CHAP. Persian historians will relate the sieges and reduction of LXIV. Otrar, Cogende, Bochara, Samarcand, Carizme, Herat, Me rou, 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 con tent to observe, that, from the Caspian to the Indus, they ruined a tract of many hundred miles, which was adorned with the habitations and labours of mankind, and that five centuries have not been sufficient to repair the ravages of four years. The Mogul emperor encouraged or indulged the fury of his troops; the hope of future possessions was lost in the ardour of rapine and slaughter; and the cause of the war exasperated their na tive fierceness by the pretence of justice and revenge. The downfal and death of the sultan Mohammed, who expired unpitied and alone, in a desert island of the Caspian Sea, is a poor atonement for the calamities of which he was the author. Could the Carizmian empire have been saved by a single hero, it would have been saved by his son Gelaleddin, whose active valour repeatedly checked the Moguls in the career of victory. Retreating, as he fought, to the banks of the Indus, he was oppressed by their innumerable host, till, in the last moment of despair, Gelaleddin spurred his horse into the waves, swam one of the broadest and most rapid rivers of Asia, and extorted the admiration and applause of Zingis himself. It was in this camp that 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 Derbent, 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 kingdom of His death, 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. A. D. 1227. Conquests guls under The haram of Zingis was composed of five hundred wives of the Mo- and concubines; and of his numerous progeny, four sons, the succes illustrious by their birth and merit, exercised under their father the principal offices of peace and war. aors of Zingia, Toushi was his -1265. great huntsman, Zagatais his judge, Octai his minister, and CHAP. Tuli his general; and their names and actions are often con- LXIV. spicuous in the history of his conquests. Firmly united for their own and the public interest, the three brothers and their A. D. 1227 families were content with dependent sceptres; and Octai, by general consent, was proclaimed great khan, or emperor of the Moguls and Tartars. He was succeeded by his son Gayuk, after whose death the empire devolved to his cousins Mangou and Cublia, the sons of Tuli, and the grandsons of Zingis. In the sixty-eight years of his four first successors, the Mogul subdued almost all Asia, and a large portion of Europe. Without confining myself to the order of time, without expatiating on the detail of events, I shall present a general picture of the progress of their arms: 1. In the East; II. In the South; III. In the West; and IV. In the North. 22 empire of A. D. 1234. I. Before the invasion of Zingis, China was divided into two of the empires or dynasties of the North and South and the dif-northern ference of origin and interest was smoothed by a general con- China, formity of laws, language, and national manners. The northern empire, which had been dismembered by Zingis, was finally subdued seven years after his death. After the loss of Pekin, the emperor had fixed his residence at Kaifong, a city many leagues in circumference, and which contained, according to the Chinese annals, fourteen hundred thousand families of inhabitants and fugitives. He escaped from thence with only seven horsemen, and made his last stand in a third capital, till at length the hopeless monarch, protesting his innocence and accusing his fortune, ascended a funeral pile, and gave orders, that as soon as he had stabbed himself, the fire should be kindled by his attendants. The dynasty of the Song, the native and ancient sovereigns of the whole empire, survived about forty-five years the fall of the northern usurpers; and the perfect conquest was reserved for the arms of Cublai. During this interval, the Moguls were often diverted by foreign wars; and if the Chinese seldom dared to meet their victors in the field, their passive courage presented an endless succession of cities to storm and of millions to slaughter. In the attack and defence of places, the engines of antiquity and the Greek fire were alternately employed: the use of gunpowder in cannon and bombs appears as a familiar practice; and 21 Zagatia gave his name to his dominions of Maurenahar, or Transoxiana; and the Moguls of Hindostan, who emigrated from that country, are styled Zagatais by the Persians. This certain etymology, and the similar example of Uzbek, Nogai, &c. may warn us not absolutely to reject the derivations of a national, from a personal name. 22 In Marco Polo and the Oriental geographers, the names of Cathay and Mangi distinguish the northern and southern empires, which, from A. D. 1234 to 1279, were those of the Great Khan, and of the Chinese. The search of Cathay, after China had been found, excited and misled our navigators of the sixteenth century, in their attempts to discover the northeast passage. 