place or originall. A public destruction hath therefore followed the
common desolation of Kingdomes and spoil of the fertile land which that
wicked people hath passed through, not sparing sex, age or dignity,
and hoping to extinguish the rest of mankind. The general destruction
of the world and specially of Christendom calls for speedy help and
succour.
“The men are of short stature but square and well-set, rough and
courageous, have broad faces, frowning lookes, horrible cries agreeing
to their hearts. They are incomparable archers.
“Heartily we adjure your majestie in behalfe of the common necessitie,
that with instant care and prudent deliberation, you diligently prepare
speedy aide of strong knights and other armed Men-at-arms.”
Throughout Europe the dread was universal. In 1248 Pope Innocent IV
sent to the Tatars an embassy with money, begging them to cease their
ravages. Failing, he summoned Christendom. Louis IX of France prepared
a crusade. The fishermen of England could not sell their herrings
because their usual customers, the Swedes, had remained at home to
defend Scandinavia. Fortunately, the tide of western Mongol invasion
had spent itself. After wasting the Danube district, the death of
the Great Khan recalled Batui in 1245.
[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO THE MING TOMBS]
Syrian archives reveal the Mongols’ next appearance. In 1243 Hatthon,
King of Armenia, sought Mangu Khan at Cambaluc (Peking), praying him to
fight the Saracens and recover Jerusalem. Mangu sent his general, who
speedily took Antioch, spoiled Aleppo, and sacked the city of Bagdad.
When the latter was stormed, Haloon, the Mongol general, ordered that
the Caliph be brought alive into his presence. There had been found in
the city a quite surprising booty in treasure and riches. Haloon asked
why the Caliph had not used his wealth to levy mercenaries and defend
his country. The Caliph replied that he had deemed his own people
sufficient to withstand the Mongols. Then the Khan announced that the
precious things which had been so cherished would be alone left to the
miserable man, who was shut into a chamber with his pearls and gold
for sustenance and perished in torments. There was no Caliph of Bagdad
after him.
Thus, almost simultaneously, there were conquered by the Mongols,
northern China, Syria, Russia, Hungary, and Poland. The stream of human
blood that it cost is immeasurable.
Of the first conqueror, Genghis Khan, an Arab poem says:--
On every course he spurred his steed
He raised the blood-dyed dust.
The lives of four and a half million people are reckoned as his toll on
humanity. He had proposed to raze every city and destroy every farm of
the five northern Chinese provinces, to make pasture for his nomads,
and was only dissuaded by a minister, who ventured death in opposing
him. It was he who ordered the million souls of Herat to slaughter.
Batui, subduer of Russia, called “Sein Khan” (the Good King), is
said after the Moscow massacre to have received 270,000 right ears.
Following his fight with the Teutonic knights, near the Baltic, nine
sacks of right ears were laid at his feet. “Vanquished, they ask no
favor, and vanquishing, they show no compassion.” “The Mongols came,
destroyed, burnt, slaughtered, plundered, and departed,” summarizes
an Arab; and the unimaginative chronicles of the Chinese tell without
comment of city after city taken, and their inhabitants put to the
sword.
Utter ineradicable barbarity would, on the face of things, seem to have
been the inmost nature of this people. Yet only a few years later, when
Mangu Khan was ruling at Caracorum, the Court had become civilized.
Forty-one years after Genghis Khan’s death, when the great Venetian
traveler Marco Polo arrived at Kublai’s Court, the palaces and the
organized statecraft at Peking had become a model of efficiency. The
Mongols, not as a race, but in the sphere of their leaders, had become
a real nation, not unworthy of its success.
It is interesting to reconstruct the Tatar capital and note its
development in half a century. The Minorite monk, sent to beg aid from
the supposedly Christian Mangu Khan for the delivery of Jerusalem,
wrote a detailed description of the city, Caracorum. It had a circuit
of three miles and in dearth of stone was rampiered strongly with
earth. It had two main streets: one of the Saracens, where the fairs
were held and where many merchants assembled, attracted by the traffic
with the Court, and with the continuous procession of visitors and
messengers; the second chief street was occupied by Chinese, who were
artificers. The town had four gates. In the eastern section grain was
sold, in the western sheep and goats, in the southern oxen and wagons,
in the northern horses. Beyond were large palaces, the residences of
the secretaries. The Khan himself had a great court beside the city
rampart, enclosed not by an earth but a brick wall. Inside was a
large palace, and a number of long buildings, in which were kept his
treasures and stores of supplies.
