The Russian road to China

THE STORY OF THE HORDES

AMONG people so peaceful and subdued as are the latter-day Mongols, it is hard to realize that the race has had a past which in tradition at least goes back to the infancy of history. According to legend, the Chinese, the first reputed offspring of the Mongols, preceded by three hundred years Egypt’s earliest dynasty. They antedate Abraham’s assigned epoch by twenty-six generations. They claim to have continued before Marathon a longer time than has elapsed from the foundation of Rome to our own era. Yet they yield not even to the Romans preëminence of arms, for they won and ruled an empire in extent and population the greatest that has ever existed. Mongols have led the world’s mightiest armies; their hosts have carried the ox-hide banners over every great European state but Spain and England, and into every Asian country except Japan.

That the march of Mongols down the long way of history has been so little appreciated is the sword’s obeisance to the pen. Save for the mendacious memoirs of Tamerlane, and a few Ouighour inscriptions in Central Asia, chronicles there are virtually none. So story has found a peg for the clipped tails of Alcibiades’ dogs, but scarcely a word for the deeds of those who won the world from the Yellow Sea to the Baltic, from the Persian Gulf to the Arctic. Only where the annals of the race have been written in the blood of the peoples they conquered are the events to be traced; only by assembling the alien and hostile evidences of the encircling nations can one shape the outline of Mongolia’s mighty past. History takes from the Confucian Book of Records the story of the earliest emigration to the east; from Herodotus the descent upon Mesopotamia and the struggle with Persia on the west. It gleans from the Chinese archives the doings of the Hiung-nu—the Huns; from the documents of the Byzantine Empire the descent on Europe of the same Mongolian “Scourge of God.” It culls from Arab historiographs the facts of the southern conquests of Genghis Khan; from Russian monasteries the tale of the northward march of his lieutenant Batui.

The outlines of Mongolia’s career are patched and gathered from her frontier lands, yet silhouetted against the far recesses of time they grow steadily clearer and more colossal.

In the year given by most as 2852 B.C., a tribe, whose earliest folk-lore and traditions point to an origin in the cradle of the Hordes near Urga, was pushing seaward down the valley of the Yellow River. Like the children of Israel, they were in constant conflict with the “barbarian” aborigines. This tribe became in due time the Chinese nation.

Through fifteen hundred years the descendants of the invaders wrought out a dimly comprehended civilization on the banks of the Hoang-ho. Behind the imposing national legend, hallowed by the mist of centuries and focused by images of their five Hero Kings, one may see the fact of strong, brave rulers striving for their people’s advance. A real statesman was the original of the demigod Shinnung, “holy husbandman,” the introducer of agriculture, in whose honor every spring a furrow is ploughed in the soil of his temple courtyard by the Emperor of China. A father in the flesh was that “Nest-builder” who watched the birds construct their homes, and on that model taught his people to make the wattled and plastered huts one sees to-day. The mystic queller of disastrous inundations, Ta-yu, founder of the house of Hia, was the first hydraulic engineer, the dykes of whose successors embank the treacherous Yellow River. He it was who hung at his door a bell which any of his subjects might ring, to obtain immediate attention, and who would leave his rice to answer a call to secure justice. Kie likewise wears human lineaments, he who made a mountain of meat and a tank of wine, and then, to please a frail companion, had his courtiers eat and drink of them on all fours like cows. There is an historic background to the rising against the tyrant under Shang, who later offered himself as a human sacrifice for rain in time of famine, and a kindred note in the story of Chou-siu, sold to misfortunes by a woman whom he loved and immolating himself in his royal robes when the rebellious vassals were closing in around him.

As the years pass, the histories become clearer and more direct, and the legendary aspect of exploits falls away. The Commentaries of Confucius deal with events as tangible and exact as Luther’s Reformation: they give the records of kings, and their daily doings two thousand years before our era.

In 1122 B.C., with Wu-wang of the dynasty of Chu, the Chinese nation emerged as a civilized state. It was organized on a feudal system, not dissimilar to that built up by Japan’s powerful Daimios. Under this single dynasty the Celestial Kingdom began a period of 873 years of development, marked by the writings of the great sages. Lao-tse, founder of the Taoist religion, with its watchword of “Tao” (reason), but its quick degeneracy to forms and idol-worship, was the first of the Chinese philosophers in point of time. He was at the zenith of his repute around 530 B.C. He had a young disciple struggling through poverty to an education, “Master Kung,” known to us under the Latinized nomenclature of Jesuit missionaries as Confucius.

The youth eagerly conned and meditated upon Lao-tse’s abstract speculations; but, unsatisfied, he began the studies and compilations from the ancients which to this day constitute the foundations of Chinese literature, etiquette, religion, ceremonial, and policy of government.

Confucius was at once the world’s greatest college professor and its most influential editor. His school instructed three thousand pupils in ethics and etiquette. His writings have influenced more minds than those of any other human individual, and his supremacy is the triumph of uninspired work. His moral tone is lofty,—as witness his “Do not unto another what you would not have done to yourself,”—but his life brought no great new message.

“I am a commentator, not an originator,” he said of himself.

Mang-tse, “Master Mang,” whom we know as Mencius, followed “Master Kung” by one hundred years, applying, as a practical reformer, to the society of the day, the maxims of his enlightened philosophy, rebuking princes and giving to the Chinese world the last of its classics.

In the glories of the Chu Dynasty, China, the earliest offshoot of the Mongol race, reached its literary and philosophic climax.

In Turan, now called Turkestan, and in Mesopotamia, a western division of the Mongols appears about 640 B.C. It is making an incursion into the declining Empire of Assyria, over which Nebuchadnezzar is soon to rule. Nothing of detail remains, only the record of the devastating inroad over the mountain; but it locates at this date the southwestern frontier of Mongol dominion.