23 I depend on the knowledge and fidelity of the Pere Gaubil, who translates CHAP. the sieges were conducted by the Mahometans and Franks, EXIV. who had been liberally invited into the service of Cublai. After Of the 1. D. 1279. passing the great river, the troops and artillery were conveyed along a series of canals, till they invested the royal residence of Hamcheu, or Quinsay, in the country of silk, the most delicious climate of China. The emperor, a defenceless youth, surrendered his person and sceptre; and before he was sent in exile into Tartary, he struck nine times the ground with his forehead, to adore in prayer or thanksgiving the mercy Southern of the great khan. Yet the war (it was now styled a rebellion) was still maintained in the southern provinces from Hamcheu to Canton; and the obstinate remnant of independence and hostility was transported from the land to the sea. But when the fleet of the Song was surrounded and oppressed by a superior armament, their last champion leaped into the waves with his infant emperor in his arms. "It is more glorious," he cried "to die a prince, than to live a slave." A hundred thousand Chinese imitated his example; and the whole empire, from Tonkin to the great wall, submitted to the dominion of Cublai. His boundless ambition aspired to the conquest of Japan his fleet was twice shipwrecked; and the lives of a hundred thousand Moguls and Chinese were sacrificed in the fruitless expedition. But the circumjacent kingdoms, Corea, Tonkin, Cochinchina, Pegu, Bengal, and Thibet, were reduced in different degrees of tribute and obedience by the effort or terror of his arins. He explored the Indian ocean with a fleet of a thousand ships: they sailed in sixty-eight days, most probably to the Isle of Borneo, under the equinoctial line; and though they returned not without spoil or glory, the emperor was dissatisfied that the savage king had escaped from their hands. Of Persia, pire of the A. D. 1258. II. The conquest of Hindostan by the Moguls, was reserved and the em in a later period for the house of Timour; but that of Iran, caliphs, or Persia, was achieved by Holagou Khan, the grandson of Zingis, the brother and lieutenant of the two successive emperors, Mangou and Cublai. I shall not enumerate the crowd of sultans, emirs, and atebeks, whom he trampled into dust: but the extirpation of the Assassins, or Ismaelians of Persia, the Chinese text of the annals of the Moguls or Yuen (p. 71. 93. 153;) but I am ignorant at what time these annals were composed and published. The two uncles of Marco Polo, who served as engineers at the siege of Siengyanfon (l. ii. c. 61, in Ramusio, tom. ii. See Gaubil, p. 155. 157,) must have felt and related the effects of this destructive powder, and their silence is weighty, and almost decisive, objection. I entertain a suspicion, that the recent discovery was carried from Europe to China by the caravans of the xvth century, and falsely adopted as an old national discovery before the arrival of the Portuguese and Jesuits in the xvith. Yet the Pere Gaubil affirms, that the use of gunpowder has been known to the Chinese above 1600 years. 24 All that can be known of the Assassins of Persia and Syria, is poured from the copious, and even profuse, erudition of M. Falconet, in two memoires rea before the Academy of Inscriptions (tom. xvii. p. 127—170.) may be considered as a service to mankind. Among the hills CHAP. to the south of the Caspian, these odious sectaries had reigned LXIV. with impunity above a hundred and sixty years; and their prince, or Imam, established his lieutenant to lead and govern the colony of mount Libanus, so famous and formidable in the history of the crusades.25 With the fanaticism of the Koran, the Ismaelians had blended the Indian transmigration, and the visions of their own prophets and it was their first duty to devote their souls and bodies in blind obedience to the vicar of our God. The daggers of his missionaries were felt both in the East and West: The Christians and the Moslems enumerate, and perhaps multiply, the illustrious victims that were sacrificed to the zeal, avarice, or resentment of the old man (as he was corruptly styled) of the mountain. But these daggers, his only arms, were broken by the sword of Holagou, and not a vestige is left of the enemies of mankind, except the word assassin, which, in the most odious sense, has been adopted in the languages of Europe. The extinction of the Abbassides cannot be indifferent to the spectators of their greatness and decline. Since the fall of