Twice a year the Khan held high festival, with drinking-bouts
whereat Master William, a captive taken in Hungary, served as chief
butler, officiating at the tree which he had devised to pour forth
intoxication. The ambassador of the Caliph of Bagdad came in state,
carried upon a litter between two mules. Before the Khan, rich and poor
in multitudes moved in procession, dancing, singing, clapping their
hands. The guests brought gifts to the monarch. Those of the ambassador
of the Turkish Soldan were especially rich, but for quaintness the
Soldan of India scored. He sent eight leopards, and ten hare-hounds
taught to sit upon the horses’ buttocks as do cheetahs. Manifestly it
was no raw encampment of barbarians, this Caracorum of Mangu Khan.
If the Mongol’s Court could, in 1253, show this degree of “pomp and
pageantry,” how much was it exceeded by that of Kublai the Magnificent,
visited and told of by Marco Polo.
Kublai had established a second seat at Shang-tu, and had built not
merely a court, but a city. His palace was of marble, its rooms
aglitter with gold. Art had come, and the ceilings were painted
with figures of men and beasts and birds. Trees of all varieties,
and flowers, were executed with such exquisite skill as filled the
traveler, familiar with the best products of Italy, with amaze
and delight. Sixteen miles of park, enclosed by a wall, embosomed
the palace. Rivers, brooks, and luxuriant meadows diversified the
landscape, and white stags, fallow deer, gazelles, roebuck, rare
squirrels, and every variety of attractive creature, lent gayety and
charm.
The Khan rode weekly with his falcons. Sometimes a leopard sat a-croup
behind him, and was loosened at the game that struck his fancy.
The tale runs on of the Khan’s silk-corded pavilion in the grove, gilt
all over, and having lacquered, dragon-pedimented columns; of cave-born
rivers running deep below the ground; of treasured gems and gold.
No wonder that Coleridge’s imagination was warmed to his dream poem.
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree,
Where Alph the sacred river ran,
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
London’s tortuous streets were to wait two hundred years for their
first pavement, when Cambaluc’s were so straight and wide that one
could see right along them from end to end, and from one gate to the
other. In the Khan’s parks, the roads, being all paved and raised two
cubits above the surface, never became muddy, nor did the rain lodge on
them, but flowed off into the meadows.
In addition to civilization’s wealth and magnificence, the Mongols
had developed a well-organized government. The Khan’s twelve barons
exercised his delegated authority, as does a modern cabinet in behalf
of the national executive. Cambaluc was policed by a thousand guards.
The city wards were laid out, for taxation and government, in squares
like a chess-board, and all these plots were assigned to different
heads of families. The military roads were constantly kept up by a
large force. The Emperor had ordered that all the highways should be
planted with great trees a few yards apart. Even the roads through the
unpeopled regions were thus planted, and it was the greatest possible
solace to travelers.
The post, too, was as thoroughly organized as Napoleon’s. The
messengers of the Emperor, bound in whatsoever direction from Cambaluc,
found, every twenty-five miles of the way, a relay-station. Where the
route lay through uninhabited deserts, the relay-posts were made houses
of sojourn. At all stations express messengers were in readiness, as
links in the system for speeding dispatches to provincial governors or
generals: they were equipped with the fastest horses, which stood fresh
and saddled, ready for an instant mount. The men wore girdles hung with
bells; when within hearing of a station came the sound of jingling and
the clatter of hoofs, the next man similarly provided would leap to
his horse, take the delivered letter, and be off at full speed. The
post covered a full two hundred miles by day, and an equal distance
by night. Marco Polo states that, in the season, fruit gathered one
morning at the capital, in the evening of the next day reached the
Great Khan in Shang-tu--a distance of ten days’ journey.
Organized charity was instituted by the Mongol Khan for Cambaluc.
A number of the poorest families became his pensioners, receiving
regularly wheat and corn sufficient for the year. The nomad levied
as tribute a tenth of all wool, silk, hemp, and cloth stuffs, and
had therefrom clothing made for the indigent of his capital. He had a
banking system, paper money, a wonderful military discipline, advanced
astronomy; and he opened the Grand Canal to the commerce of the ages.