Scythia, north of the Black Sea, reveals them next. The sketch is drawn by the master-pen of the Greek father of history in his description of the expedition of Darius, 506 B.C. “Having neither cities nor forts, they carry their dwellings with them wherever they go,” Herodotus writes, describing the nomad foes of the Great King. He relates that they are “accustomed, moreover, one and all of them, to shoot from horseback and to live not by husbandry, but on their cattle.”

This was the enemy against whom Darius planned a campaign, whose object was to free from the menace of the Scythians north of the line of advance his prospective expedition for the conquest of Greece. From the bridge of boats over the Hellespont, beside which Miltiades watched, the great Persian marched to the Don River, the nomads always retreating. Darius finally challenged the Scythian king to stand and fight, or to accept him as suzerain. To this message Idonthyrsus replied: “This is my way, Persian. I never fear men or fly from them, nor do I now fly from thee. I only follow my common mode of life in peaceful years. We Scythians have neither towns nor cultivated lands, which might induce us, through fear of being taken or ravaged, to be in any hurry to fight with you. In return for thy calling thyself my lord, I say to thee, ‘Go weep!’”

All the Asian steppes were open to the ever-retreating nomads: Darius was obliged to halt. Hereupon, the Scythian prince, understanding how matters stood, dispatched a herald to the Persian camp with presents for the king. They were “a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows.”

Darius was at liberty to deduce whatever explanation he chose. He retreated, the Scythians hounding his army on. He found his bridge over the Bosphorus safe, and returned to Persia to prepare the Athenian expedition that ended at Marathon. The Scythians remained: they were left leading their flocks as of old over the unconquerable steppes.

By these echoes of clashings with other nations, the first-known streams of Mongol outflow are dimly followed to the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea on the south and west, bounding Scythia; to the Hoang-ho Valley, in which were living the metamorphosed Chinese.

But the rolling hills south of Lake Baikal, the source of the race-stream, still poured out fresh hordes, which periodically overflowed in roving nomad bands, harrying the plainsmen. While the feudal states of China struggled and fought among themselves, now coalescing under the “Wu-pa,” the five dictators, now uniting under a Prince Hwan of Shan-tung into a temporary Chinese Shogunate, there came down upon the fertile lands and populous cities wild horsemen, sparing none, burning, looting, riding away. “The Hiung-nu descended on us,” appears again and again in the history.

At length, about 246 B.C., arose the short but glorious dynasty of Ts’in, under China’s king, Shi-hwang-ti. He was a man of action. He compacted a centralized monarchy from the many princedoms, drove back the nomad Hiung-nu beyond the Yellow River, built the Great Wall, and by his glorious exploits blazoned into Europe’s vocabulary, the word China—Ts’in.

In Sz-ma Ts’ien’s history, a striking incident, revealing the Great Emperor’s limitations, is graphically told.

“Li-se, the councillor, said, ‘Of old, the Empire was divided and troubled. There was nobody who could unite it. Therefore did many lords reign at a time. For this, the readers of books speak of old times to cry down these. They encourage the people to forge calumnies. Your subject proposes that all the official histories be burned. The books not proscribed shall be those of medicine, of divination, of agriculture. If any want to study laws, let them take the office-holders as masters.’”

The decree was “approved.” The old books of annals, the Confucian Commentaries, the Odes and the Rituals, to the suppressed execration of the learned, fed the flames. The literati who protested were warmed, themselves, over the same fires.

But despite Shi-hwang-ti’s signal defeat of the five coalescing tribes, and the eighty-two thousand severed heads; despite the victories in 214 B.C., the Hiung-nu Empire grew in power, until it extended from Corea to Tibet.

The Chinese “Han” Dynasty, even under the peasant-founder, Lin-pang, who had proven himself a thorough soldier, was constantly harried. The loss of the old literature continued to be mourned, which argues some plane of general appreciation. The Minister urged the recall of the Ts’in philosophers and the reproduction of the burned books.

“Why have books?” said the Emperor. “I won the Empire on horseback.”

“Can you keep it on horseback?” the Minister asked.

The literati were eventually recalled. Their support was secured for the throne, and the Hiung-nu were kept back by art as well as by arms.

At the Emperor’s death, his widow, the Dowager Empress Lu, of Borgian repute, was still harder pressed by the nomads. Meteh, the khan of the invading hordes outside the Wall, ventured to send to her a proposal of marriage and tariff-treaty couched in Rabelaisian poetry. “I wish to change what I have for what I have not.” He followed the verses with gifts of camels and carts and steppe ponies. In return his messengers insisted on a tribute of wadded and silk clothes, precious metals and embroidery, grain and yeast, as well as the intoxicating samshu. These royal presents and tribute were really a trading of goods, a barter, and citizens of lower rank, in the fairs beside the Wall, were carrying on an equivalent.

More and more oppressive became the demands of the Mongols. A band of beautiful maidens, a very toll of the Minotaur, was exacted yearly. In one of the ancient Chinese poems a princess laments the fate that condemns her to a barbarian husband, a desolate land where raw flesh is to be her food, sour milk her drink, and the felt hut her palace.

In 200 B.C., Sin, King of Han, marched against the Hiung-nu, only to retreat after heavy losses, with a third of his soldiers fingerless from the cold. Again, in 177 B.C., the Hiung-nu broke a treaty and raided across the Wall. A speech of the Emperor, in 162 B.C., is quoted in the Chinese chronicles: “These later times for several years the Hiung-nu have come in a crowd to exercise their ravages on our frontiers.”

