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manners of

1259-1368

basons, and statues of massy silver; and the artists of China and Paris vied with each other in the service of the Great Khan.50 Caracorum contained two streets, the one of Chinese mechanics, the other of Mahometan traders; and the places of religious worship, one Nestorian church, two mosques, and twelve temples of various idols, may represent, in some degree, the number and division of inhabitants. Yet a French missionary declares that the town of St. Denys, near Paris, was more considerable than the Tartar capital; and that the whole palace of Mangou was scarcely equal to a tenth part of that Benedictine abbey. The conquests of Russia and Syria might amuse the vanity of the Great Khans; but they were seated on the borders of China; the acquisition of that empire was adopt the the nearest and most interesting object; and they might learn China, A.D. from their pastoral economy that it is for the advantage of the shepherd to protect and propagate his flock. I have already celebrated the wisdom and virtue of a mandarin who prevented the desolation of five populous and cultivated provinces. In a spotless administration of thirty years, this friend of his country and of mankind continually laboured to mitigate or suspend the havoc of war; to save the monuments, and to rekindle the flame, of science; to restrain the military commander by the restoration of civil magistrates; and to instil the love of peace and justice into the minds of the Moguls. He struggled with the barbarism of the first conquerors; but his salutary lessons produced a rich harvest in the second generation. The northern and by degrees the southern empire acquiesced in the government of Cublai, the lieutenant and afterwards the successor of Mangou; and the nation was loyal to a prince who had been educated in the manners of China. He restored the forms of her venerable constitution; and the victors submitted to the laws, the fashions, and even the prejudices of the vanquished people. This peaceful triumph, which has been more than once repeated, may be ascribed, in a great measure, to the numbers and servitude of the Chinese. The Mogul army was dissolved in a vast and populous country; and their emperors adopted with pleasure a political system

50 Rubruquis found at Caracorum his countryman Guillaume Boucher, orfèvre de Paris, who had executed, for the khan, a silver tree, supported by four lions, and ejecting four different liquors. Abulghazi (part iv. p. 336) mentions the painters of Kitay or China.

the Yuen

which gives to the prince the solid substance of despotism and leaves to the subject the empty names of philosophy, freedom, and filial obedience. Under the reign of Cublai, letters and commerce, peace and justice, were restored; the great canal of five hundred miles was opened from Nankin to the capital; [Period of he fixed his residence at Pekin,51 and displayed in his court dynasty] the magnificence of the greatest monarch of Asia. Yet this learned prince declined from the pure and simple religion of his great ancestor; he sacrificed to the idol Fo; and his blind attachment to the lamas of Thibet and the bonzes of China 52 provoked the censure of the disciples of Confucius. His successors polluted the palace with a crowd of eunuchs, physicians, and astrologers, while thirteen millions of their subjects were consumed in the provinces by famine. One hundred and forty

the Mogul

A.D. 1259

1300

years after the death of Zingis, his degenerate race, the dynasty of the Yuen, was expelled by a revolt of the native Chinese; 53 [A.D. 1268] and the Mogul emperors were lost in the oblivion of the desert. Before this revolution, they had forfeited their supremacy over the dependent branches of their house, the khans of Kipzak and Division of Russia, the khans of Zagatai or Transoxiana, and the khans of empire, Iran or Persia. By their distance and power, these royal lieu-î tenants had soon been released from the duties of obedience; and, after the death of Cublai, they scorned to accept a sceptre or a title from his unworthy successors. According to their respective situation, they maintained the simplicity of the pastoral life or assumed the luxury of the cities of Asia; but the princes and their hordes were alike disposed for the reception of a foreign worship. After some hesitation between the Gospel and the Koran, they conformed to the religion of Mahomet; and, while they adopted for their brethren the Arabs. and Persians, they renounced all intercourse with the ancient Moguls, the idolaters of China.

In this shipwreck of nations, some surprise may be excited

51 [Which was called Khan Baligh, City of the Khān.]