When one recalls the epoch at which all this existed, and realizes that
at that time wolves and robbers disputed mastery of the streets of
Paris; that the Saracens were lords of half of Spain; that Wycliffe had
not yet published his Bible, and that French was the language of the
English law courts,--the advance attained is hardly short of marvelous.
In nothing whatsoever is the Mongol civilization more remarkable and
contrasting than in its religious toleration--the last acquisition of a
civilized state.
While the Christian King of France was engaged in earning the title of
“Saint Louis” by extirpating a people of whose creed he disapproved,
his envoy, the friar, came to a country which had attained complete
religious liberty and toleration. There were “twelve kinds of
idolatries of divers nations.” Two churches of Mahomet preached the law
of the Koran, and one church of the Christians proclaimed the gospel of
the Christ.
He found his own creed treated with especial courtesy, the Great Khan
subscribing two thousand marks to rebuild a chapel on the behest of
an Armenian monk. He relates that the privilege was accorded to the
Church of trying any of their number accused of theft; that the
Khan’s secretary and his favorite wife were Christians; that a chapel
was allowed them within the court enclosure; and that the Nestorians
inhabited fifteen cities of Cathay and had a bishopric there.
Marco Polo found the same indulgent tolerance of his religion. In
Calaci, the principal city of Tangus, the inhabitants were “idolaters,”
but there were three churches of Nestorian Christians. In the province
of Tenduch, formerly the seat of Presbyter John, King George was a
Christian and a priest, and most of the people were Christians. They
paid tribute to the Great Khan.
Indeed, if the Mongolian attitude toward armed nations combating in
Christ’s name has been implacable hostility, toward those of the faith
who worshiped peacefully in their midst it has been uniformly tolerant,
even favoring. The Nestorians, who brought their creed from Khorassan
in the fourth century, had by 500 A.D. bishoprics in Merv, Herat, and
Samarcand. The Perait Turkomans as a tribe accepted Christianity, and
were unpunished. That the Faith was liberally treated in 781, under
the Chinese, is self-acknowledged, on the ancient Nestorian stone of
Si-an-fu. Headed by a cross, there is graven in Syrian and Chinese the
Imperial decree of 638, ordering a church to be built: it gives an
abstract of Christian doctrine, and an account of the “introduction
and propagation of the noble law of Ta-t’sin in the Middle Kingdom.”
In Si-an-fu at this time there were four thousand foreign families,
cut off from return by a northern inroad of fanatical Tibetans into
Turkestan.
Another monument of 830, found near the site of the old Ouighour
capital on the Orkhon, and carved in Chinese, Turkish, and Ouighour
characters, mentions the Western religion. A strange sect of Hebrews
of unknown origin found as well an unpersecuted home at K’ai-feng-fu,
where the Mosaic rites could be performed. To this day a remnant
survives.
The same tolerance for alien faiths marked Tatar rule in Russia. The
Khan of Sarai authorized a Greek church and a bishopric in his capital,
exempting the monks from his poll-tax. Khan Usbek in 1313 confirmed the
privileges of the Church, and punished with death sacrilege against it.
Kublai Khan took part regularly in the Easter services, and allowed the
Roman missionaries to establish a school in Shang-tu.
Indeed, reviewing the whole sweep of Asia’s religious history, one can
hardly escape the deduction that if the greatest race of the greatest
continent is idolatrous, it is not the fault of the Mongolians.
The Nestorian missionaries had an unsurpassed opportunity in the
fourth century when their faith was new and burning, and the world
was at peace. But stigmatized as heretics after a doctrinal dispute
which had been settled by the logic of a street fight, in which
Cyril’s Egyptian bravos defeated the Syrian henchmen of the Patriarch
of Constantinople, their mother church was driven out of the Roman
Empire into Persia, where, cut off from the support of the main trunk
of fellow Christians, their organization withered away as a lopped
branch. The chief congregations in Iran and Turan were overwhelmed by
the Mohammedans, until at length there were left only the dwindling
congregations in Mongolia, and such communities as those on the Malabar
coast in India.
To-day one hears of interesting discoveries. Now it is of the old
buried Christian strata among Turkomans of Samarcand, of doctrines
preserved through the fury of Islam fanaticism by families that have
secretly transmitted Christian worship through the centuries. Next it
is of Nestorian monks in Asia Minor, startled at being able to read the
characters of Ouighour inscriptions, relics of the writings which their
predecessors carried to Mongolia. But for all practical purposes the
Nestorian labors, once so promising, are as if they had never been.