In 141 B.C., Nu-ti, the fifth of the House of Han, assembled a great army of one hundred and forty thousand Chinese, and marched against the Confederacy. This army, like that of Darius, penetrated far up into the nomad’s territory. Scarcely a quarter of them returned. But the invasion was not fruitless: the Hiung-nu gave allegiance to China. Later, in 138 B.C., largely to turn the left flank of the Horde, the Chinese advanced into Corea. In 119 B.C. another march to the district north of Tibet turned the nomads’ right flank. At length, in 100 A.D., a more northerly Tatar clan, the Sien-pi, came down on the broken remnants of the Hiung-nu. After thirteen hundred years of power this tribe was destroyed. Of the scattered nomads some remained to unite with their victorious conquerors; some went south to Turkestan; a third group trekked north, and went over the great steppe. Subsequent to 100 A.D., they are found on the east bank of the Volga, where during two centuries they temporarily disappear from history.

The great Empire of China now existed unmolested by the Hordes, and after a few hard fights ruled Asia as far as the borders of Persia. Its outposts almost met those of the Empire of Rome. Both realms were, about this date, in peace and prosperity. There is even a record of trade between them, the Chinese annals telling of an expedition of King An-tun, or Antoninus, in 166 A.D., to Burmah, from which his factors reached the Middle Kingdom; and of glass, drugs, metals, and game obtained overland by way of Parthia from Ta-ts’in, the Great Empire. Pliny writes of silk, iron, furs, and skins, caravan-brought from China. So moved the two empires until 376 A.D., when Valens the Irresolute reigned in Byzantium. To him came messengers bringing word of great alarm from the Danube. The whole nation of Goths were on the bank, begging a refuge in Roman territory.

“Wild enemies, from where we know not, are upon us!” they cried.

The Goths, who were to subvert the declining empire, were escaping from before the western division of the old Hiung-nu. Valens had the Goths ferried over the Danube, and the Huns established themselves in the vacated places of what is now Austria.

Amid those hordes arose a leader destined to leave a memory in the sagas of the Scandinavian bards, in the Niebelungenlied of the Teutons, and a lurid trail in the annals of the Cæsars. He called himself a descendant of the great Nimrod, “nurtured in Engaddi, by the grace of God, King of the Huns, the Goths, the Danes, the Medes; the Dread of the World,”—Attila.

A profound politician, he alternately cajoled and threatened the peoples whose conquest he undertook; a true barbarian, no food save flesh and milk passed his lips. He and his men worshiped the mysteriously discovered scimitar of Mars, and from Persia to Gaul, from Finland to the walls of Constantinople, his armies ranged. Ambassadors went from his Court to China. The great battle of Chalons, in which, aided by the Goths, the dwindling forces of Rome’s Western Empire won their last victory, alone preserved Europe from his yoke. His descendants, mixing with succeeding conquerors, have remained until this day in the land that is called, after their dreaded name, Hungary.

Back to the history of Sz-ma Ts’ien one must return for the next harvest of Mongolia’s dragon-teeth. The Tung-hu, whose descendants are now the skin-clad Tunguses that live far to the north, even up to the Arctic Ocean, came down between 309 and 439 A.D. upon Manchuria. This occupation separated China from Corea, which, thus isolated, preserved for centuries the old Han dialect. The Tung-hu conquerors established a great kingdom extending from the Japan Sea to Turkestan. From 380 to 580 they ruled the northern kingdom of China proper. The leading place among those who composed their empire was held by the tribe of Juju, or Geougen, whose descendants are now the Finns. Subject to the Juju was a Mongol clan descended from the old southern Hiung-nu, who lived hard-by Mount Altai. They were blacksmiths and armorers for the Tung-hu army, and were called Turks. Their crescent power gradually supplanted that of their masters.

In 480 this people appeared on the border of China. By 560 the Turkish Empire had become supreme in Central Asia. They pressed upon the nation of Avars on the Altai borderland of the steppe, until twenty thousand of these, refusing to submit, moved westward. Justinian received the envoys of the fugitives in 558. They offered to serve him, and threatened, if unaccepted, to attack his Eastern Empire. Anxious only to keep them away from his own domains, and indifferent as to which should survive, he sent them to attack his German enemies. The Avars, conquering a place in Europe, established a powerful nation between the Danube and the Elbe, biding their time till with the other barbarians they could descend to the spoil of Rome.

After their rebellious vassals came the Turkish envoys, with richer presents to the Eastern Emperor Justin II, and more alarming menaces. The military alliance of the Turks was accepted and that of the Avars renounced. Kemarchus carried the ratification of Rome’s treaty to Mount Altai in Central Asia. For many years there was friendship between Mongol and Byzantine, mutual alliance and trade.

In 618 the great T’ang Dynasty arose in China, whose fame is suggested in the fact that the only Cantonese word for a Chinese nationality is “Man of T’ang.” The energetic Li-shi-min subdued the Manchurian Tunguses, and in 630 a great battle broke the Turkish power. China once again was supreme from Corea to the borderland of Persia. During the T’ang Dynasty, Kashmir in India, and Anam were captured by the Chinese.

There followed now a period of centuries when the breeding-place of the Mongol’s wolf-born hordes ran barren. In unchronicled obscurity the skin-clad herdsmen lived out their generation. To the feeble Ouighour confederacy fell the sceptre of the steppes. The old territory of the Hiung-nu khans and the Turkish Supreme King was split into little chief-governed principalities. Manchus and Tung-hus, rallying again, alternately ruled and harried China. Avars and Huns occupied their distant conquests. But in the vast stretch between, the tribes were in a bewitched sleep. The people and the qualities that made the old armies were there; the breed of shaggy ponies which they rode was there; iron reddened the hill-slopes, waiting to be hammered into spears in the Altai forges; China and Europe were as ripe for the spoiling. All that the Mongols needed was a leader.

