory of re-incarnation opened a way for the union of Buddhism
with the older Brahmanism, for the priests taught that in Buddha
himself was the incarnated soul of Vishnu, the supreme spirit of the
Brahmans. So they taught, and who was there to contradict them?
For the regulation of social life the maxims of Buddha are such as
the highest Christian morality must approve. Hatred was to be
conquered by love. Wives, children, and servants were to be treated
with {31} wise kindness. After a while, as has happened with other
religions, the followers of Buddhism split up into sects, and
especially into what were called the Northern and the Southern
Churches. Although it was in the north of India that Buddha had
preached, it was there that his rules of life were modified and made
less severe. The Southern Church observed them more strictly.
In the centuries that followed, the doctrines of Buddha won converts
far beyond India itself--in Tibet in the north, in Burma and Siam in
the east and south, and so to the Malay Peninsula and to the islands
of the Malay Archipelago. Farther west it was carried down into
Ceylon.
Whatever, we may think of the religion of Buddha, it is obvious that
it was in no sense a "fighting religion." It did not inspire its
followers to be soldiers. Perhaps this is the reason why the Hindus
never seem to have been able to resist the incursions of warlike
neighbours. In the fourth century B.C. came Alexander of Macedon
and pushed his wonderful conquests into the very heart of India. His
general, Seleucus, organised part of the conquered territory under
his rule, but it made little lasting impression on the story of the
country. About the middle of the second century A.D., the wild
hordes of the Parthians, the people who gave such continual trouble
to the mighty Roman Empire, swept into Northern India, and with them
they brought Christianity. Christianity, too, came early to that
Malabar coast where the Portuguese, more than a thousand years later,
found the Moslems in full possession. But Christianity was not
imposed by force.
Although many wars have been fought for Christianity, it would be no
more right to speak of it, than of Buddhism itself, as a "fighting
religion." Mahommedanism, on the contrary, has ever been the great
fighting religion of the world.
{32}
In the eighth century, while the Mahommedans in the West were making
themselves dominant in Spain, other armies of the same faith went
conquering eastwards through Central Asia to the very borders of
China. They conquered, but they did not succeed in establishing any
permanent empire. There was no power at their centre to control such
an extent of the world's surface. The local princes became
practically independent again. But in many parts the Mahommedan
religion remained. It failed to make any impression in Tibet, where
the Great Llama, as the chief of the Tibetan Buddhists was called,
was ruler as well as high priest.
In India Mahommedanism established itself the more easily because
Buddhism was by that time a waning force in many parts and was being
re-absorbed by the older Brahmanism. Spread by its missionaries,
called Mullahs, the new creed won its way right through the country
to Siam, down the Malay Peninsula and into the islands of the
archipelago. It penetrated southward also. We have noted that when
the Portuguese came to the western shores of Southern India in 1500
or so they found Sultans, as the heads of Mahommedan states were
called, in possession. To these seaports, however, and to the
islands it is likely enough that the religion of Mahomet was brought
by the Arab traders as much as or more than by any overland route.
Of the principalities which gained, or regained, independence after
the flood of Moslem conquest had swept from West to East, that which
became of greatest importance in the story was the kingdom of
Afghanistan. It has been of importance by reason of its geographical
position making it "the gate of India," as it has been called. It is
the "gate" for such nations as Persia and Russia which might seek to
enter India from the west and north.
{33}
From the kingdom of Afghanistan itself a Moslem army swept again into
India about the year A.D. 1000. A confederacy of Hindu princes
assembled a force to oppose it, but it is said that this army was
entirely demoralised by the sound--the first of its kind that they
had heard--of a gun brought by the invaders. The rule of the Moslem
Viceroys, under which a large portion of Northern India was
administered as the result of this Afghan victory, seems to have been
equitable and effective, and in the course of the four centuries that
followed a great part of all India became Mahommedan.
[Sidenote: Timour, the Tartar]
At the end of that period appeared on the Indian scene the formidable
figure of Timour, the Tartar, sometimes known as Tamerlane or
Tambourlaine, meaning Tamer, or Timour, the Lame. He too was a
Mahommedan, and doubtless was of the same stock as those Afghan
rulers who claimed Turkish descent; but that distant relationship did
not deter him from the invasion of India from the north. He won his
way easily enough as far as Delhi, and there appears no reason why he
should not have pushed his conquests as far south as he wished. He
returned to his own country, however, and shortly afterwards went
westward against the Ottoman Turks and very heavily defeated them at
Angora, the new capital of modern Turkey.
But for the lack of ships, it seems certain that Timour, with his
Tartar hordes, would have passed over into Europe--with what result
on our story no one can say. But he had no means of crossing the
Dardanelles, and once more he went back to his own country.
Rather more than a thousand years later one of his descendants again
invaded India from the north, and made a beginning of that Mogul
empire which was to become far more widely and firmly established,
{34} under the great Akbar, towards the end of the sixteenth century.
Such, or somewhat such, are the main features of the stories of that
new world in the West and that old world in the East which were
opened up by the enterprise of Spain and Portugal about the year 1500.
{35}