and the legendary aspect of exploits falls away. The Commentaries
of Confucius deal with events as tangible and exact as Luther’s
Reformation: they give the records of kings, and their daily doings two
thousand years before our era.
In 1122 B.C., with Wu-wang of the dynasty of Chu, the Chinese nation
emerged as a civilized state. It was organized on a feudal system,
not dissimilar to that built up by Japan’s powerful Daimios. Under
this single dynasty the Celestial Kingdom began a period of 873 years
of development, marked by the writings of the great sages. Lao-tse,
founder of the Taoist religion, with its watchword of “Tao” (reason),
but its quick degeneracy to forms and idol-worship, was the first of
the Chinese philosophers in point of time. He was at the zenith of
his repute around 530 B.C. He had a young disciple struggling through
poverty to an education, “Master Kung,” known to us under the Latinized
nomenclature of Jesuit missionaries as Confucius.
The youth eagerly conned and meditated upon Lao-tse’s abstract
speculations; but, unsatisfied, he began the studies and compilations
from the ancients which to this day constitute the foundations of
Chinese literature, etiquette, religion, ceremonial, and policy of
government.
Confucius was at once the world’s greatest college professor and its
most influential editor. His school instructed three thousand pupils
in ethics and etiquette. His writings have influenced more minds than
those of any other human individual, and his supremacy is the triumph
of uninspired work. His moral tone is lofty,--as witness his “Do not
unto another what you would not have done to yourself,”--but his life
brought no great new message.
“I am a commentator, not an originator,” he said of himself.
Mang-tse, “Master Mang,” whom we know as Mencius, followed “Master
Kung” by one hundred years, applying, as a practical reformer, to the
society of the day, the maxims of his enlightened philosophy, rebuking
princes and giving to the Chinese world the last of its classics.
In the glories of the Chu Dynasty, China, the earliest offshoot of the
Mongol race, reached its literary and philosophic climax.
In Turan, now called Turkestan, and in Mesopotamia, a western division
of the Mongols appears about 640 B.C. It is making an incursion into
the declining Empire of Assyria, over which Nebuchadnezzar is soon to
rule. Nothing of detail remains, only the record of the devastating
inroad over the mountain; but it locates at this date the southwestern
frontier of Mongol dominion.
Scythia, north of the Black Sea, reveals them next. The sketch
is drawn by the master-pen of the Greek father of history in his
description of the expedition of Darius, 506 B.C. “Having neither
cities nor forts, they carry their dwellings with them wherever they
go,” Herodotus writes, describing the nomad foes of the Great King. He
relates that they are “accustomed, moreover, one and all of them, to
shoot from horseback and to live not by husbandry, but on their cattle.”
This was the enemy against whom Darius planned a campaign, whose
object was to free from the menace of the Scythians north of the line
of advance his prospective expedition for the conquest of Greece.
From the bridge of boats over the Hellespont, beside which Miltiades
watched, the great Persian marched to the Don River, the nomads always
retreating. Darius finally challenged the Scythian king to stand and
fight, or to accept him as suzerain. To this message Idonthyrsus
replied: “This is my way, Persian. I never fear men or fly from them,
nor do I now fly from thee. I only follow my common mode of life in
peaceful years. We Scythians have neither towns nor cultivated lands,
which might induce us, through fear of being taken or ravaged, to be in
any hurry to fight with you. In return for thy calling thyself my lord,
I say to thee, ‘Go weep!’”
All the Asian steppes were open to the ever-retreating nomads: Darius
was obliged to halt. Hereupon, the Scythian prince, understanding how
matters stood, dispatched a herald to the Persian camp with presents
for the king. They were “a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows.”
Darius was at liberty to deduce whatever explanation he chose. He
retreated, the Scythians hounding his army on. He found his bridge over
the Bosphorus safe, and returned to Persia to prepare the Athenian
expedition that ended at Marathon. The Scythians remained: they were
left leading their flocks as of old over the unconquerable steppes.
By these echoes of clashings with other nations, the first-known
streams of Mongol outflow are dimly followed to the Caucasus Mountains
and the Black Sea on the south and west, bounding Scythia; to the
Hoang-ho Valley, in which were living the metamorphosed Chinese.