In a quaint chronicle of the Middle Ages we read of how he came. When the French took Antioch from the Turks, one Can Can ruled over the northern region out of which the Turks had originally come. To the old kindred in this hour of need they sent for aid. Can Can was of the Cathayans, a people dwelling among the mountains. In one of the valley stretches lived the Tayman tribe, who were Nestorians. After Can Can’s death a shepherd, who had risen to power among the Taymans, made himself ruler as King John. King John had a brother named Vut. Beyond his pastures some ten or fifteen days’ journey was Mongol; the latter described as a poor and beggarly nation, without governor or law save their soothsayings so detestable to the minds of the Nestorians. Adjoining the Mongols were other poor people called Tatars. When King John died without an heir, Vut became greatly enriched. This aroused naturally the cupidity of his needy neighbors. Among the Mongols was a blacksmith named Cyngis. Ingratiating himself with the Tatars, he pointed out that the lack of a governor left both peoples subject to the oppression of the surrounding tribes. He got himself raised to the double chieftainship, secretly collected an army, and broke suddenly upon Vut. Cyngis sent the Tatars ahead now to open his way, and the people everywhere cried in dismay, “Lo, the Tatars come! the Tatars come!”

While the Turks sought aid of their kinsmen for the defense, the French King sent to King John’s reputedly Christian kingdom for help to his crusade. But Cyngis “Temugin,” the Man, had come. As Genghis Khan he was to open up the vastest empire the world has ever seen.

In 1200 the young Temugin, in a great battle near Urga, defeated Wang Khan, whom modern research, vindicating the basis of truth in the old Friar William de Rubruquis tales, has shown to have been a Tatar prince of the Nestorian Christian faith, King of the Kitai or Cathayans, in all probability the ruler known to the princes of Europe, through his letters to the Roman Pope, as the Christian potentate of the Orient, Prester John.

Wang Khan’s skull, encased in silver, graced the conqueror’s tent as a first trophy. In 1206, summoning all the Mongol chiefs, Temugin took the title of Genghis Khan, “The Greatest King.”

His armies were turned next to the reduction of his own people, the nomad tribes of the Central Asian plains. As one after another was defeated, its warriors were incorporated into his growing army. When all these myriad shepherds and soldiers were gathered in, he directed his march towards China.

The Great Wall was as paper to his host. Ninety cities were taken by storm, never one surrendering. For while to the kindred races which he had conquered, and which furnished further recruits for his armies, Genghis was most merciful and humane, to a foreign foe he was indeed the Wrath of God. Once he was bought off from the invasion; but again he returned to the prey. A way into Peking was opened by means of a mine dug under the walls to the centre of the city; through it a picked body of Mongols entered, marched to the gates, and opened them. The savage host rushed in to sack and slay. For sixty days Peking burned, and five desolated provinces of North China were added to the Mongol Empire.

Mohammed, Sultan of Carizme, who reigned from India to the Persian Gulf, was the next objective for the Mongols. In the field, by valor and numbers, the Khan’s troops defeated all the Sultan’s armies. The walled towns were besieged and taken, largely through the skill of Chinese engineers. The whole great Persian district was harried after the custom of the Mongols through four years; for hundreds of miles the country was so ruined that to this day the old populousness and prosperity have never been recovered.

The army of one of the Khan’s generals marched north into Turkestan, and subduing many Turkish peoples, entered beyond the Caucasus the territory of the Polovtisni, themselves Mongols of an earlier invasion. The conquest of Russia had begun. A Muscovite chronicle of those days illustrates the utter consternation and surprise of the inhabitants at this formidable and sudden incursion: “In those times there came upon us, for our sins, unknown nations. No one could tell their origin, whence they came, or what religion they professed. God alone knew who they were.” The people generally believed that the time had come foretold in Revelation when Satan should be let loose with the hosts of “Gog and Magog to gather them together in battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.” Indeed, in the old map of Tatary, by Hondius, the territories of these two fabled worthies are carefully outlined in what is now Manchuria.

Despite the Tatarean theory of the Mongols’ army, the Russian chivalry gathered to the aid of the Polovtisni, and collected an army by the lower Dnieper. Defiantly they killed the ambassadors whom the Mongols sent. The wrathful nomads advanced into the Crimea near the Sea of Azov. The two hosts met in the fatal battle of Kalka. It was the Crécy of Russian chivalry. Hardly a tenth of the army escaped. Ten thousand of the men of Kiev fell; of the princes, six, of the boyars, seventy, died on the field of battle. Matislaf the Bold alone made front, and he was treacherously betrayed and slain.

The way into southern Russia was now open; yet, after their victory in 1224, the Mongols disappeared as suddenly as they had come. The hordes had been diverted to complete the conquest of China. For thirteen years they were swallowed up by the steppe. The son of Genghis, “Oktai,” had succeeded the dead conqueror, and had appointed Batui General of the West.

Again there was heralded an invasion, this time by one of the outlying tribes of Khirgiz on the eastern border. The blow was aimed at the very heart of Russia. The old Slav ballads, or “bilinî,” tell how Oleg the Handsome fell at Riszan. The Tatars entered and burned Moscow in 1237. Onward into the north rolled their conquest, town after town falling. At the Cross of Ignatius, fifty miles from Novgorod, the torrent turned, and, sparing for the time being the ancient republic, swept to the south.

Against the cradle of the Russian race, the white-walled many-towered city of Kiev, Mangu, the grandson of Genghis, now marched. By multitudes the Tatars carried the walls. Fighting to the end, the last defenders went down in a ring around the tomb of the great Yaroslav.

