Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

Peace and justice had been banished from the land above forty years; and the Mogul invader might seem to listen to the cries of an oppressed people. Their petty tyrants might have opposed him with confederate arms; they separately stood and successively fell; and the difference of their fate was only marked by the promptitude of submission or the obstinacy of resistance. Ibrahim, prince of Shirwan or Albania, kissed the footstool of the Imperial throne. His peace-offerings of silks, horses, and jewels were composed, according to the Tartar fashion, each article of nine pieces; but a critical spectator observed that there were only eight slaves. "I myself am the ninth," replied Ibrahim, who was prepared for the remark; and his flattery was rewarded by the smile of Timour.18 Shah Mansour, prince of Fars or the proper Persia, was one of the least powerful, but most dangerous, of his enemies. In a battle under the walls of Shiraz, he broke, with three or four thousand soldiers, the coul or main body of thirty thousand horse, where the emperor fought in person. No more than fourteen or fifteen guards remained near the standard of Timour; he stood firm as a rock, and received on his helmet two weighty strokes of a scymetar; the Moguls rallied; the head of Mansour was thrown at his feet, and he declared his esteem of the valour of a foe by extirpating all the males of so intrepid a race. From Shiraz, his troops advanced to the Persian Gulf; and the richness and weakness of Ormuz 20 were displayed in an annual tribute of six hundred thousand dinars of gold. Bagdad was no longer the city of peace, the seat of the caliphs; but the noblest conquest of Holacou could not be overlooked by his ambitious successor. The whole

19

18 The reverence of the Tartars for the mysterious number of nine is declared by Abulghazi Khan, who, for that reason, divides his Genealogical History into nine parts. 19 According to Arabshah (p. i. c. 28, p. 183), the coward Timour ran away to his tent, and hid himself from the pursuit of Shah Mansour under the women's garments. Perhaps Sherefeddin (1. ii. c. 25) has magnified his courage.

20 The history of Ormuz is not unlike that of Tyre. The old city, on the continent, was destroyed by the Tartars, and renewed [in the 14th cent.] in a neighbouring island without fresh water or vegetation. The kings of Ormuz, rich in the Indian trade and the pearl fishery, possessed large territories both in Persia and Arabia; but they were at first the tributaries of the sultans of Kerman, and at last were delivered (A.D. 1505) by the Portuguese tyrants from the tyranny of their own vizirs (Marco Polo, l. i. c. 15, 16, fol. 7, 8; Abulfeda Geograph. tabul. xi. p. 261, 262; an original Chronicle of Ormuz, in Texeira, or Stevens' History of Persia, p. 376-416, and the Itineraries inserted in the 1st volume of Ramusio; of Ludovico Barthema (1503), fol. 167; of Andrea Corsali (1517), fol. 202, 203; and of Odoardo Barbessa (in 1516), fol. 315-318).

VOL. VII.-4

II. Of
Turkestan,
A.D. 1370-

1383

course of the Tigris and Euphrates, from the mouth to the sources of those rivers, was reduced to his obedience. He entered Edessa; and the Turkmans of the black sheep were chastised for the sacrilegious pillage of a caravan of Mecca. In the mountains of Georgia, the native Christians still braved the law and the sword of Mahomet; by three expeditions he obtained the merit of the gazie, or holy war; and the Prince of Teflis became his proselyte and friend.

II. A just retaliation might be urged for the invasion of Turkestan, or the Eastern Tartary. The dignity of Timour could not endure the impunity of the Gotes; he passed the Sihoon, subdued the kingdom of Cashgar, and marched seven times into the heart of their country. His most distant camp was two months' journey, or four hundred and eighty leagues to the north-east of Samarcand; and his emirs, who traversed the river Irtish, engraved in the forests of Siberia a rude memorial of their exploits. The conquest of Kipzak, or the Western Tartary,21 was founded on the double motive of aiding [A.D. 1375] the distressed and chastising the ungrateful. Toctamish, a fugitive prince, was entertained and protected in his court; the ambassadors of Auruss Khan were dismissed with an haughty denial, and followed on the same day by the armies of Zagatai; and their success established Toctamish in the Mogul empire [A.D. 1376] of the North. But, after a reign of ten years, the new khan forgot the merits and the strength of his benefactor, the base usurper, as he deemed him, of the sacred rights of the house of [A.D. 1387] Zingis. Through the gates of Derbend, he entered Persia at

