the tide of emigration and war has repeatedly been poured. These ancient
seats of the Huns and Turks were occupied in the twelfth century by many
pastoral tribes, of the same descent and similar manners, which were
united and (A.D. 1206-1227) led to conquest by the formidable Zingis. In
his ascent to greatness, that barbarian (whose private appellation was
Temugin) had trampled on the necks of his equals. His birth was noble,
but it was in the pride of victory that the prince or people deduced his
seventh ancestor from the immaculate conception of a virgin. His father
had reigned over thirteen hordes, which composed about thirty or forty
thousand families, above two thirds refused to pay tithes or obedience
to his infant son, and at the age of thirteen, Temugin fought a battle
against his rebellious subjects. The future conqueror of Asia was
reduced to fly and to obey, but he rose superior to his fortune, and in
his fortieth year he had established his fame and dominion over the
circumjacent tribes. In a state of society in which policy is rude and
valor is universal the ascendant of one man must be founded on his power
and resolution to punish his enemies and recompense his friends. His
first military league was ratified by the simple rites of sacrificing a
horse and tasting of a running stream; Temugin pledged himself to divide
with his followers the sweets and the bitters of life, and, when he had
shared among them his horses and apparel, he was rich in their gratitude
and his own hopes. After his first victory, he placed seventy caldrons
on the fire, and seventy of the most guilty rebels were cast headlong
into the boiling water. The sphere of his attraction was continually
enlarged by the ruin of the proud and the submission of the prudent; and
the boldest chieftains might tremble when they beheld, enchased in
silver, the skull of the khan of the Keraites, who, under the name of
Prester John, had corresponded with the Roman pontiff and the princes of
Europe. The ambition of Temugin condescended to employ the arts of
superstition, and it was from a naked prophet who could ascend to heaven
on a white horse that he accepted the title of Zingis, the _most great_,
and a divine right to the conquest and dominion of the earth. In a
general _couroultai_, or diet, he was seated on a felt, which was long
afterward revered as a relic, and solemnly proclaimed great khan, or
emperor, of the Moguls and Tartars. Of these kindred, though rival
names, the former had given birth to the imperial race, and the latter
has been extended, by accident or error, over the spacious wilderness of
the north.
The code of laws which Zingis dictated to his subjects was adapted to
the preservation of domestic peace and the exercise of foreign
hostility. The punishment of death was inflicted on the crimes of
adultery, murder, perjury, and the capital thefts of a horse or an ox;
and the fiercest of men were mild and just in their intercourse with
each other. The future election of the great kahn was vested in the
princes of his family and the heads of the tribes, and the regulations
of the chase were essential to the pleasures and plenty of a Tartar
camp. The victorious nation was held sacred from all servile labors,
which were abandoned to slaves and strangers, and every labor was
servile except the profession of arms. The service and discipline of the
troops, who were armed with bows, cimeters, and iron maces, and divided
by hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands, were the institutions of a
veteran commander. Each officer and soldier was made responsible, under
pain of death, for the safety and honor of his companions; and the
spirit of conquest breathed in the law that peace should never be
granted unless to a vanquished and suppliant enemy.
But it is the religion of Zingis that best deserves our wonder and
applause. The Catholic inquisitors of Europe, who defended nonsense by
cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a barbarian, who
anticipated the lessons of philosophy, and established by his laws a
system of pure theism and perfect toleration. His first and only article
of faith was the existence of one God, the author of all good, who fills
by his presence the heavens and earth, which he has created by his
power. The Tartars and Moguls were addicted to the idols of their
peculiar tribes, and many of them had been converted by the foreign
missionaries to the religions of Moses, of Mahomet, and of Christ. These
various systems in freedom and concord were taught and practiced within
the precincts of the same camp, and the bonze, the imaum, the rabbi, the
Nestorian and the Latin priest, enjoyed the same honorable exemption
from service and tribute. In the mosque of Bokhara, the insolent victor
might trample the Koran under his horse’s feet, but the calm legislator
respected the prophets and pontiffs of the most hostile sects. The
reason of Zingis was not informed by books--the khan could neither read
nor write--and, except the tribe of the Igours, the greatest part of the
Moguls and Tartars were as illiterate as their sovereign. The memory of
their exploits was preserved by tradition; sixty-eight years after the
death of Zingis, these traditions were collected and transcribed. The
brevity of their domestic annals may be supplied by the Chinese,
Persians, Armenians, Syrians, Arabians, Greeks, Russians, Poles,
Hungarians, and Latins; and each nation will deserve credit in the
relation of their own disasters and defeats.