Russia was prostrate at the feet of the nomads. Her princes became vassals, some to journey as far as the Amur to pay their homage to the Great Khan. Without the Tatar Emperor’s letters-patent, no prince could assume his inheritance. When the envoy presented the documents, the nobles had to prostrate themselves and accept them kneeling. Each Russian city gave its tribute, even the still uninvaded Novgorod. Every peasant in Muscovy paid his poll-tax. Indeed, the supremacy of the czars of Moscow, when the Tatar yoke was at length thrown off, was largely due to the wealth which the Romanov family had managed to acquire and to hold during their term as tax-farmers of the Great Khan. Russian troops, supplied as part of the tribute, engaged in the Tatar wars, getting in one instance of record their share of the booty—after the sack of Daghestan. They were drafted on account of their great size and valor into a body-guard for the Mongol Emperor in Peking, corresponding to the Swiss Guard of Louis XVI.

While the conquest of Russia was being consolidated into a permanent Mongol dominion destined to endure for nearly two hundred and fifty years, Batui led his army on into Poland and Bohemia. He took Buda-Pest and devastated the country far and wide. The most alarming accounts preceded him, which are still to be read in the monkish annals of the time. “Anno Domini, 1240, the detestable people of Satan, to wit, an infinite number of Tatars, broke forth like grasshoppers covering the face of the earth, spoiling the eastern confines with fire and sword, ruining cities, cutting up woods, rooting up vineyards, killing the people both of city and country. They are rather monsters than men; clothed with ox-hides, armed with iron plates, in stature thick and short, well-set, strong in body, in war invincible, in labor indefatigable, drinking the blood of their beasts for dainties.”

The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who undertook to gather the powers of Europe to meet the danger, wrote to Henry III of England:—

“A barbarous nation hath lately come called Tatars. We know not of what place or originall. A public destruction hath therefore followed the common desolation of Kingdomes and spoil of the fertile land which that wicked people hath passed through, not sparing sex, age or dignity, and hoping to extinguish the rest of mankind. The general destruction of the world and specially of Christendom calls for speedy help and succour.

“The men are of short stature but square and well-set, rough and courageous, have broad faces, frowning lookes, horrible cries agreeing to their hearts. They are incomparable archers.

“Heartily we adjure your majestie in behalfe of the common necessitie, that with instant care and prudent deliberation, you diligently prepare speedy aide of strong knights and other armed Men-at-arms.”

Throughout Europe the dread was universal. In 1248 Pope Innocent IV sent to the Tatars an embassy with money, begging them to cease their ravages. Failing, he summoned Christendom. Louis IX of France prepared a crusade. The fishermen of England could not sell their herrings because their usual customers, the Swedes, had remained at home to defend Scandinavia. Fortunately, the tide of western Mongol invasion had spent itself. After wasting the Danube district, the death of the Great Khan recalled Batui in 1245.

Syrian archives reveal the Mongols’ next appearance. In 1243 Hatthon, King of Armenia, sought Mangu Khan at Cambaluc (Peking), praying him to fight the Saracens and recover Jerusalem. Mangu sent his general, who speedily took Antioch, spoiled Aleppo, and sacked the city of Bagdad.

When the latter was stormed, Haloon, the Mongol general, ordered that the Caliph be brought alive into his presence. There had been found in the city a quite surprising booty in treasure and riches. Haloon asked why the Caliph had not used his wealth to levy mercenaries and defend his country. The Caliph replied that he had deemed his own people sufficient to withstand the Mongols. Then the Khan announced that the precious things which had been so cherished would be alone left to the miserable man, who was shut into a chamber with his pearls and gold for sustenance and perished in torments. There was no Caliph of Bagdad after him.

Thus, almost simultaneously, there were conquered by the Mongols, northern China, Syria, Russia, Hungary, and Poland. The stream of human blood that it cost is immeasurable.

Of the first conqueror, Genghis Khan, an Arab poem says:—

The lives of four and a half million people are reckoned as his toll on humanity. He had proposed to raze every city and destroy every farm of the five northern Chinese provinces, to make pasture for his nomads, and was only dissuaded by a minister, who ventured death in opposing him. It was he who ordered the million souls of Herat to slaughter. Batui, subduer of Russia, called “Sein Khan” (the Good King), is said after the Moscow massacre to have received 270,000 right ears. Following his fight with the Teutonic knights, near the Baltic, nine sacks of right ears were laid at his feet. “Vanquished, they ask no favor, and vanquishing, they show no compassion.” “The Mongols came, destroyed, burnt, slaughtered, plundered, and departed,” summarizes an Arab; and the unimaginative chronicles of the Chinese tell without comment of city after city taken, and their inhabitants put to the sword.

Utter ineradicable barbarity would, on the face of things, seem to have been the inmost nature of this people. Yet only a few years later, when Mangu Khan was ruling at Caracorum, the Court had become civilized. Forty-one years after Genghis Khan’s death, when the great Venetian traveler Marco Polo arrived at Kublai’s Court, the palaces and the organized statecraft at Peking had become a model of efficiency. The Mongols, not as a race, but in the sphere of their leaders, had become a real nation, not unworthy of its success.

It is interesting to reconstruct the Tatar capital and note its development in half a century. The Minorite monk, sent to beg aid from the supposedly Christian Mangu Khan for the delivery of Jerusalem, wrote a detailed description of the city, Caracorum. It had a circuit of three miles and in dearth of stone was rampiered strongly with earth. It had two main streets: one of the Saracens, where the fairs were held and where many merchants assembled, attracted by the traffic with the Court, and with the continuous procession of visitors and messengers; the second chief street was occupied by Chinese, who were artificers. The town had four gates. In the eastern section grain was sold, in the western sheep and goats, in the southern oxen and wagons, in the northern horses. Beyond were large palaces, the residences of the secretaries. The Khan himself had a great court beside the city rampart, enclosed not by an earth but a brick wall. Inside was a large palace, and a number of long buildings, in which were kept his treasures and stores of supplies.

