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every age, the possession of the same countries. Their numerous tribes, however distant or adverse, used one common language (it was harsh and irregular), and were known by the resemblance of their form, which deviated from the swarthy Tartar, and approached without attaining the lofty stature and fair complexion of the German. Four thousand six hundred villages were scattered over the provinces of Russia and Poland, and their huts were hastily built of rough timber, in a country deficient both in stone and iron. Erected, or rather concealed, in the depth of forests, on the banks of rivers, or the edge of morasses, we may, not per haps without flattery, compare them to the architecture of the beaver; which they resembled in a double issue, to the land and water, for the escape of the savage inhabitant, an animal less cleanly, less diligent, and less social, than that marvellous quadruped. The fertility of the soil, rather than the labor of the natives, supplied the rustic plenty of the Selavonians. Their sheep and horned cattle were large and numerous, and the fields which they sowed with millet and panic 14 afforded, in the place of bread, a coarse and less nutritive food. The incessant rapine of their neighbors compelled them to bury this treasure in the earth; but on the appearance of a stranger, it was freely imparted by a people, whose unfavorable character is qualified by the epithets of chaste, patient, and hospitable. As their supreme god, they adored an invisible master of the thunder. The rivers and the nymphs obtained their subordinate honors, and the popular worship was expressed in vows and sacrifice. The Sclavonians disdamned to obey a despot, a prince, or even a magistrate; but their experience was too narrow, their pas sions too headstrong, to compose a system of equal law or general defence. Some voluntary respect was yielded to age and valor; but each tribe or village existed as a separate republic, and all must be persuaded where none could be compelled. They fought on foot, almost naked, and, except an unwieldy shield, without any defensive armor; their weapons of offence were a bow, a quiver of small poisoned arrows, and a long rope, which they dexterously threw from

13 This sum is the result of a particular list, in a curious MS. fragment of the year 550, found in the library of Milan. The obscure geography of the times provokes and exercises the patience of the count de Buat (tom. xi. pp. 69-189). The French minister often loses himself in a wilderness which requires a Saxon and Polish guide.

14 Panicum, milium. See Columella, 1. ii. c. 9, p. 430, edit. Gesner. Plin. Hist. Natur. xviii. 24, 25. The Sarmatians made a pap of millet, mingled with mare's milk or blood. In the wealth of modern husbandry, our millet feeds poultry, and not heroes. See the dictionaries of Bomare and Miller.

a distance, and entangled their enemy in a running noose. In the field, the Sclavonian infantry were dangerous by their speed, agility, and hardiness: they swam, they dived, they remained under water, drawing their breath through a hollow cane; and a river or lake was often the scene of their unsuspected ambuscade. But these were the achievements of spies or stragglers; the military art was unknown to the Sclavonians; their name was obscure, and their conquests were inglorious.15

I have marked the faint and general outline of the Scla vonians and Bulgarians, without attempting to define their intermediate boundaries, which were not accurately known or respected by the Barbarians themselves. Their impor tance was measured by their vicinity to the empire; and the level country of Moldavia and Wallachia was occupied by the Antes, 16 a Sclavonian tribe, which swelled the titles of Justinian with an epithet of conquest." Against the Antes he erected the fortifications of the Lower Danube; and labored to secure the alliance of a people seated in the direct channel of northern inundation, an interval of two hundred miks between the mountains of Transylvania and the Euxine Sea. But the Antes wanted power and inclination to stem the fury of the torrent; and the light-armed Selavonians, from a hundred tribes, pursued with almost equal speed the footsteps of the Bulgarian horse. The payment of one piece of gold for each soldier procured a safe and easy retreat through the country of the Gepida, who commanded the passage of the Upper Danube.18 The hopes or fears of the Barbarians; their intestine union or discord; the accident of a frozen or shallow stream; the prospect of harvest and vintage; the prosperity or distress of the Romans; were the causes which produced the uniform repetition of annual visits, 19 tedious in the narrative, and

15 For the name and nation, the situation and manners, of the Sclavonians, fee the original evidence of the vith century, in Procopius (Goth. 1. i. c. 26, 1 iii. c. 14), and the emperor Mauritius or Maurice (Stratagemat. 1. ii. c. 5, apud Mascou, Annotat. xxxi). The Stratagems of Maurice have been printed only, as I under stand, at the end of Scheffer's edition of Arrian's Tactics, at Upsal, 1664 (Fabric. Bibliot. Græc. 1. iv. c. 8, tom. iii. p. 278), a scarce, and hitherto, to me, an inaccessible book.

