at the approach of the Tartars,28 whom their fear and igno rancer were inclined to separate from the human species. Since the invasion of the Arabs in the eighth century, Europe had never been exposed to a similar calamity: and if the disciples of Mahomet would have oppressed her religion and liberty, it might be apprehended that the shepherds of Scythia would extinguish her cities, her arts, and all the institutions of civil society. The Roman pontiff attempted to appease and. convert these invincible Pagans by a mission of Franciscan and Dominican friars; but he was astonished by the reply of the khan, that the sons of God and of Zingis were invested with a divine power to subdue or extirpate the nations; and that the pope would be involved in the universal destruction, unless ot ne visited in person, and as a suppliant, the royal horde. The emperor Frederic the Second embraced a more generous mode of defence; and his letters to the kings of France and England, and the princes of Germany, represented the common danger, and urged them to arm their vassals in this just and rational crusade.29 The Tartars themselves were awedbo by the fame and valor of the Franks; the town of Newstadt T in Austria was bravely defended against them by fifty knights and twenty crossbows; and they raised the siege on the appearance of a German army. After wasting the adjacent kingdoms of Servia, Bosnia, and Bulgaria, Batou slowly retreated from the Danube to the Volga to enjoy the rewards of victory in the city and palace of Serai, which started at his command from the midst of the desert.*

ot beoneybe 28 In the year 1238, the inhabitants of Gothia (Sweden) and Frise were prevented, by their fear of the Tartars, from sending as usual, their ships to the herring fishery on the coast of Englan; and as there was no exportation, forty or fifty of these fish were sold for a shilling, (Matthew Paris, p. 396.) It is whimsical enough, that the orders of a Mogul khan, who reigned on the borders of China, should have lowered of herrings in the English market. Price I shall copy characteristic or flattering epithets of the different countries of Europe: Furens ac fervens ad arma Germania, strenuæ militiæ genitrix et alumna Francia, bellicosa et audax Hised pania, virtuosa viris et classe munita fertilis Anglia, impetuosis bellatoribus referta Alemannia, navalis Dacia, indomita Italia, pacis ignarad Burgundia, inquieta Apulia, cum maris Græci, Adriatici et i vrrheni insulis pyraticis et invictis, Creta, Cypro, Sicilia, cum Oceans conter-s terminis insulis, et regionibus, cruenta Hybernia, cum agil: Wallia

29

wb Julliardner2 yd Lozmeren viuinadobne bae viineileg ese alumio • He was recalled by the death of Octai. 4M. 962

IV. Even the poor and frozen regions of the north attract ed the arms of the Moguls: Sheibani khan, the brother of the great Batou, led a horde of fifteen thousand families into the wilds of Siberia; and his descendants reigned at Tobol skoi above three centuries, till the Russian conquest. The spirit of enterprise which pursued the course of the Oby and Yenisei must have led to the discovery of the icy sea. After brushing away the monstrous fables, of men with dogs' heads and cloven feet, we shall find, that, fifteen years after the death of Zingis, the Moguls were informed of the name and manners of the Samoyedes in the neighborhood of the polar circle, who dwelt in subterraneous huts, and derived their furs and their food from the sole occupation of hunting.30

2

While China, Syria, and Poland, were invaded at the same time by the Moguls and Tartars, the authors of the mighty mischief were content with the knowledge and declaration, that their word was the sword of death. Like the first ca. liphs, the first successors of Zingis seldom appeared in person at the head of their victorious armies. On the banks of the Onon and Selinga, the royal or golden horde exhibited the contrast of simplicity and greatness; of the roasted sheep and mare's milk which composed their banquets; and of a distribution in one day of five hundred wagons of gold and silver. The ambassadors and princes of Europe and Asia were compelled to undertake this distant and laborious pilgrimage; and the life and reign of the great dukes of Russia, the kings of Georgia and Armenia, the sultans of Iconium, and ine emirs of Persia, were decided by the frown or smile of the great khan. The sons and grandsons of Zingis had been accustomed to the pastoral life; but the village of Caracorum 31 was gradually ennobled by their election and residence. loved doir a boorborg ervoor guid

palustris Scotia, glacialis Norwegia, suam electam militiam sub vexillo Crucis destinabunt, &c. (Matthew Paris, p. 498.)