21 Arabshah had travelled into Kipzak, and acquired a singular knowledge of the geography, cities, and revolutions of that northern region (p. i. c. 45-49). [The position of Tōktāmish cannot be understood without a knowledge of the relations of the rulers of the Golden Horde. Orda, the eldest son of Juji (eldest son of Chingiz Khan) had succeeded his father in the rule over the tribes north of the Jaxartes. The tribes of the Western Kipchak (the regions of the Volga and Ural, north of the Caspian) had been conquered by Batu, a younger son of Jūji (see above, pp. 15, 16). Tüka-Timur, another son, ruled over Great Bulgaria on the Middle Volga; and a fourth, named Shayban, was lord of the Kirghiz Kazaks, in Siberia, to the north of Orda's land. The tribes ruled over by all these brothers and their descendants were included under the "Golden Horde," which derived its name from the Sir Orda, the golden camp of the Khan. The tribes under the line of Orda were called the White Horde; and the Khans of this line were nominally the head of the family. The tribes subject to Batu's line were the Blue Horde, and they were far the most important. The line of Bātu came to an end in 1358, and after twenty years of anarchy Tōktamish won the Khanate with Timur's help in 1378. Tōktāmish was a descendant of Orda, and had won the lordship of the White Horde in 1376. Under him the Khanate of the Golden Horde reasserted itself in Russia, and Moscow was burned in 1382.]

22

Russia, &c.

1396

the head of ninety thousand horse; with the innumerable forces of Kipzak, Bulgaria, Circassia, and Russia, he passed the Sihoon, burnt the palaces of Timour, and compelled him, amidst the winter snows, to contend for Samarcand and his life. After a mild expostulation, and a glorious victory, the of Kipzak, emperor resolved on revenge; and by the east and the west of AD. 1390the Caspian and the Volga, he twice invaded Kipzak with such mighty powers that thirteen miles were measured from his right to his left wing. In a march of five months, they rarely beheld the footsteps of man; and their daily subsistence was often trusted to the fortune of the chase. At length the armies encountered each other; but the treachery of the standardbearer, who, in the heat of action, reversed the Imperial standard of Kipzak, determined the victory of the Zagatais; [A.D. 1391] and Toctamish (I speak the language of the Institutions) gave the tribe of Toushi to the wind of desolation.23 He fled to the Christian duke of Lithuania; again returned to the banks (Flight of of the Volga; and, after fifteen battles with a domestic rival, to Siberia, at last perished in the wilds of Siberia. The pursuit of a flying enemy carried Timour into the tributary provinces of Russia; a duke of the reigning family was made prisoner amidst the ruins of his capital; and Yeletz, by the pride and ignorance of the Orientals, might easily be confounded with the genuine metropolis of the nation. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar, and the resistance would have been feeble, since the hopes of the Russians were placed in a miraculous image of the Virgin, to whose protection they ascribed the casual and voluntary retreat of the conqueror. Ambition and prudence recalled him to the south, the desolate country was exhausted, and the Mogul soldiers were enriched with an immense spoil of precious furs, of linen of Antioch,24 and of ingots of gold and

22 [Timur routed Tōktāmish in 1391 at Urtupa, and in 1395 on the Terek. By thus destroying the power of the Khanate of the Golden Horde, Timur involuntarily delivered Russia.]

23 Institutions of Timour, p. 123, 125. Mr. White, the editor, bestows some animadversion on the superficial account of Sherefeddin (1. iii. c. 12-14), who was ignorant of the designs of Timour, and the true springs of action. [M. Charmoy contributed to the 3rd vol. of the Transactions of the Academy of St. Petersburg an important account of these campaigns of Timur.]

24 The furs of Russia are more credible than the ingots. But the linen of Antioch has never been famous; and Antioch was in ruins. I suspect that it was some manufacture of Europe, which the Hanse merchants had imported by the way of Novogorod.

Toctamish

A.D. 1399]

III. Of
Hindostan,
A.D. 1398,
1399

silver.25
On the banks of the Don, or Tanais, he received an
humble deputation from the consuls and merchants of Egypt,26
Venice, Genoa, Catalonia, and Biscay, who occupied the com-
merce and city of Tana, or Azoph, at the mouth of the river.
They offered their gifts, admired his magnificence, and trusted
his royal word. But the peaceful visit of an emir, who ex-
plored the state of the magazines and harbour, was speedily
followed by the destructive presence of the Tartars. The city
was reduced to ashes; the Moslems were pillaged and dismissed;
but all the Christians who had not fled to their ships were con-
demned either to death or slavery. Revenge prompted him
to burn the cities of Serai and Astrachan, the monuments of
rising civilisation; and his vanity proclaimed that he had
penetrated to the region of perpetual daylight, a strange pheno-
menon, which authorised his Mahometan doctors to dispense
with the obligation of evening prayer.28