Another supreme opportunity for Christianity came when Kublai Khan, in
1268, sent west by the Polo brothers for Roman missionaries to teach
his people.
“The Great Khan, ... calling to him the two brethren, desired them
for his love to go to the Pope of the Romans, to pray him to send an
hundred wise men and learned in the Christian religion unto him, who
might show his wise men that the faith of the Christians was to be
preferred before all other sects, and was the only way of salvation.
“After this the Prince caused letters to the Pope to be written and
gave them to the two brothers. Now the contents of the letters were
as follows: He begged that the Pope would send as many as an hundred
persons of our Christian faith; intelligent men acquainted with the
seven arts, well qualified to prove by force of argument to idolaters
and other kind of folk, that the law of Christ was best; and if they
would prove this, he and all under him would be Christians.”
In the advance of Christianity the steps ahead have been made not
so much by the conversion of the people as by the winning of their
rulers,--Constantine, giving to Rome’s legions the standard of the
Cross; Clovis; Ethelbert; Vladimir, who drove the whole population of
Kiev naked into consecrated water of the Dnieper; Charlemagne, moving
against the Saxons with his corps of priests. Where these spoke for
a hundred thousand souls, Kublai spoke for a hundred million. He was
able to deliver; it was the Pope who did not rise to the occasion.
In all Christendom Gregory could find but two priests to go with the
Khan’s messengers, and these turned back in the midst of the journey,
alarmed by the prospect of its hardships. The Khan, who wished some
religion, sent to Tibet, and received the Buddhist missionaries whom
he requested. So China, Mongolia, Tibet, and eastern Turkestan are
Buddhist to this day.
Yet once again the Christian opportunity came. The way which had
been opened into China by Matteo Ricci had been followed by Jesuit
missionaries, until at the beginning of the seventeenth century there
were two churches in Peking, some three hundred thousand converts in
the Empire, and the favor of the Emperor Hang was with the Western
faith.
When Christianity was spreading with cumulative rapidity, the
Dominicans and Franciscans came in and denounced the Jesuit workers for
tolerating the ancestor-cult of the Chinese, and for permitting God
to be called “Shang-ti.” In vain the Emperor Hang, appealed to by the
Jesuits, declared that by “Shang-ti” the Chinese meant “Ruler of the
Universe,” and that the Confucian rites were family ceremonies and not
idolatry. The rival friars persuaded the Pope to proclaim “Tien-chu”
the proper Chinese word for God, and to condemn all ancestral
ceremonies. Thereupon, the Chinese Emperor, rebuffed and disgusted
with all the wrangling fraternities, condemned the Christian religion
and killed the friars, save those whom he wanted for the Imperial
Observatory.
One cannot but recall an early commentary made by Mangu Khan upon the
jarring Christian sects whose rival dogmas have prevented, and do to
this day, the common progress.
“We Mongolians believe that there is but one God, through whom we live
and die, and we have an upright heart towards Him. That as God hath
given unto the hand fingers, so He hath given many ways to men. God
hath given the Scriptures to you, and ye Christians keep them not. But
He hath given us soothsayers, and we do that which they bid us, and we
live in peace.”
For some years after Kublai Khan’s death, the Mongol Empire held its
preëminence by inertia rather than by strength. Each of the khans had
his kingdom. Presently the nations that had been subdued began to rise
against the numerically small garrisons of Mongolia. In China, the
young Bonze, Chu-Yuan-Chang, finally organized a band of Boxers, and
succeeded in driving out the last degenerate Mongol khan from Peking.
He united the old eighteen provinces and established the Ming Dynasty,
the tombs and palaces of whose kings are still the most celebrated
structures of China.
In Russia, Dimitri of the Don gathered one hundred and fifty thousand
men and defeated the Mongols at Kulikovo.
If the old supreme monarch of the north had lost his sway, in the south
the Mongol race was being lifted to its second period of empire under
Tamerlane, the Iron Khan. His was the history of the first Mongol
conqueror repeated. The ant that Timur watched during his exile,
which fell back and returned sixty-nine times before it carried its
grain of wheat to the top of the wall, was the symbol of his early
career. Constant obscure tribal conflicts, unsuccessful at first, led
finally to a gathering of the nomads into a terrible invading army.
