but the calm legislator respected the prophets and pontiffs of the most hostile sects. The reason of Zingis was not informed by books; the khan could neither read nor write; and, except the tribe of the Igours, the greatest part of the Moguls and Tartars were as illiterate as their sovereign. The memory of their exploits was preserved by tradition; sixty-eight years after the death of Zingis, these traditions were collected and transcribed; the brevity of their domestic annals may be supplied by the Chinese,† Persians,‡ Armenians,§ Syrians, T

* In the year 1294, by the command of Cazan, khan of Persia, the fourth in descent from Zingis. From these traditions, his vizir Fadlallah composed a Mogul history in the Persian language, which has been used by Petit de la Croix. (Hist. de Genghizcan, p. 537— 539.) The Histoire Généalogique des Tatars (à Leyde, 1726, in 12mo. 2 tomes), was translated by the Swedish prisoners in Siberia from the Mogul MS. of Abulgasi Bahadur Khan, a descendant of Zingis, who reigned over the Usbecks of Charasm or Carizme (A.D. 1644—1663). He is of most value and credit for the names, pedigrees, and manners, of his nation. Of his nine parts, the first descends from Adam to Mogul Khan; the second, from Mogul to Zingis; the third is the life of Zingis; the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh, the general history of his four sons and their posterity; the eighth and ninth, the particular history of the descendants of Sheibani Khan, who reigned in Maurenahar and Charasm. + Histoire de Gentchiscan, et

de toute la Dynastie des Mongous ses Successeurs, Conquérans de la Chine; tirée de l'Histoire de la Chine, par le R. P. Gaubil, de la Société de Jesus, Missionaire à Peking; à Paris, 1739, in 4to. This translation is stamped with the Chinese character of domestic accuracy and foreign ignorance. See the Histoire du Grand Genghizcan, premier Empereur des Moguls et Tartares, par M. Petit de la Croix, à Paris, 1710, in 12mo; a work of ten years' labour, chiefly drawn from the Persian writers, among whom Nisavi, the secretary of sultan Gelaleddin, has the merit and prejudices of a contemporary. A slight air of romance is the fault of the originals, or the compiler. See likewise the articles of Genghizcan, Mohammed, Gelaleddin, &c. in the Bibliothèque Orientale of D'Herbelot.

§ Haithonus, or Aithonus, an Armenian prince, and afterwards a monk of Premontré (Fabric. Bibliot. Lat. medii Ævi. tom. i. p. 34), dictated in the French language his book de Tartaris, his old fellowsoldiers. It was immediately translated into Latin, and is inserted in the Novus Orbis of Simon Grynæus. (Basil, 1555, in folio.)

Zingis Khan and his first successors occupy the conclusion of the ninth dynasty of Abulpharagius (vers. Pocock. Oxon. 1663, in 4to.); and his tenth dynasty is that of the Moguls of Persia. Assemannus (Bibliot. Orient. tom. ii.) has extracted some facts from his Syriac writings, and the lives of the Jacobite maphrians, or primates of the

*

Arabians, Greeks,† Russians,‡ Poles,§ Hungarians,¶ and Latins,** and each nation will deserve credit in the relation of their own disasters and defeats.tt

The arms of Zingis and his lieutenants successively re

East. * Among the Arabians, in language and religion, we may distinguish Abulfeda, sultan of Hamah in Syria, who fought in person under the Mameluke standard against the Moguls.

+ Nicephorus Gregoras (1. 2, c. 5, 6) has felt the necessity of connecting the Scythian and Byzantine histories. He describes with truth and elegance the settlement and manners of the Moguls of Persia, but he is ignorant of their origin, and corrupts the name of Zingis and his sons. [For a Greek, Nicephorus adhered more closely than usual to the true name of the Mongolian conqueror, for he calls him Sitzischan, those of his sons are distorted into Chalaus and Telepugas.-ED.]

M. Levesque (Histoire de Russie, tom. ii.) has described the conquest of Russia by the Tartars, from the patriarch Nicon and the old chronicles. SFor Poland, I am content with the Sarmatia Asiatica et Europea of Matthew à Michou, or de Michoviâ, a canon and physician of Cracow (A.D. 1506), inserted in the Novus Orbis of Grynæus. Fabric. Bibliot. Latin. mediæ et infimæ Ætatis, toin. v. p. 56. I should quote Thuroczius, the oldest general historian (pars 2, c. 74, p. 150), in the first volume of the Scriptores Rerum Hungaricarum, did not the same volume contain the original narrative of a contemporary, an eye-witness and a sufferer (M. Rogerii, Hungari, Varadiensis Capituli Canonici, Carmen miserabile, seu Historia super Destructione Regni Hungariæ, Temporibus Belæ IV. Regis per Tartaros facta, p. 292-321); the best picture that I have ever seen of all the circumstances of a Barbaric invasion.