But the rolling hills south of Lake Baikal, the source of the
race-stream, still poured out fresh hordes, which periodically
overflowed in roving nomad bands, harrying the plainsmen. While the
feudal states of China struggled and fought among themselves, now
coalescing under the “Wu-pa,” the five dictators, now uniting under a
Prince Hwan of Shan-tung into a temporary Chinese Shogunate, there came
down upon the fertile lands and populous cities wild horsemen, sparing
none, burning, looting, riding away. “The Hiung-nu descended on us,”
appears again and again in the history.
At length, about 246 B.C., arose the short but glorious dynasty of
Ts’in, under China’s king, Shi-hwang-ti. He was a man of action. He
compacted a centralized monarchy from the many princedoms, drove back
the nomad Hiung-nu beyond the Yellow River, built the Great Wall, and
by his glorious exploits blazoned into Europe’s vocabulary, the word
China--Ts’in.
In Sz-ma Ts’ien’s history, a striking incident, revealing the Great
Emperor’s limitations, is graphically told.
“Li-se, the councillor, said, ‘Of old, the Empire was divided and
troubled. There was nobody who could unite it. Therefore did many
lords reign at a time. For this, the readers of books speak of old
times to cry down these. They encourage the people to forge calumnies.
Your subject proposes that all the official histories be burned.
The books not proscribed shall be those of medicine, of divination,
of agriculture. If any want to study laws, let them take the
office-holders as masters.’”
The decree was “approved.” The old books of annals, the Confucian
Commentaries, the Odes and the Rituals, to the suppressed execration of
the learned, fed the flames. The literati who protested were warmed,
themselves, over the same fires.
But despite Shi-hwang-ti’s signal defeat of the five coalescing tribes,
and the eighty-two thousand severed heads; despite the victories in 214
B.C., the Hiung-nu Empire grew in power, until it extended from Corea
to Tibet.
The Chinese “Han” Dynasty, even under the peasant-founder, Lin-pang,
who had proven himself a thorough soldier, was constantly harried. The
loss of the old literature continued to be mourned, which argues some
plane of general appreciation. The Minister urged the recall of the
Ts’in philosophers and the reproduction of the burned books.
“Why have books?” said the Emperor. “I won the Empire on horseback.”
“Can you keep it on horseback?” the Minister asked.
The literati were eventually recalled. Their support was secured for
the throne, and the Hiung-nu were kept back by art as well as by arms.
At the Emperor’s death, his widow, the Dowager Empress Lu, of Borgian
repute, was still harder pressed by the nomads. Meteh, the khan of the
invading hordes outside the Wall, ventured to send to her a proposal of
marriage and tariff-treaty couched in Rabelaisian poetry. “I wish to
change what I have for what I have not.” He followed the verses with
gifts of camels and carts and steppe ponies. In return his messengers
insisted on a tribute of wadded and silk clothes, precious metals and
embroidery, grain and yeast, as well as the intoxicating _samshu_.
These royal presents and tribute were really a trading of goods, a
barter, and citizens of lower rank, in the fairs beside the Wall, were
carrying on an equivalent.
More and more oppressive became the demands of the Mongols. A band of
beautiful maidens, a very toll of the Minotaur, was exacted yearly.
In one of the ancient Chinese poems a princess laments the fate that
condemns her to a barbarian husband, a desolate land where raw flesh is
to be her food, sour milk her drink, and the felt hut her palace.
In 200 B.C., Sin, King of Han, marched against the Hiung-nu, only to
retreat after heavy losses, with a third of his soldiers fingerless
from the cold. Again, in 177 B.C., the Hiung-nu broke a treaty and
raided across the Wall. A speech of the Emperor, in 162 B.C., is
quoted in the Chinese chronicles: “These later times for several years
the Hiung-nu have come in a crowd to exercise their ravages on our
frontiers.”
In 141 B.C., Nu-ti, the fifth of the House of Han, assembled a great
army of one hundred and forty thousand Chinese, and marched against
the Confederacy. This army, like that of Darius, penetrated far up
into the nomad’s territory. Scarcely a quarter of them returned. But
the invasion was not fruitless: the Hiung-nu gave allegiance to China.
Later, in 138 B.C., largely to turn the left flank of the Horde, the
Chinese advanced into Corea. In 119 B.C. another march to the district
north of Tibet turned the nomads’ right flank. At length, in 100 A.D.,
a more northerly Tatar clan, the Sien-pi, came down on the broken
remnants of the Hiung-nu. After thirteen hundred years of power this
tribe was destroyed. Of the scattered nomads some remained to unite
with their victorious conquerors; some went south to Turkestan; a third
group trekked north, and went over the great steppe. Subsequent to 100
A.D., they are found on the east bank of the Volga, where during two
centuries they temporarily disappear from history.