The Golden Horde was hurled against Dimitri, defeated him, and marched
upon Moscow. It was sacked with the horrors of Genghis’ days, and all
Russia was ravaged to the Don and the Sea of Azov. One of Tamerlane’s
armies traversed the Pamir into India, and, by the capture of Delhi,
opened the way for the Mogul Dynasty of his sons, which was to endure
until the Indian Mutiny. His Indian army, returning, swept a swath of
desolation through Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Georgia, and Armenia.
Every city that was taken was sacked, and the event commemorated by a
pyramid of skulls embedded in mortar. One hundred and twenty pyramids
marked Tamerlane’s path through India alone. The Delhi pyramid was made
from the skulls of one hundred thousand slain “with the sword of holy
war.”
Bajazet, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks,--themselves sprung from a nomad
Mongol tribe,--was threatened by Tamerlane on the west. In a great
battle Bajazet was defeated.
Alhacen, Tamerlane’s Arabian secretary, relates that the conquered king
was examined by his master.
“Wherefore dost thou use so great cruelty towards men? Dost thou not
pardon sex or age?”
Bajazet might logically have responded with a “tu quoque,” but his
position did not warrant it.
“I am appointed by God to punish tyrants,” continued Tamerlane. He had
an iron cage made; and locked within it like a linnet, the unfortunate
sultan was carried from place to place, because, in the Tatar’s naïvely
quoted words, “It is necessary that he be made an exemplary punishment
to all the cruel of the world, of the just wrath of God against them.”
The invasion of China was under way, in 1405, when Tamerlane died,
leaving a renewed Mongol Empire, which stretched from the Hoang-ho to
the Don, and from Siberia to India.
Here again the descendants of the savage conquerors rose to the
requirements of their sovereignty and obeyed the peaceful and humane
maxims that each of the two great and warlike and pitiless tyrants had
bequeathed to his successors. They ruled with a fair degree of wisdom
and a large measure of success. A descendant of Tamerlane was to build
at Agra, in 1630, the most splendid monument the world has ever seen,
the Taj-Mahal.
In the century after Tamerlane’s death the Hordes split up once
more, Ivan the Great of Moscow, having consolidated many neighboring
princedoms, with the nominal consent of his Tatar overlord, at length
seized the opportunity to refuse the payment of tribute. The Mongol
Khan had no longer the power to compel it at the sword’s point, and
without a battle the Tatar supremacy was covertly relinquished. In
1480 the long servitude of Russia to the alien invader was ended. From
this time the Mongol nomads appear hardly at all in history. They
withdrew gradually to their Asian steppes, leaving in Turkey, in the
Crimea, and in India, the kingdoms of their offshoot tribes. Russia and
China still felt the raids of the horsemen, for the khans of the Golden
Horde were yet not to be despised.
Fernan Hendez Pinto, the shipwrecked Portuguese of the generation
after Vasco da Gama, was in China in 1542 when Tatars came down and
besieged it. He saw “an emperor called Caran whose seigniorie confineth
within the mountains of Gen Halidan, a nation which the naturals call
Moscoby, of whom we saw some in this citie [of Tuymican], ruddie, of
big stature, with shoes and furred clothes, having some Latin words,
but seeming rather, for aught we observed, idolaters than Christians.
“To the ambassador of that Prince Caran, better entertainment was
given than to all the rest. He brought with him one hundred and twenty
men of his guard, with arrows and gilded quivers, all clothed in
chamois-skins, murrie and green. After whom followed twelve men of high
giantlike stature, leading great greyhounds, in chains and collars of
silver.”
When Yermak cleared the way to Sibir, and opened the path that was to
lead to the Pacific, the Mongols were pushed south. Russians still had
Tatars all along their frontier, but these were pressed steadily back
as the Slavic race advanced eastward. The Tatar domains were restricted
soon to the steppe country and Mongolia.
After Yermak’s time the Mongol power sank. It fell further when the
Manchus established their dynasty in Peking in 1644. So low had its
estate become that even the old fighting instinct was gone,--all
the passionate desire for independence that has been the Mongols’
birthright since the dawn of history. How had it vanished? Christianity
had not come. Buddhism had come, and it was the tolling of the knell
for freedom.