52 The attachment of the khans and the hatred of the mandarins, to the bonzes and lamas (Duhalde, Hist. de la Chine, tom. i. p. 502, 503) seems to represent them as the priests of the same god, of the Indian Fo, whose worship prevails among the sects of Hindostan, Siam, Thibet, China, and Japan. But this mysterious subject is still lost in a cloud, which the researches of our Asiatic Society may gradually dispel.

53 [Under Chu Yuen Chang who became emperor and founded the Ming dynasty.]

Constanti

Escape of by the escape of the Roman empire, whose relics, at the time nople and of the Mogul invasion, were dismembered by the Greeks and

the Greek

empire from the Moguls,

A.D. 12401304

1256-66 A.D.]

Latins. Less potent than Alexander, they were pressed, like the Macedonian, both in Europe and Asia, by the shepherds of Scythia; and, had the Tartars undertaken the siege, Constantinople must have yielded to the fate of Pekin, Samarcand, and Bagdad. The glorious and voluntary retreat of Batou from the Danube was insulted by the vain triumph of the Franks and Greeks; and in a second expedition death surprised him in full march to attack the capital of the Cæsars. His brother [Beraka, Borga carried the Tartar arms into Bulgaria and Thrace; but he was diverted from the Byzantine war by a visit to Novogorod, in the fifty-seventh degree of latitude, where he numbered the inhabitants and regulated the tributes of Russia. The Mogul khan formed an alliance with the Mamalukes against his brethren of Persia; three hundred thousand horse penetrated through the gates of Derbend; and the Greeks might rejoice in the first example of domestic war. After the recovery of Constantinople, Michael Palæologus, at a distance from his court and army, was surprised and surrounded in a Thracian castle by twenty thousand Tartars. But the object of their march was a private interest; they came to the deliverance of Azzadin, the Turkish sultan; and were, content with his person and the treasure of the emperor. Their general Noga, whose name is perpetuated in the hordes of Astracan, raised a formid[Mangu- able rebellion against Mengo Timour, the third of the khans 1266-1280] of Kipzak; obtained in marriage Maria, the natural daughter of Palæologus; and guarded the dominions of his friend and father. The subsequent invasions of a Scythian cast were those of outlaws and fugitives; and some thousands of Alani and Comans, who had been driven from their native seats, were reclaimed from a vagrant life and enlisted in the service of the empire. Such was the influence in Europe of the invasion of the Moguls. The first terror of their arms secured

Timur, A.D.

56

55

54 Some repulse of the Moguls in Hungary (Matthew Paris, p. 545, 546) might propagate and colour the report of the union and victory of the kings of the Franks on the confines of Bulgaria. Abulpharagius (Dynast. p. 310), after forty years, beyond the Tigris, might be easily deceived.

55 See Pachymer, l. iii. c. 25, and 1. ix. c. 26, 27; and the false alarm at Nice, 1. iii. c. 27 [28]. Nicephorus Gregoras, 1. iv. c. 6.

56 [Izz ad-Din II. reigned A.D. 1245-1257.]

rather than disturbed the peace of the Roman Asia. The sultan of Iconium solicited a personal interview with John Vataces; and his artful policy encouraged the Turks to defend their barrier against the common enemy.57 That barrier indeed was soon overthrown; and the servitude and ruin of the Seljukians exposed the nakedness of the Greeks. The formidable Holagou threatened to march to Constantinople at the head of four hundred thousand men; and the groundless panic of the citizens of Nice will present an image of the terror which he had inspired. The accident of a procession, and the sound of a doleful litany, "From the fury of the Tartars, good Lord, deliver us," had scattered the hasty report of an assault and massacre. In the blind credulity of fear, the streets of Nice were crowded with thousands of both sexes, who knew not from what or to whom they fled; and some hours elapsed before the firmness of the military officers could relieve the city from this imaginary foe. But the ambition of Holagou and his successors was fortunately diverted by the conquest of Bagdad and a long vicissitude of Syrian wars; their hostility to the Moslems inclined them to unite with the Greeks and Franks; 58 and their generosity or contempt had offered the kingdom of Anatolia as the reward of an Armenian vassal. The fragments of the Seljukian monarchy were disputed by the emirs who had occupied the cities or the mountains; but they all confessed the supremacy of the khans of Persia; and he often interposed his authority, and sometimes his arms, to check their depredations, and to preserve the peace and balance of his Turkish frontier. The death of Cazan,59 one of the greatest Decline of and most accomplished princes of the house of Zingis, removed Khans of this salutary control; and the decline of the Moguls gave a free 1304, 31st scope to the rise and progress of the OTTOMAN EMPIRE.60