30

See Carpin's relation in Hackluyt, vol, i. p. 30. The pedigree of the khans of Siberia is given by Abulghazi, (part viii. p. 485-495.) Have the Russians found no Tartar chronicles at Tobolskoi: *

"The Map of D'Anville and the Chinese Itineraries (De Guignes, tom. i. part ii. p. 57) seem to mark the position of Holin, or Caracorum, about six hundred miles to the north-west of Pekin. The dis

See the account of the Mongol library in Bergman, Nomadische Streifereyen, vol. iii. p. 185, 205, and Remusat, Hist. des Langues Tartares, p 227, and preface to Schmidt, Geschichte der Ost-Mongolen. — M

A change of manners is implied in the removal of Octai and Mangou from a tent to a house; and their example was imi tated by the princes of their family and the great officers of the empire. Instead of the boundless forest, the enclosure of a park afforded the more indolent pleasures of the chase, their new habitations were decorated with painting and sculpture; their superfluous treasures were cast in fountains, and basins, and statues of massy silver; and the artists of China and Paris vied with each other in the service of the great khan.& 82 Caracorum contained two streets, the one of Chinese mechanics, the other of Mahometan traders; and the places of religious worship, one Nestorian church, two mo-ques, 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 the nearest and most interesting object; and they might learn 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. s. In a spotless administration of thirty years, this friend of his country and of mankind continually labored to mitigate, , or suspend, the havoc of war; to save the monu ments, 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

tance between Selinginsky and Pekin is near 2000 Russian versts, between 1300 and 1400 English miles, (Bell's Travels, vol. ii. p. 67.1 "Kuorüquis found at Caracorum his countryman Guillaume Boucher, orfevre de Paris, who had executed for the khan a silver tree, supported by four lions, and ejecting four different liquors. Abul ghazi (part iv. p. 366) mentions the painters of Kitay or China. B

See the interesting sketch of the life of this minister (Yelin-Thsorchsai) in the second volume of the second series of Recherches Asiatiques Dar A. Remusat, p. 64. — M.

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 bein a vast and populous country; and their emperors adopted with pleasure a political system, 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: he fixed his residence at Pekin; and displayed in his court the magnificence of the greatest monarch of Asia. Yet this learned prince declined from the pure and simple religion of his great ancestor : the sacrificed to the idol Fo; and his blind attachment to the blamas of Thibet and the bonzes of China 33 provoked the censure of the disciples of Confucius. His successors polluted the palace with a crowd of eunuchs, physicians, and astrolosogers, while thirteen millions of their subjects were consumed ein the provinces by famine. One hundred and forty years beafter the death of Zingis, his degenerate race, the dynasty of bethe Yuen, was expelled by a revolt of the native Chinese; and of 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 brando Russia, the khans of Zagatai, or Transoxiana, and the khans of Iran or Persia. By their distance and power, these Heroyal lieutenants had soon been released from the duties of boobedience gands after the death of Cublai, they scorned to -plnokng plamen 'osody mali levonor Hindr

Boll 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 Both of the Indian Fo, whose worship prevails among 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. bevingeb

Compare Hist. des Mongols, p. 6164—M. ne gurke

Ac

accept a sceptre or a title from his unworthy successors. cording 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. bun Bora In this shipwreck of nations, some surprise may be excited by the escape of the Roman empire, whose relics, at the time of the Mogul invasion, were dismembered by the Greeks and 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, SamarSand, and Bagdad. The glorious and voluntary retreat of Batou from the Danube was insulted by the vain triumph of the Franks and Greeks; 34 and in a second expedition death surprised him in full march to attack the capital of the Cæsars. His brother 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, Bewhere he numbered the inhabitants and regulated the tributes of Russia. The Mogul khan formed an alliance with the Mamalukes against his brethren of Persia: threed hundred bthousand horse penetrated through the gates of Derbend; and the Greeks might rejoice in the first example of domestic swar. After the recovery of Constantinople, Michael Palaologus,35 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 interbest they came to the deliverance of Azzadin, the Turkish of 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 formidable rebellion

3

46ome repulse

of the Moguls in Hungary (Matthew Paris, p. 545,

might propagate and color the report of the union and victory of kings of the Franks on the confines of Bulgaria. Abulpharagius (Dynast. p. 310) after forty years, beyond the Tigris, might be easily

deceived.

25 See Pachyme, l. iii. c. 25, and I. ix. c. 26, 27; and the false alarm at Nice, 1. c. 27. Nicephorus Gregoras, 1. iv. c. 6.