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
one 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 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
center of the capital, and the conflagration of the palace burned above
thirty days. China was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction, and
the five northern provinces were added to the empire of Zingis.
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. A caravan of three ambassadors and one hundred and fifty
merchants was 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, 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 thousands Carizmians were slain.
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 Chorasan. 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 conqueror yielded with reluctance to
the murmurs of his weary and wealthy troops, who sighed for the
enjoyment of their native land. Incumbered 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 Derbend, 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.
SIMON DE MONTFORT, EARL OF LEICESTER.
BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[A valiant soldier, astute politician, and public-spirited reformer
of the thirteenth century, born about 1200, died 1265. The son of
that De Montfort who led the cruel crusade against the Albigenses
of southern France, Simon became in early life an English subject,
received the highest honors from Henry III, and also secured the
hand of his sister in marriage. He sympathized with and became a
leader of the English barons in demanding the necessary concessions
to complete and enforce that great charter wrung from King John at
Runnymede; and finally took up arms to constrain Henry. In the
civil war which ensued Simon of Montfort was for the most part
victorious, but finally found himself forsaken by the fickle
baronage whose cause he had espoused. He was obliged to throw
himself on the support of the people. In the last Parliament he
convoked, in the year of his death, he summoned knights and
burgesses to sit by the side of the barons and bishops, thus
creating a new force in the English constitution, which wrought a
great change in the political system of the country. He was slain
and his army defeated some months later at the battle of Evesham by
Prince Edward.]
When a thunderstorm once forced the king, as he was rowing on the
Thames, to take refuge at the palace of the Bishop of Durham, Earl Simon
of Montfort, who was a guest of the prelate, met the royal barge with
assurances that the storm was drifting away, and that there was nothing
to fear. Henry’s petulant wit broke out in his reply: “If I fear the
thunder,” said the king, “I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the
thunder in the world.”
The man whom Henry dreaded as the champion of English freedom was
himself a foreigner, the son of a Simon de Montfort whose name had
become memorable for his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian
heretics in southern Gaul. Though fourth son of this crusader, Simon
became possessor of the English earldom of Leicester, which he inherited
through his mother, and a secret match with Eleanor, the king’s sister
and widow of the second William Marshal, linked him to the royal house.
The baronage, indignant at this sudden alliance with a stranger, rose in
a revolt which failed only through the desertion of their head, Earl
Richard of Cornwall; while the censures of the Church on Eleanor’s
breach of a vow of chastity, which she had made at her first husband’s
death, were hardly averted by a journey to Rome. Simon returned to find
the changeable king quickly alienated from him and to be driven by a
burst of royal passion from the realm. He was, however, soon restored to
favor, and before long took his stand in the front rank of the patriot
leaders. In 1248 he was appointed governor of Gascony, where the stern
justice of his rule and the heavy taxation which his enforcement of
order made necessary earned the hatred of the disorderly nobles. The
complaints of the Gascons brought about an open breach with the king. To
Earl Simon’s offer of the surrender of his post if the money he had
spent in the royal service were, as Henry had promised, repaid him, the
king hotly retorted that he was bound by no promise to a false traitor.
Simon at once gave Henry the lie; “and but that thou bearest the name of
king it had been a bad hour for thee when thou utteredst such a word!” A
formal reconciliation was brought about, and the earl once more returned
to Gascony, but before winter had come he was forced to withdraw to
France. The greatness of his reputation was shown in an offer which its
nobles made him of the regency of their realm during the absence of King
Lewis on the crusade. But the offer was refused, and Henry, who had
himself undertaken the pacification of Gascony, was glad before the
close of 1253 to recall its old ruler to do the work he had failed to
do.