Twice a year the Khan held high festival, with drinking-bouts whereat Master William, a captive taken in Hungary, served as chief butler, officiating at the tree which he had devised to pour forth intoxication. The ambassador of the Caliph of Bagdad came in state, carried upon a litter between two mules. Before the Khan, rich and poor in multitudes moved in procession, dancing, singing, clapping their hands. The guests brought gifts to the monarch. Those of the ambassador of the Turkish Soldan were especially rich, but for quaintness the Soldan of India scored. He sent eight leopards, and ten hare-hounds taught to sit upon the horses’ buttocks as do cheetahs. Manifestly it was no raw encampment of barbarians, this Caracorum of Mangu Khan.

If the Mongol’s Court could, in 1253, show this degree of “pomp and pageantry,” how much was it exceeded by that of Kublai the Magnificent, visited and told of by Marco Polo.

Kublai had established a second seat at Shang-tu, and had built not merely a court, but a city. His palace was of marble, its rooms aglitter with gold. Art had come, and the ceilings were painted with figures of men and beasts and birds. Trees of all varieties, and flowers, were executed with such exquisite skill as filled the traveler, familiar with the best products of Italy, with amaze and delight. Sixteen miles of park, enclosed by a wall, embosomed the palace. Rivers, brooks, and luxuriant meadows diversified the landscape, and white stags, fallow deer, gazelles, roebuck, rare squirrels, and every variety of attractive creature, lent gayety and charm.

The Khan rode weekly with his falcons. Sometimes a leopard sat a-croup behind him, and was loosened at the game that struck his fancy.

The tale runs on of the Khan’s silk-corded pavilion in the grove, gilt all over, and having lacquered, dragon-pedimented columns; of cave-born rivers running deep below the ground; of treasured gems and gold.

No wonder that Coleridge’s imagination was warmed to his dream poem.

London’s tortuous streets were to wait two hundred years for their first pavement, when Cambaluc’s were so straight and wide that one could see right along them from end to end, and from one gate to the other. In the Khan’s parks, the roads, being all paved and raised two cubits above the surface, never became muddy, nor did the rain lodge on them, but flowed off into the meadows.

In addition to civilization’s wealth and magnificence, the Mongols had developed a well-organized government. The Khan’s twelve barons exercised his delegated authority, as does a modern cabinet in behalf of the national executive. Cambaluc was policed by a thousand guards. The city wards were laid out, for taxation and government, in squares like a chess-board, and all these plots were assigned to different heads of families. The military roads were constantly kept up by a large force. The Emperor had ordered that all the highways should be planted with great trees a few yards apart. Even the roads through the unpeopled regions were thus planted, and it was the greatest possible solace to travelers.

The post, too, was as thoroughly organized as Napoleon’s. The messengers of the Emperor, bound in whatsoever direction from Cambaluc, found, every twenty-five miles of the way, a relay-station. Where the route lay through uninhabited deserts, the relay-posts were made houses of sojourn. At all stations express messengers were in readiness, as links in the system for speeding dispatches to provincial governors or generals: they were equipped with the fastest horses, which stood fresh and saddled, ready for an instant mount. The men wore girdles hung with bells; when within hearing of a station came the sound of jingling and the clatter of hoofs, the next man similarly provided would leap to his horse, take the delivered letter, and be off at full speed. The post covered a full two hundred miles by day, and an equal distance by night. Marco Polo states that, in the season, fruit gathered one morning at the capital, in the evening of the next day reached the Great Khan in Shang-tu—a distance of ten days’ journey.

Organized charity was instituted by the Mongol Khan for Cambaluc. A number of the poorest families became his pensioners, receiving regularly wheat and corn sufficient for the year. The nomad levied as tribute a tenth of all wool, silk, hemp, and cloth stuffs, and had therefrom clothing made for the indigent of his capital. He had a banking system, paper money, a wonderful military discipline, advanced astronomy; and he opened the Grand Canal to the commerce of the ages. When one recalls the epoch at which all this existed, and realizes that at that time wolves and robbers disputed mastery of the streets of Paris; that the Saracens were lords of half of Spain; that Wycliffe had not yet published his Bible, and that French was the language of the English law courts,—the advance attained is hardly short of marvelous.

In nothing whatsoever is the Mongol civilization more remarkable and contrasting than in its religious toleration—the last acquisition of a civilized state.

While the Christian King of France was engaged in earning the title of “Saint Louis” by extirpating a people of whose creed he disapproved, his envoy, the friar, came to a country which had attained complete religious liberty and toleration. There were “twelve kinds of idolatries of divers nations.” Two churches of Mahomet preached the law of the Koran, and one church of the Christians proclaimed the gospel of the Christ.

He found his own creed treated with especial courtesy, the Great Khan subscribing two thousand marks to rebuild a chapel on the behest of an Armenian monk. He relates that the privilege was accorded to the Church of trying any of their number accused of theft; that the Khan’s secretary and his favorite wife were Christians; that a chapel was allowed them within the court enclosure; and that the Nestorians inhabited fifteen cities of Cathay and had a bishopric there.

Marco Polo found the same indulgent tolerance of his religion. In Calaci, the principal city of Tangus, the inhabitants were “idolaters,” but there were three churches of Nestorian Christians. In the province of Tenduch, formerly the seat of Presbyter John, King George was a Christian and a priest, and most of the people were Christians. They paid tribute to the Great Khan.