their Seljukian tyrants, the caliphs had recovered their lawful dominion of Bagdad and the Arbabian Irak; but the city was distracted by theological factions, and the commander of the faithful was lost in a haram of seven hundred concubines. The invasion of the Moguls he encountered with feeble arms and haughty embassies. "On the divine decree," said the caliph Mostasem, "is founded the throne of the sons of Abbas; and their foes shall surely be destroyed in this world and in the next. Who is this Holagou that dares to rise against them? if he be desirous of peace, let him instantly depart from the sacred territory; and perhaps he may obtain from our clemency the pardon of his fault." This presumption was cherished by a perfidious vizir, who assured his master, that, even if the barbarians had entered the city, the women and children, from the terraces, would be sufficient to overwhelm them with stones. But when Holagou touched the phantom, it instantly vanished into smoke. After a siege of two months, Bagdad was stormed and sacked by the Moguls; and their savage commander pronounced the death of the caliph Mostasem, the last of the temporal successors of Mahomet; whose noble kinsmen, of the race of Abbas, had reigned in Asia above five hundred years. Whatever might be the designs of the conqueror, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina were protected by the Arabian desert; but the 25 The Ismaelians of Syria, 40,000 Assassins, had acquired or founded ten castles in the hills above Tortosa. About the year 1280, they were extirpated by the Mamalukes. 28 As a proof of the ignorance of the Chinese in foreign transactions, I must observe, that some of their historians extend the conquests of Zingis himself to Medina, the country of Mahomet (Gaubil, p. 42.) CHAP. Moguls spread beyond the Tigris and Euphrates, pillaged LXIV. Aleppo and Damascus, and threatened to join the Franks in the deliverance of Jerusalem. Egypt was lost, had she been defended only by her feeble offspring: but the Mamalukes had breathed in their infancy the keenness of a Scythian air: equal in valour, superior in discipline, they met the Moguls in many a well-fought field; and drove back the stream of hostility OfAnatolia, to the eastward of the Euphrates. But it overflowed with reA. D. 1242 sistless violence the kingdoms of Armenia and Anatolia, of which the former was possessed by the Christians, and the latter by the Turks. The sultans of Iconium opposed some resistance to the Mogul arms, till Azzadin sought a refuge among the Greeks of Constantinople, and his feeble successors, the last of the Seljukian dynasty, were finally extirpated by the khans of Persia. -1272. Of Kipzak, land, Hun A. D. 1235 -1215. III. No sooner had Octai subverted the northern empire of Russia, Po- China, than he resolved to visit with his arms the most remote gary, &c. countries of the West. Fifteen hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars were inscribed on the military roll; of these the great khan selected a third, which he intrusted to the command of his nephew Batou, the son of Tuli, who reigned over his father's conquests to the north of the Caspian Sea. After a festival of forty days, Batou set forwards on this great expedition; and such was the speed and ardour of his innumerable i squadrons, that in less than six years they had measured a line of ninety degrees of longitude, a fourth part of the circumference of the globe. The great rivers of Asia and Europe, the Volga and Kama, the Don and Borysthenes, the Vistula and Danube, they either swam with their horses, or passed on the ice, or traversed in leatliern boats, which followed the camp, and transported their wagons and artillery By the first victories of Batou, the remains of national freedom were eradicated in the immense plains of Turkestan and Kipzak. In his rapid progress, he overran the kingdoms, as they are now styled, of Astracan and Cazan; and the troops which he detached toward mount Caucasus, explored the most secret recesses of Georgia and Circassia. The civil discord of the great dukes, or princes, of Russia, betrayed their country to the Tartars. They spread from Livonia to the Black Sea, and both Moscow and Kiow, the modern and ancient capitals, were reduced to ashes; a temporary ruin, less fatal than the deep, and perhaps indelible, mark, which a servitude of two hundred years has imprinted on the character of the Russians. The Tartars ravaged with equal fury the countries which they hoped to possess, and those which they were hastening to leave. From the permanent 1 27 The Dashté Kipzak, or plain of Kipzak, extends on either side of the Volga, in a boundless space towards the Jaik and Borysthenes, and is supposed to contain the primitive name and nation of the Cosacks. |