Simon’s character had now thoroughly developed. He had inherited the
strict and severe piety of his father; he was assiduous in his
attendance on religious services, whether by night or day; he was the
friend of Grosseteste and the patron of the Friars. In his
correspondence with Adam Marsh we see him finding patience under his
Gascon troubles in the perusal of the Book of Job. His life was pure and
singularly temperate; he was noted for his scant indulgence in meat,
drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheerful and pleasant in talk; but his
natural temper was quick and ardent, his sense of honor keen, his speech
rapid and trenchant. His impatience of contradiction, his fiery temper,
were in fact the great stumbling-blocks in his after career. But the one
characteristic which overmastered all was what men at that time called
his “constancy,” the firm, immovable resolve which trampled even death
under foot in its loyalty to the right. The motto which Edward I chose
as his device, “Keep troth,” was far truer as the device of Earl Simon.
We see in his correspondence with what a clear discernment of its
difficulties both at home and abroad he “thought it unbecoming to
decline the danger of so great an exploit” as the reduction of Gascony
to peace and order; but once undertaken, he persevered in spite of the
opposition he met with, the failure of all support or funds from
England, and the king’s desertion of his cause, till the work was done.
There is the same steadiness of will and purpose in his patriotism. The
letters of Grosseteste show how early he had learned to sympathize with
the bishop in his resistance to Rome, and at the crisis of the contest
he offers him his own support and that of his associates. He sends to
Adam Marsh a tract of Grosseteste’s on “the rule of a kingdom and of a
tyranny,” sealed with his own seal. He listens patiently to the advice
of his friends on the subject of his household or his temper. “Better is
a patient man,” writes honest Friar Adam, “than a strong man, and he who
can rule his own temper than he who storms a city.” “What use is it to
provide for the peace of your fellow-citizens and not guard the peace of
your own household?” It was to secure “the peace of his
fellow-citizens” that the earl silently trained himself as the tide of
misgovernment mounted higher and higher, and the fruit of his discipline
was seen when the crisis came. While other men wavered and faltered and
fell away, the enthusiastic love of the people gathered itself round the
stern, grave soldier who “stood like a pillar,” unshaken by promise or
threat or fear of death, by the oath he had sworn.
In England affairs were going from bad to worse. The Pope still weighed
heavily on the Church. Two solemn confirmations of the charter failed to
bring about any compliance with its provisions. In 1248, in 1249, and
again in 1255, the great council fruitlessly renewed its demand for a
regular ministry, and the growing resolve of the nobles to enforce good
government was seen in their offer of a grant on condition that the
chief officers of the crown were appointed by the council. Henry
indignantly refused the offer, and sold his plate to the citizens of
London to find payment for his household. The barons were mutinous and
defiant. “I will send reapers and reap your fields for you,” Henry had
threatened Earl Bigod of Norfolk when he refused him aid. “And I will
send you back the heads of your reapers,” retorted the earl. Hampered by
the profusion of the court and by the refusal of supplies, the crown was
penniless, yet new expenses were incurred by Henry’s acceptance of a
papal offer of the kingdom of Sicily in favor of his second son, Edmund.
Shame had fallen on the English arms, and the king’s eldest son, Edward,
had been disastrously defeated on the Marches by Llewelyn of Wales. The
tide of discontent, which was heightened by a grievous famine, burst its
bounds in the irritation excited by the new demands from both Henry and
Rome with which the year 1258 opened, and the barons repaired in arms to
a great council summoned at London. The past half-century had shown both
the strength and weakness of the charter--its strength as a
rallying-point for the baronage, and a definite assertion of rights
which the king could be made to acknowledge; its weakness in providing
no means for the enforcement of its own stipulations. Henry had sworn
again and again to observe the charter, and his oath was no sooner taken
than it was unscrupulously broken.