Indeed, if the Mongolian attitude toward armed nations combating in Christ’s name has been implacable hostility, toward those of the faith who worshiped peacefully in their midst it has been uniformly tolerant, even favoring. The Nestorians, who brought their creed from Khorassan in the fourth century, had by 500 A.D. bishoprics in Merv, Herat, and Samarcand. The Perait Turkomans as a tribe accepted Christianity, and were unpunished. That the Faith was liberally treated in 781, under the Chinese, is self-acknowledged, on the ancient Nestorian stone of Si-an-fu. Headed by a cross, there is graven in Syrian and Chinese the Imperial decree of 638, ordering a church to be built: it gives an abstract of Christian doctrine, and an account of the “introduction and propagation of the noble law of Ta-t’sin in the Middle Kingdom.” In Si-an-fu at this time there were four thousand foreign families, cut off from return by a northern inroad of fanatical Tibetans into Turkestan.

Another monument of 830, found near the site of the old Ouighour capital on the Orkhon, and carved in Chinese, Turkish, and Ouighour characters, mentions the Western religion. A strange sect of Hebrews of unknown origin found as well an unpersecuted home at K’ai-feng-fu, where the Mosaic rites could be performed. To this day a remnant survives.

The same tolerance for alien faiths marked Tatar rule in Russia. The Khan of Sarai authorized a Greek church and a bishopric in his capital, exempting the monks from his poll-tax. Khan Usbek in 1313 confirmed the privileges of the Church, and punished with death sacrilege against it. Kublai Khan took part regularly in the Easter services, and allowed the Roman missionaries to establish a school in Shang-tu.

Indeed, reviewing the whole sweep of Asia’s religious history, one can hardly escape the deduction that if the greatest race of the greatest continent is idolatrous, it is not the fault of the Mongolians.

The Nestorian missionaries had an unsurpassed opportunity in the fourth century when their faith was new and burning, and the world was at peace. But stigmatized as heretics after a doctrinal dispute which had been settled by the logic of a street fight, in which Cyril’s Egyptian bravos defeated the Syrian henchmen of the Patriarch of Constantinople, their mother church was driven out of the Roman Empire into Persia, where, cut off from the support of the main trunk of fellow Christians, their organization withered away as a lopped branch. The chief congregations in Iran and Turan were overwhelmed by the Mohammedans, until at length there were left only the dwindling congregations in Mongolia, and such communities as those on the Malabar coast in India.

To-day one hears of interesting discoveries. Now it is of the old buried Christian strata among Turkomans of Samarcand, of doctrines preserved through the fury of Islam fanaticism by families that have secretly transmitted Christian worship through the centuries. Next it is of Nestorian monks in Asia Minor, startled at being able to read the characters of Ouighour inscriptions, relics of the writings which their predecessors carried to Mongolia. But for all practical purposes the Nestorian labors, once so promising, are as if they had never been.

Another supreme opportunity for Christianity came when Kublai Khan, in 1268, sent west by the Polo brothers for Roman missionaries to teach his people.

“The Great Khan, ... calling to him the two brethren, desired them for his love to go to the Pope of the Romans, to pray him to send an hundred wise men and learned in the Christian religion unto him, who might show his wise men that the faith of the Christians was to be preferred before all other sects, and was the only way of salvation.

“After this the Prince caused letters to the Pope to be written and gave them to the two brothers. Now the contents of the letters were as follows: He begged that the Pope would send as many as an hundred persons of our Christian faith; intelligent men acquainted with the seven arts, well qualified to prove by force of argument to idolaters and other kind of folk, that the law of Christ was best; and if they would prove this, he and all under him would be Christians.”

In the advance of Christianity the steps ahead have been made not so much by the conversion of the people as by the winning of their rulers,—Constantine, giving to Rome’s legions the standard of the Cross; Clovis; Ethelbert; Vladimir, who drove the whole population of Kiev naked into consecrated water of the Dnieper; Charlemagne, moving against the Saxons with his corps of priests. Where these spoke for a hundred thousand souls, Kublai spoke for a hundred million. He was able to deliver; it was the Pope who did not rise to the occasion. In all Christendom Gregory could find but two priests to go with the Khan’s messengers, and these turned back in the midst of the journey, alarmed by the prospect of its hardships. The Khan, who wished some religion, sent to Tibet, and received the Buddhist missionaries whom he requested. So China, Mongolia, Tibet, and eastern Turkestan are Buddhist to this day.

Yet once again the Christian opportunity came. The way which had been opened into China by Matteo Ricci had been followed by Jesuit missionaries, until at the beginning of the seventeenth century there were two churches in Peking, some three hundred thousand converts in the Empire, and the favor of the Emperor Hang was with the Western faith.

When Christianity was spreading with cumulative rapidity, the Dominicans and Franciscans came in and denounced the Jesuit workers for tolerating the ancestor-cult of the Chinese, and for permitting God to be called “Shang-ti.” In vain the Emperor Hang, appealed to by the Jesuits, declared that by “Shang-ti” the Chinese meant “Ruler of the Universe,” and that the Confucian rites were family ceremonies and not idolatry. The rival friars persuaded the Pope to proclaim “Tien-chu” the proper Chinese word for God, and to condemn all ancestral ceremonies. Thereupon, the Chinese Emperor, rebuffed and disgusted with all the wrangling fraternities, condemned the Christian religion and killed the friars, save those whom he wanted for the Imperial Observatory.

One cannot but recall an early commentary made by Mangu Khan upon the jarring Christian sects whose rival dogmas have prevented, and do to this day, the common progress.

“We Mongolians believe that there is but one God, through whom we live and die, and we have an upright heart towards Him. That as God hath given unto the hand fingers, so He hath given many ways to men. God hath given the Scriptures to you, and ye Christians keep them not. But He hath given us soothsayers, and we do that which they bid us, and we live in peace.”