The great Empire of China now existed unmolested by the Hordes, and
after a few hard fights ruled Asia as far as the borders of Persia.
Its outposts almost met those of the Empire of Rome. Both realms were,
about this date, in peace and prosperity. There is even a record of
trade between them, the Chinese annals telling of an expedition of
King An-tun, or Antoninus, in 166 A.D., to Burmah, from which his
factors reached the Middle Kingdom; and of glass, drugs, metals, and
game obtained overland by way of Parthia from Ta-ts’in, the Great
Empire. Pliny writes of silk, iron, furs, and skins, caravan-brought
from China. So moved the two empires until 376 A.D., when Valens the
Irresolute reigned in Byzantium. To him came messengers bringing word
of great alarm from the Danube. The whole nation of Goths were on the
bank, begging a refuge in Roman territory.
“Wild enemies, from where we know not, are upon us!” they cried.
The Goths, who were to subvert the declining empire, were escaping from
before the western division of the old Hiung-nu. Valens had the Goths
ferried over the Danube, and the Huns established themselves in the
vacated places of what is now Austria.
[Illustration: THE MIRACLE OF ATTILA’S REPULSE (From a painting by
Raphael in Vatican)]
Amid those hordes arose a leader destined to leave a memory in the
sagas of the Scandinavian bards, in the Niebelungenlied of the Teutons,
and a lurid trail in the annals of the Cæsars. He called himself a
descendant of the great Nimrod, “nurtured in Engaddi, by the grace of
God, King of the Huns, the Goths, the Danes, the Medes; the Dread of
the World,”--Attila.
A profound politician, he alternately cajoled and threatened the
peoples whose conquest he undertook; a true barbarian, no food
save flesh and milk passed his lips. He and his men worshiped the
mysteriously discovered scimitar of Mars, and from Persia to Gaul, from
Finland to the walls of Constantinople, his armies ranged. Ambassadors
went from his Court to China. The great battle of Chalons, in which,
aided by the Goths, the dwindling forces of Rome’s Western Empire
won their last victory, alone preserved Europe from his yoke. His
descendants, mixing with succeeding conquerors, have remained until
this day in the land that is called, after their dreaded name, Hungary.
Back to the history of Sz-ma Ts’ien one must return for the next
harvest of Mongolia’s dragon-teeth. The Tung-hu, whose descendants are
now the skin-clad Tunguses that live far to the north, even up to the
Arctic Ocean, came down between 309 and 439 A.D. upon Manchuria. This
occupation separated China from Corea, which, thus isolated, preserved
for centuries the old Han dialect. The Tung-hu conquerors established
a great kingdom extending from the Japan Sea to Turkestan. From 380 to
580 they ruled the northern kingdom of China proper. The leading place
among those who composed their empire was held by the tribe of Juju, or
Geougen, whose descendants are now the Finns. Subject to the Juju was a
Mongol clan descended from the old southern Hiung-nu, who lived hard-by
Mount Altai. They were blacksmiths and armorers for the Tung-hu army,
and were called Turks. Their crescent power gradually supplanted that
of their masters.
In 480 this people appeared on the border of China. By 560 the Turkish
Empire had become supreme in Central Asia. They pressed upon the nation
of Avars on the Altai borderland of the steppe, until twenty thousand
of these, refusing to submit, moved westward. Justinian received
the envoys of the fugitives in 558. They offered to serve him, and
threatened, if unaccepted, to attack his Eastern Empire. Anxious only
to keep them away from his own domains, and indifferent as to which
should survive, he sent them to attack his German enemies. The Avars,
conquering a place in Europe, established a powerful nation between the
Danube and the Elbe, biding their time till with the other barbarians
they could descend to the spoil of Rome.
After their rebellious vassals came the Turkish envoys, with richer
presents to the Eastern Emperor Justin II, and more alarming menaces.
The military alliance of the Turks was accepted and that of the Avars
renounced. Kemarchus carried the ratification of Rome’s treaty to Mount
Altai in Central Asia. For many years there was friendship between
Mongol and Byzantine, mutual alliance and trade.