The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state. “Now
England breathes in the hope of liberty,” sang a poet of the time; “the
English were despised like dogs, but now they have lifted up their head
and their foes are vanquished.” The song announces with almost legal
precision the theory of the patriots. “He who would be in truth a king,
he is a ‘free king’ indeed if he rightly rule himself and his realm. All
things are lawful to him for the government of his kingdom, but nothing
for its destruction. It is one thing to rule according to a king’s duty,
another to destroy a kingdom by resisting the law.... Let the community
of the realm advise, and let it be known what the generality, to whom
their own laws are best known, think on the matter. They who are ruled
by the laws know those laws best; they who make daily trial of them are
best acquainted with them; and since it is their own affairs which are
at stake, they will take more care, and will act with an eye to their
own peace.... It concerns the community to see what sort of men ought
justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm.” The constitutional
restrictions on the royal authority, the right of the whole nation to
deliberate and decide on its own affairs, and to have a voice in the
selection of the administrators of government, had never been so clearly
stated before.
It was impossible to make binding terms with an imprisoned king, yet to
release Henry without terms was to renew the war. A new Parliament was
summoned in January, 1265, to Westminster, but the weakness of the
patriotic party among the baronage was shown in the fact that only
twenty-three earls and barons could be found to sit beside the hundred
and twenty ecclesiastics. But it was just this sense of his weakness
that drove Earl Simon to a constitutional change of mighty issue in our
history. As before, he summoned two knights from every county. But he
created a new force in English politics when he summoned to sit beside
them two citizens from every borough. The attendance of delegates from
the towns had long been usual in the county courts when any matter
respecting their interests was in question; but it was the writ issued
by Earl Simon that first summoned the merchant and the trader to sit
beside the knight of the shire, the baron, and the bishop in the
Parliament of the realm.
EDWARD I, KING OF ENGLAND.
BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[Surnamed Longshanks, born 1239, crowned 1274, died 1307. Son of
Henry III, he defeated and slew Simon de Montfort in his father’s
reign and took part in the fourth crusade. On his accession to the
throne he completed the subjugation of Wales and in all ways
approved himself an able and powerful monarch. The most signal
events of his reign were those connected with the subjugation of
Scotland. At first successful, it was only in the last months of
his long reign that Robert Bruce’s coronation as King of the Scots
opened the way for a final defeat of English claims and arms under
Edward II.]
In his own time, and among his own subjects, Edward was the object of
almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national king.
At the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed away, when
the descendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac blended
for ever into an English people, England saw in her ruler no stranger,
but an Englishman. The national tradition returned in more than the
golden hair or the English name which linked him to our earlier kings.
Edward’s very temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he
stands out as the typical representative of the race he ruled; like
them willful and imperious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his
pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but
like them, too, just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious,
haughtily observant of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of
duty, religious. He inherited, indeed, from the Angevins their fierce
and passionate wrath; his punishments, when he punished in anger, were
without pity; and a priest who ventured at a moment of storm into his
presence with a remonstrance dropped dead from sheer fright at his feet.
But for the most part his impulses were generous, trustful, averse from
cruelty, prone to forgiveness. “No man ever asked mercy of me,” he said,
in his old age, “and was refused.” The rough soldierly nobleness of his
nature breaks out at Falkirk, where he lay on the bare ground among his
men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to drink of the one cask
of wine which had been saved from marauders. “It is I who have brought
you into this strait,” he said to his thirsty fellow-soldiers, “and I
will have no advantage of you in meat or drink.” A strange tenderness
and sensitiveness to affection lay, in fact, beneath the stern
imperiousness of his outer bearing. Every subject throughout his realm
was drawn closer to the king who wept bitterly at the news of his
father’s death, though it gave him a crown; whose fiercest burst of
vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother; whose crosses rose
as memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife’s bier
rested. “I loved her tenderly in her lifetime,” wrote Edward to
Eleanor’s friend the Abbot of Cluny; “I do not cease to love her now she
is dead.” And as it was with mother and wife, so it was with his people
at large. All the self-concentrated isolation of the earlier Angevins
disappears in Edward. He was the first English king since the Conquest
who loved his people with a personal love and craved for their love back
again. To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, to his care for them
the great statutes which stand in the forefront of our laws. Even in
his struggles with her England understood a temper which was so
perfectly her own, and the quarrels between king and people during his
reign are quarrels where, doggedly as they fought, neither disputant
doubted for a moment the worth or affection of the other. Few scenes in
our history are more touching than that which closes the long contest
over the charter, when Edward stood face to face with his people in
Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of tears owned himself frankly
in the wrong.