7 G. Acropolita, p. 36, 37 [c. 41]. Nic. Gregoras, 1. ii. c. 6, l. iv. c. 5. 58 Abulpharagius, who wrote in the year 1284, declares that the Moguls, since the fabulous defeat of Batou, had not attacked either the Franks or Greeks; and of this he is a competent witness. Hayton, likewise, the Armeniac prince, celebrates their friendship for himself and his nation.

59 Pachymer gives a splendid character of Cazan Khan, the rival of Cyrus and Alexander (1. xii. c. 1). In the conclusion of his history (1. xiii. c. 36), he hopes much from the arrival of 30,000 Tochars, or Tartars, who were ordered by the successor of Cazan [Ghāzān Mahmud, A.D. 1295-1304; his successor was Uljāitu, A.D. 1304-1316] to restrain the Turks of Bithynia, A.D. 1308.

60 The origin of the Ottoman dynasty is illustrated by the critical learning of MM. de Guignes (Hist. des Huns, tom. iv. p. 329-337), and d'Anville (Empire Turc,

the Mogul

Persia, A.D.

May

Origin of the Otto

1240, &c.

1231]

I. A.D. 1219

After the retreat of Zingis, the sultan Gelaleddin of Carizme mans, A.D. had returned from India to the possession and defence of his Persian kingdoms. In the space of eleven years, that hero fought in person fourteen battles; and such was his activity that (A.D. 1220- he led his cavalry, in seventeen days, from Teflis to Kerman, a march of a thousand miles.61 Yet he was oppressed by the jealousy of the Moslem princes and the innumerable armies of the Moguls; and after his last defeat Gelaleddin perished ignobly in the mountains of Curdistan. His death dissolved a veteran and adventurous army, which included under the name of Carizmians, or Corasmins, many Turkman hordes that had attached themselves to the sultan's fortune. The bolder and more powerful chiefs invaded Syria and violated the holy sepulchre of [Ala-ad-Din Jerusalem; the more humble engaged in the service of Aladin, 1236] sultan of Iconium; and among these were the obscure fathers of the Ottoman line.62 They had formerly pitched their tents near the southern banks of the Oxus, in the plains of Mahan and Nesa; and it is somewhat remarkable that the same spot should have produced the first authors of the Parthian and Turkish [Death of empires. At the head or in the rear of a Carizmian army, Sulayman. Soliman Shah was drowned in the passage of the Euphrates; [Ertugrull his son, Orthogrul, became the soldier and subject of Aladin, [In Phry- and established at Surgut,63 on the banks of the Sangar, a camp of four hundred families, or tents, whom he governed fifty-two years both in and war. peace He was the father of Thaman, or Athman, whose Turkish name has been melted into the appellation of the caliph Othman; 64 and, if we describe that pastoral chief as a shepherd and a robber, we must separate from those characters all idea of ignominy and baseness. Othman possessed, and perhaps surpassed, the ordinary virtues of a soldier; and the circumstances of time and place were propitious to his independence and success. The Seljukian dynasty was no more; and the p. 14-22), two inhabitants of Paris, from whom the Orientals may learn the history and geography of their own country.

A.D. 1231]

gia]

Reign of Othman, A.D. 12991326

61 [Jalal ad-Din Mangbarti, A.D. 1220-1231.]

63 [They were a clan of the tribe of Oghuz.]

[Sugut (Turkish name = "willow "), south of Malagina on the way to Dorylæum, is mentioned by Anna Comnena (Zayoudάovs, xv. 2). Othman was born in A.D. 1258. Gibbon has shown his critical faculty in neglecting the confused and false accounts of the Greek historians, Phrantzes and Chalcondyles, of the deeds of Ertughrul.]

64 [This is the correct form of the name -Othman. The name of the people is Othmanli; Ottoman is a corruption.]

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