In 618 the great T’ang Dynasty arose in China, whose fame is suggested
in the fact that the only Cantonese word for a Chinese nationality
is “Man of T’ang.” The energetic Li-shi-min subdued the Manchurian
Tunguses, and in 630 a great battle broke the Turkish power. China once
again was supreme from Corea to the borderland of Persia. During the
T’ang Dynasty, Kashmir in India, and Anam were captured by the Chinese.
There followed now a period of centuries when the breeding-place of the
Mongol’s wolf-born hordes ran barren. In unchronicled obscurity the
skin-clad herdsmen lived out their generation. To the feeble Ouighour
confederacy fell the sceptre of the steppes. The old territory of the
Hiung-nu khans and the Turkish Supreme King was split into little
chief-governed principalities. Manchus and Tung-hus, rallying again,
alternately ruled and harried China. Avars and Huns occupied their
distant conquests. But in the vast stretch between, the tribes were
in a bewitched sleep. The people and the qualities that made the old
armies were there; the breed of shaggy ponies which they rode was
there; iron reddened the hill-slopes, waiting to be hammered into
spears in the Altai forges; China and Europe were as ripe for the
spoiling. All that the Mongols needed was a leader.
In a quaint chronicle of the Middle Ages we read of how he came. When
the French took Antioch from the Turks, one Can Can ruled over the
northern region out of which the Turks had originally come. To the
old kindred in this hour of need they sent for aid. Can Can was of
the Cathayans, a people dwelling among the mountains. In one of the
valley stretches lived the Tayman tribe, who were Nestorians. After
Can Can’s death a shepherd, who had risen to power among the Taymans,
made himself ruler as King John. King John had a brother named Vut.
Beyond his pastures some ten or fifteen days’ journey was Mongol; the
latter described as a poor and beggarly nation, without governor or law
save their soothsayings so detestable to the minds of the Nestorians.
Adjoining the Mongols were other poor people called Tatars. When King
John died without an heir, Vut became greatly enriched. This aroused
naturally the cupidity of his needy neighbors. Among the Mongols was
a blacksmith named Cyngis. Ingratiating himself with the Tatars, he
pointed out that the lack of a governor left both peoples subject to
the oppression of the surrounding tribes. He got himself raised to the
double chieftainship, secretly collected an army, and broke suddenly
upon Vut. Cyngis sent the Tatars ahead now to open his way, and the
people everywhere cried in dismay, “Lo, the Tatars come! the Tatars
come!”
While the Turks sought aid of their kinsmen for the defense, the French
King sent to King John’s reputedly Christian kingdom for help to his
crusade. But Cyngis “Temugin,” the Man, had come. As Genghis Khan he
was to open up the vastest empire the world has ever seen.
In 1200 the young Temugin, in a great battle near Urga, defeated Wang
Khan, whom modern research, vindicating the basis of truth in the old
Friar William de Rubruquis tales, has shown to have been a Tatar prince
of the Nestorian Christian faith, King of the Kitai or Cathayans, in
all probability the ruler known to the princes of Europe, through his
letters to the Roman Pope, as the Christian potentate of the Orient,
Prester John.
Wang Khan’s skull, encased in silver, graced the conqueror’s tent as a
first trophy. In 1206, summoning all the Mongol chiefs, Temugin took
the title of Genghis Khan, “The Greatest King.”
His armies were turned next to the reduction of his own people, the
nomad tribes of the Central Asian plains. As one after another was
defeated, its warriors were incorporated into his growing army. When
all these myriad shepherds and soldiers were gathered in, he directed
his march towards China.
The Great Wall was as paper to his host. Ninety cities were taken by
storm, never one surrendering. For while to the kindred races which he
had conquered, and which furnished further recruits for his armies,
Genghis was most merciful and humane, to a foreign foe he was indeed
the Wrath of God. Once he was bought off from the invasion; but again
he returned to the prey. A way into Peking was opened by means of a
mine dug under the walls to the centre of the city; through it a picked
body of Mongols entered, marched to the gates, and opened them. The
savage host rushed in to sack and slay. For sixty days Peking burned,
and five desolated provinces of North China were added to the Mongol
Empire.
Mohammed, Sultan of Carizme, who reigned from India to the Persian
Gulf, was the next objective for the Mongols. In the field, by valor
and numbers, the Khan’s troops defeated all the Sultan’s armies. The
walled towns were besieged and taken, largely through the skill of
Chinese engineers. The whole great Persian district was harried after
the custom of the Mongols through four years; for hundreds of miles
the country was so ruined that to this day the old populousness and
prosperity have never been recovered.