27

III. When Timour first proposed to his princes and emirs the invasion of India or Hindostan,29 he was answered by a murmur of discontent: "The rivers! and the mountains and deserts! and the soldiers clad in armour! and the elephants, destroyers of men!" But the displeasure of the emperor was more dreadful than all these terrors; and his superior reason

25 M. Levesque (Hist. de Russie, tom. ii. p. 247. Vie de Timour, p. 64-67, before the French version of the Institutes) has corrected the error of Sherefeddin, and marked the true limit of Timour's conquests. His arguments are superfluous, and a simple appeal to the Russian annals is sufficient to prove that Moscow, which six years before had been taken by Toctamish [A.D. 1382], escaped the arms of a more formidable invader.

26 An Egyptian consul from Grand Cairo is mentioned in Barbaro's voyage to Tana in 1436, after the city had been rebuilt (Ramusio, tom. ii. fol. 92).

27 The sack of Azoph is described by Sherefeddin (l. iii. c. 55), and much more particularly by the author of an Italian chronicle (Andreas de Redusiis de Quero, in Chron. Tarvisiano, in Muratori, Script. Rerum Italicarum, tom. xix. p. 802-805). He had conversed with the Mianis, two Venetian brothers, one of whom had been sent a deputy to the camp of Timour, and the other had lost at Azoph three sons and 12,000 ducats. [After the disintegration of the Golden Horde by Timur, the house of Tuka-Timur (see above, note 21) begins to come into prominence. Members of this house established the three Khanates of Kazan, the Crimea, and Kazimov.]

28 Sherefeddin only says (1. iii. c. 13) that the rays of the setting, and those of the rising, sun were scarcely separated by any interval: a problem which may be solved in the latitude of Moscow (the 56th degree) with the aid of the Aurora Borealis and a long summer twilight. But a day of forty days (Khondemir apud d'Herbelot, p. 880) would rigorously confine us within the polar circle.

29 For the Indian war, see the Institutions (p. 129-139), the fourth book of Sherefeddin, and the history of Ferishta (in Dow, vol. ii. p. 1-20), which throws a general light on the affairs of Hindostan.

was convinced that an enterprise of such tremendous aspect was safe and easy in the execution. He was informed by his spies of the weakness and anarchy of Hindostan; the soubahs of the provinces had erected the standard of rebellion; and the perpetual infancy of sultan Mahmoud was despised even in the harem of Delhi. The Mogul army moved in three great divisions; and Timour observes with pleasure that the ninetytwo squadrons of a thousand horse most fortunately corresponded with the ninety-two names or epithets of the prophet Mahomet. Between the Jihoon and the Indus, they crossed one of the ridges of mountains, which are styled by the Arabian geographers the Stony Girdles of the Earth. The highland robbers were subdued or extirpated; but great numbers of men and horses perished in the snow; the emperor himself was let down a precipice on a portable scaffold; the ropes were one hundred and fifty cubits in length; and, before he could reach the bottom, this dangerous operation was five times repeated. Timour crossed the Indus at the ordinary passage of Attok; and successively traversed, in the footsteps of Alexander, the Punjab, or five rivers,30 that fall into the masterstream. From Attok to Delhi the high road measures no more than six hundred miles; but the two conquerors deviated to the south-east; and the motive of Timour was to join his grandson who had achieved by his command the conquest of Moultan. On the eastern bank of the Hyphasis, on the edge of the desert, the Macedonian hero halted and wept; the Mogul entered the desert, reduced the fortress of Batnir, and stood in arms before the gates of Delhi, a great and flourishing city, which had subsisted three centuries under the dominion of the Mahometan kings. The siege, more especially of the [A.D. 1398] castle, might have been a work of time; but he tempted, by the appearance of weakness, the sultan Mahmoud and his vizir to descend into the plain, with ten thousand cuirassiers, forty thousand of his foot-guards, and one hundred and twenty elephants, whose tusks are said to have been armed with sharp and poisoned daggers. Against these monsters, or rather against the imagination of his troops, he condescended to use

30 The rivers of the Punjab, the five eastern branches of the Indus, have been laid down for the first time with truth and accuracy in Major Rennell's incomparable map of Hindostan. In his Critical Memoir he illustrates with judgment and learning the marches of Alexander and Timour,

« ForrigeFortsett »