16 Antes eorum fortissimi * * * * Taysis qui rapidus et vorticosus in Histri fluenta furens devolvitur (Jornandes, c. 5. p. 194, edit. Murator. Procopius Goth 1. iii. c. 14, et de Edific. 1. iv. c. 7). Yet the same Procopius mentions the Goths and Huns as neighbors, yeɩTovoûvra. to the Danube (de Edific. 1. iv. c. 1).

17 The national title of Anticus, in the laws and inscriptions of Justinian, was adopted by his successors, and is justified by the pious Ludewig (in Vit. Justinian, p. 515). It had strangely puzzled the civilians of the middle age.

13 Procopius, Goth. 1. iv. c. 25.

19 An inroad of the Huns is connected by Procopius with a comet; perhaps that of 531 (Persic. 1. ii. c. 4). Agathias (1. v. pp. 154, 155) borrows from his prede cessors some early facts.

destructive in the event. The same year, and possibly the same month, in which Ravenna surrendered, was marked by an invasion of the Huns or Bulgarians, so dreadful, that it almost effaced the memory of their past inroads. They spread from the suburbs of Constantinople to the Ionian Gulf, destroyed thirty-two cities or castles, erased Potidæa, which Athens had built, and Philip had besieged, and repassed the Danube, dragging at their horses' heels one hundred and twenty thousand of the subjects of Justinian. In a subsequent inroad they pierced the wall of the Thracian Chersonesus, extirpated the habitations and the inhabitants, boldly traversed the Hellespont, and returned to their companions, laden with the spoils of Asia. Another party, which seemed a multitude in the eyes of the Romans, penetrated, without opposition, from the Straits of Thermopyla to the Isthmus of Corinth; and the last ruin of Greece has ap peared an object too minute for the attention of history. The works which the emperor raised for the protection, but at the expense of his subjects, served only to disclose the weakness of some neglected part; and the walls, which by flattery had been deemed impregnable, were either deserted by the garrison, or scaled by the Barbarians. Three thousand Sclavonians, who insolently divided themselves into two bands, discovered the weakness and misery of a triumphant reign. They passed the Danube and the Hebrus, vanquished the Roman generals who dared to oppose their progress, and plundered, with impunity, the cities of Illyricum and Thrace, each of which had arms and numbers to overwhelm their contemptible assailants. Whatever praise the boldness of the Sclavonians may deserve, it is sullied by the wanton and deliberate cruelty which they are accused of exercising on their prisoners. Without distinction of rank, or age, or sex, the captives were impaled or flayed alive, or suspended between four posts, and beaten with clubs till they expired, or enclosed in some spacious building, and left to perish in the flames with the spoil and cattle which might impede the march of these savage victors.20 Perhaps a more impartial narrative would reduce the number, and qualify the nature, of these horrid acts; and they might sometimes he excused by the cruel laws of retaliation. In the siege of To

20 The cruelties of the Sclavonians are related or magnified by Procopius (Goth, 1. iii c. 29, 38. For their mild and liberal behavior to their prisoners, we may appeal to the authority, somewhat more recent, of the emperor Maurice (Stratagem. 1. ii. c. 5).

pirus, whose obstinate defence had enraged the Sclavoni ans, they massacred fifteen thousand males; but they spared the women and children; the most valuable captives were always reserved for labor or ransom; the servitude was not rigorous, and the terms of their deliverance were speedy and moderate. But the subject, or the historian of Justinian, exhaled his just indignation in the language of complaint and reproach; and Procopius has confidently affirmed, that in a reign of thirty-two years, each annual inroad of the Barbarians consumed two hundred thousand of the inhabitants of the Roman empire. The entire population of Turkish Europe, which nearly corresponds with the provinces of Justinian, would perhaps be incapable of supplying six millions of persons, the result of this incredible estimate.22

In the midst of these obscure calamities, Europe felt the shock of a revolution, which first revealed to the world the name and nation of the TURKS.* Like Romulus, the founder † of that martial people was suckled by a she-wolf, who afterwards made him the father of a numerous progeny; and the representation of that animal in the banners of the Turks preserved the memory, or rather suggested the idea, of a fable, which was invented, without any mutual intercourse, by the shepherds of Latium and those of Scythia. At the equal distance of two thousand miles from the Caspian, the Icy, the Chinese, and the Bengal Seas, a ridge of mountains is conspicuous, the centre, and perhaps the summit, of Asia; which, in the language of different nations, has been styled Imaus, and Caf, and Altai, and the Golden Mountains,‡ and the Girdle of the Earth. The sides of the hills were

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21 Tonirus was situate near Philippi in Thrace, or Macedonia, opposite to the Isle of Thasos, twelve days' journey from Constantinople. (Callarius, tom. i. pp.