The army of one of the Khan’s generals marched north into Turkestan,
and subduing many Turkish peoples, entered beyond the Caucasus the
territory of the Polovtisni, themselves Mongols of an earlier invasion.
The conquest of Russia had begun. A Muscovite chronicle of those days
illustrates the utter consternation and surprise of the inhabitants at
this formidable and sudden incursion: “In those times there came upon
us, for our sins, unknown nations. No one could tell their origin,
whence they came, or what religion they professed. God alone knew
who they were.” The people generally believed that the time had come
foretold in Revelation when Satan should be let loose with the hosts of
“Gog and Magog to gather them together in battle; the number of whom is
as the sand of the sea.” Indeed, in the old map of Tatary, by Hondius,
the territories of these two fabled worthies are carefully outlined in
what is now Manchuria.
Despite the Tatarean theory of the Mongols’ army, the Russian chivalry
gathered to the aid of the Polovtisni, and collected an army by the
lower Dnieper. Defiantly they killed the ambassadors whom the Mongols
sent. The wrathful nomads advanced into the Crimea near the Sea of
Azov. The two hosts met in the fatal battle of Kalka. It was the Crécy
of Russian chivalry. Hardly a tenth of the army escaped. Ten thousand
of the men of Kiev fell; of the princes, six, of the boyars, seventy,
died on the field of battle. Matislaf the Bold alone made front, and he
was treacherously betrayed and slain.
The way into southern Russia was now open; yet, after their victory in
1224, the Mongols disappeared as suddenly as they had come. The hordes
had been diverted to complete the conquest of China. For thirteen
years they were swallowed up by the steppe. The son of Genghis,
“Oktai,” had succeeded the dead conqueror, and had appointed Batui
General of the West.
Again there was heralded an invasion, this time by one of the outlying
tribes of Khirgiz on the eastern border. The blow was aimed at the very
heart of Russia. The old Slav ballads, or “_bilinî_,” tell how Oleg the
Handsome fell at Riszan. The Tatars entered and burned Moscow in 1237.
Onward into the north rolled their conquest, town after town falling.
At the Cross of Ignatius, fifty miles from Novgorod, the torrent
turned, and, sparing for the time being the ancient republic, swept to
the south.
Against the cradle of the Russian race, the white-walled many-towered
city of Kiev, Mangu, the grandson of Genghis, now marched. By
multitudes the Tatars carried the walls. Fighting to the end, the last
defenders went down in a ring around the tomb of the great Yaroslav.
Russia was prostrate at the feet of the nomads. Her princes became
vassals, some to journey as far as the Amur to pay their homage to
the Great Khan. Without the Tatar Emperor’s letters-patent, no prince
could assume his inheritance. When the envoy presented the documents,
the nobles had to prostrate themselves and accept them kneeling. Each
Russian city gave its tribute, even the still uninvaded Novgorod.
Every peasant in Muscovy paid his poll-tax. Indeed, the supremacy of
the czars of Moscow, when the Tatar yoke was at length thrown off,
was largely due to the wealth which the Romanov family had managed to
acquire and to hold during their term as tax-farmers of the Great Khan.
Russian troops, supplied as part of the tribute, engaged in the Tatar
wars, getting in one instance of record their share of the booty--after
the sack of Daghestan. They were drafted on account of their great
size and valor into a body-guard for the Mongol Emperor in Peking,
corresponding to the Swiss Guard of Louis XVI.
While the conquest of Russia was being consolidated into a permanent
Mongol dominion destined to endure for nearly two hundred and fifty
years, Batui led his army on into Poland and Bohemia. He took Buda-Pest
and devastated the country far and wide. The most alarming accounts
preceded him, which are still to be read in the monkish annals of the
time. “Anno Domini, 1240, the detestable people of Satan, to wit, an
infinite number of Tatars, broke forth like grasshoppers covering
the face of the earth, spoiling the eastern confines with fire and
sword, ruining cities, cutting up woods, rooting up vineyards, killing
the people both of city and country. They are rather monsters than
men; clothed with ox-hides, armed with iron plates, in stature thick
and short, well-set, strong in body, in war invincible, in labor
indefatigable, drinking the blood of their beasts for dainties.”
The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who undertook to gather the
powers of Europe to meet the danger, wrote to Henry III of England:--