** Matthew Paris has represented, from authentic documents, the danger and distress of Europe (consuit the word Tartari in his copious Index). From motives of zeal and curiosity, the court of the great khan, in the thirteenth century, was visited by two friars, John de Plano Carpini, and William Rubruquis, and by Marco Polo, a Venetian gentleman. The Latin relations of the two former are inserted in the first volume of Hakluyt; the Italian original or version of the third (Fabric. Bibliot. Latin. medii Ævi, tom. ii. p. 198; tom. v. p. 25) may be found in the second tome of Ramusio. [See Bohn's editions of Matthew Paris, vol. i. p. 131, and of Marco Polo, p. 14 et passim. The Venetian, with his father and uncle, visited Tartary on a mercantile speculation; during the reign of Cublai, the grandson of Zingis, they were employed in his service nearly twenty years, between 1270 and 1290, and returned to Venice in 1295 with great wealth.-ED.]

In his great history of the Huns, M. de Guignes has most amply treated of Zingis Khan and his successors. See tom. iii. 1. 15-19, and in the collateral articles of the Seljukians of Roum, tom. ii. 1. 11, the Carizmians, 1. 14, and the Mamelukes, tom. iv. 1. 21: consult likewise the tables of the first volume. He is ever learned and accurate;

duced the hordes of the desert, who pitched their tents between the wall of China and the Volga; and the Mogul emperor became the monarch of the pastoral world, the lord of many millions of shepherds and soldiers, who felt their united strength, and were impatient to rush on the mild and wealthy climates of the South. His ancestors had been the tributaries of the Chinese emperors; and Temugin himself had been disgraced by a title of honour and servitude. The court of Pekin was astonished by an embassy from its former vassal, who, in the tone of the king of nations, exacted the tribute and obedience which he had paid, and who affected to treat the son of heaven as the most contemptible of mankind. A haughty answer disguised their secret apprehensions; and their fears were soon justified by the march of innumerable squadrons, who pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall. Ninety cities were stormed, or starved, by the Moguls; ten only escaped; and Zingis, from a knowledge of the filial piety of the Chinese, covered his vanguard with their captive parents; an unworthy, and by degrees a fruitless, abuse of the virtue of his enemies. His invasion was supported by the revolt of a hundred thousand Khitans, who guarded the frontier; yet he listened to a treaty; and a princess of China, three thousand horses, five hundred youths, and as many virgins, and a tribute of gold and silk, were the price of his retreat. In his second expedition, he compelled the Chinese emperor to retire beyond the Yellow River to a more southern residence. The siege of Pekin was long and laborious; the inhabitants were reduced by famine to decimate and devour their fellow-citizens; when their ammunition was spent, they discharged ingots of gold and silver from their engines; but the Moguls introduced a mine to the centre of the capital; and the conflagration of the palace burnt above thirty days. China was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction; and the five northern provinces were added to the empire of Zingis.

yet I am only indebted to him for a general view, and some passages of Abulfeda, which are still latent in the Arabic text.

* More properly Yen-king, an ancient city, whose ruins still appear some furlongs to the south-east of the modern Pekin, which was built by Cublai Khan. (Gaubil. p. 146.) Pe-king and Nan-king are vague titles, the courts of the north and of the south. The identity and

In the West, he touched the dominions of Mohammed, sultan of Carizme, who reigned from the Persian Gulf to the borders of India and Turkestan; and who, in the proud imitation of Alexander the Great, forgot the servitude and ingratitude of his fathers to the house of Seljuk. It was the wish of Zingis to establish a friendly and commercial intercourse with the most powerful of the Moslem princes; nor could he be tempted by the secret solicitations of the caliph of Bagdad, who sacrificed to his personal wrongs the safety of the church and state. A rash and inhuman deed provoked and justified the Tartar arms in the invasion of the Southern Asia. A caravan of three ambassadors and one hundred and fifty merchants was arrested and murdered at Otrar, by the command of Mohammed; nor was it till after a demand and denial of justice, till he had prayed and fasted three nights on a mountain, that the Mogul emperor appealed to the judgment of God and his sword. Our European battles, says a philosophic writer,* are petty skirmishes, if compared to the numbers that have fought and fallen in the fields of Asia. Seven hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the standard of Zingis and his four sons. In the vast plains that extend to the north of the Sihon or Jaxartes, they were encountered by four hundred thousand soldiers of the sultan; and in the first battle, which was suspended by the night, one hundred and sixty thousand Carizmians were slain. Mohammed was astonished by the multitude and valour of his enemies; he withdrew from the scene of danger, and distributed his troops in the frontier towns; trusting that the Barbarians, invincible in the field, would be repulsed by the length and difficulty of so many regular sieges. But the prudence of Zingis had formed a body of Chinese engineers, skilled in the mechanic arts, informed perhaps of the secret of gunpowder, and capable, under his discipline, of attacking a foreign country with more vigour and success than they had defended their own. The Persian historians will relate the sieges and reduction of Otrar, Cogende, Bochara, Samar

change of names perplex the most skilful readers of the Chinese geography (p. 177). * M. de Voltaire, Essai sur I'Histoire Générale, tom. iii. c. 60, p. 8. His account of Zingis and the Moguls contains, as usual, much general sense and truth, with some particular errors.

cand, Carizme, Herat, Merou, 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 content 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 possession was lost in the ardour of rapine and slaughter; and the cause of the war exasperated their native 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. Encumbered 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 Derbend, 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 king