676, 840).

22 According to the malevolent testimony of the Anecdotes (c. 18), these inroads had reduced the provinces south of the Danube to the state of a Scythian wilderness.

23 From Caf to Caf; which a more rational geography would interpret, from Imaus, perhaps, to Mount Atlas. According to the religious philosophy of the Mahometans, the basis of Mount Caf is an emerald, whose reflection produces the azure of the sky. The mountain is endowed with a sensitive action in its roots or nerves, and their vibration, at the command of God, is the cause of earthquakes (D'Herbelot, pp. 230, 231).

* It must be remembered that the name of Turks is extended to a whole family of the Asiatic races, and not confined to the Assena, or Turks of the Altai.-M.

Assena (the wolf) was the name of this chief. Klaproth, Tabl. Hist. de l'Asie, p. 114.-M.

Altai, i. e., Altun Tagh, the Golden Mountain. Von Hammer. Osman Geschichte, vol. i. p. 2.-M.

*

productive of minerals; and the iron forges,24 for the purpose of war, were exercised by the Turks, the most despised portion of the slaves of the great khan of the Geougen. But their servitude could only last till a leader, bold and eloquent, should arise to persuade his countrymen that the same arms which they forged for their masters, might become, in their own hands, the instruments of freedom and victory. They sallied from the mountain; 25 a sceptre was the reward of his advice; and the annual ceremony, in which a piece of iron was heated in the fire, and a smith's hammer was successively handled by the prince and his nobles, recorded for ages the humble profession and rational pride of the Turkish nation. Bertezena,† their first leader, signalized their valor and his own in successful combats against the neighboring tribes; but when he presumed to ask in marriage the daughter of the great khan, the insolent demand of a slave and a mechanic was contemptuously rejected. The disgrace was expiated by a more noble alliance with a princess of China; and the decisive battle which almost extirpated the nation of the Geougen, established in Tartary the new and more powerful empire of the Turks.‡ They reigned over the north; but they confessed the vanity of conquest by their faithful attachment to the mountain of their fathers. The royal encampment seldom lost sight of Mount Altai, from whence the River Irtish descends to wa

24 The Siberian iron is the best and most plentiful in the world; and in the southern parts, above sixty mines are now worked by the indus ry of the Russians (Strahlenberg, Hist. of Siberia, pp. 342, 387. Voyage en Siberie, par l'Abbé Chappe d'Auteroche, pp. 603–608, edit. m 12mo. Amsterdam, 1770). The Turks offered iron for sale; yet the Roman ambassadors, with strange obstinacy, persisted in believing that it was all a trick, and that their country produced none (Menander in Excerpt. Leg. 152).

25 Of Irgana-kon (Abulghazi Khan, Hist. Généalogique des Tatars, P. ii. c. 5, pp. 71-77, c. 15, p. 155). The tradition of the Moguls, of the 450 years which they passed in the mountains, agrees with the Chinese periods of the history of the Huns and Turks (De Guignes, tom. i. part ii. p. 376), and the twenty generations, from their restoration to Zingis.

The Mongol Temurin is also, though erroneously, explained by Rubruquis, a smith. Schmidt, p. 376.- M.

There appears the same confusion here. Bertezena (Bertè-Scheno) is claimed as the founder of the Mongol race. The name means the gray (blauliche) wolf. In fact, the same tradition of the origin from a wolf seems common to the Mongols and the Turks. The Mongol Bertè-Scheno, of the very curious Mongol History, published and translated by M. Schmidt of Petersburg, is brought from Thibet. M. Schmidt considers this tradition of the Thibetane descent of the royal race of the Mongols to be much earlier than their conversion to Lamaism, yet it seems very suspicious. See Klaproth, Tabl. de l'Asie, p. 159. The Turkish Bertezena is called Thou-men by Klaproth, p. 115. In 552, Thoumen took the title of Kha-Khan, and was called Il Khan.--M.

Great Bucharia is called Turkistan: see Hammer, 2. It includes all the vast steppes at the foot of the Altai. The name is the same with that of the Turau of Persian poetic legend.-M.

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