For some years after Kublai Khan’s death, the Mongol Empire held its preëminence by inertia rather than by strength. Each of the khans had his kingdom. Presently the nations that had been subdued began to rise against the numerically small garrisons of Mongolia. In China, the young Bonze, Chu-Yuan-Chang, finally organized a band of Boxers, and succeeded in driving out the last degenerate Mongol khan from Peking. He united the old eighteen provinces and established the Ming Dynasty, the tombs and palaces of whose kings are still the most celebrated structures of China.

In Russia, Dimitri of the Don gathered one hundred and fifty thousand men and defeated the Mongols at Kulikovo.

If the old supreme monarch of the north had lost his sway, in the south the Mongol race was being lifted to its second period of empire under Tamerlane, the Iron Khan. His was the history of the first Mongol conqueror repeated. The ant that Timur watched during his exile, which fell back and returned sixty-nine times before it carried its grain of wheat to the top of the wall, was the symbol of his early career. Constant obscure tribal conflicts, unsuccessful at first, led finally to a gathering of the nomads into a terrible invading army. The Golden Horde was hurled against Dimitri, defeated him, and marched upon Moscow. It was sacked with the horrors of Genghis’ days, and all Russia was ravaged to the Don and the Sea of Azov. One of Tamerlane’s armies traversed the Pamir into India, and, by the capture of Delhi, opened the way for the Mogul Dynasty of his sons, which was to endure until the Indian Mutiny. His Indian army, returning, swept a swath of desolation through Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Georgia, and Armenia. Every city that was taken was sacked, and the event commemorated by a pyramid of skulls embedded in mortar. One hundred and twenty pyramids marked Tamerlane’s path through India alone. The Delhi pyramid was made from the skulls of one hundred thousand slain “with the sword of holy war.”

Bajazet, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks,—themselves sprung from a nomad Mongol tribe,—was threatened by Tamerlane on the west. In a great battle Bajazet was defeated.

Alhacen, Tamerlane’s Arabian secretary, relates that the conquered king was examined by his master.

“Wherefore dost thou use so great cruelty towards men? Dost thou not pardon sex or age?”

Bajazet might logically have responded with a “tu quoque,” but his position did not warrant it.

“I am appointed by God to punish tyrants,” continued Tamerlane. He had an iron cage made; and locked within it like a linnet, the unfortunate sultan was carried from place to place, because, in the Tatar’s naïvely quoted words, “It is necessary that he be made an exemplary punishment to all the cruel of the world, of the just wrath of God against them.”

The invasion of China was under way, in 1405, when Tamerlane died, leaving a renewed Mongol Empire, which stretched from the Hoang-ho to the Don, and from Siberia to India.

Here again the descendants of the savage conquerors rose to the requirements of their sovereignty and obeyed the peaceful and humane maxims that each of the two great and warlike and pitiless tyrants had bequeathed to his successors. They ruled with a fair degree of wisdom and a large measure of success. A descendant of Tamerlane was to build at Agra, in 1630, the most splendid monument the world has ever seen, the Taj-Mahal.

In the century after Tamerlane’s death the Hordes split up once more, Ivan the Great of Moscow, having consolidated many neighboring princedoms, with the nominal consent of his Tatar overlord, at length seized the opportunity to refuse the payment of tribute. The Mongol Khan had no longer the power to compel it at the sword’s point, and without a battle the Tatar supremacy was covertly relinquished. In 1480 the long servitude of Russia to the alien invader was ended. From this time the Mongol nomads appear hardly at all in history. They withdrew gradually to their Asian steppes, leaving in Turkey, in the Crimea, and in India, the kingdoms of their offshoot tribes. Russia and China still felt the raids of the horsemen, for the khans of the Golden Horde were yet not to be despised.

Fernan Hendez Pinto, the shipwrecked Portuguese of the generation after Vasco da Gama, was in China in 1542 when Tatars came down and besieged it. He saw “an emperor called Caran whose seigniorie confineth within the mountains of Gen Halidan, a nation which the naturals call Moscoby, of whom we saw some in this citie [of Tuymican], ruddie, of big stature, with shoes and furred clothes, having some Latin words, but seeming rather, for aught we observed, idolaters than Christians.

“To the ambassador of that Prince Caran, better entertainment was given than to all the rest. He brought with him one hundred and twenty men of his guard, with arrows and gilded quivers, all clothed in chamois-skins, murrie and green. After whom followed twelve men of high giantlike stature, leading great greyhounds, in chains and collars of silver.”

When Yermak cleared the way to Sibir, and opened the path that was to lead to the Pacific, the Mongols were pushed south. Russians still had Tatars all along their frontier, but these were pressed steadily back as the Slavic race advanced eastward. The Tatar domains were restricted soon to the steppe country and Mongolia.

After Yermak’s time the Mongol power sank. It fell further when the Manchus established their dynasty in Peking in 1644. So low had its estate become that even the old fighting instinct was gone,—all the passionate desire for independence that has been the Mongols’ birthright since the dawn of history. How had it vanished? Christianity had not come. Buddhism had come, and it was the tolling of the knell for freedom.

The sum of national energy and the heat of the new dispensation were diverted into theocracy. The meaning of life, its value and its duty, these basic ideas which determine the ultimate activities of every race, were revolutionized by the new faith. To the Pagan the world was good despite its evils; struggle against environment measured the worth of manhood and freedom was the supreme blessing. To the Buddhist, life was an evil in which the soul had become enmeshed. The path to release lay not in overcoming the environment, but in retreating from it within the citadel of the soul. Resignation, self-surrender, the yielding of this world to secure the other world beyond,—such were the forces which transformed the Mongols from the foremost warriors into the priest-ridden, subject, unaspiring people of to-day. The supreme problem in the autonomy of China, and in the subjugation of India, is involved in the point of view of Buddhism and its outgrowth in character.

In 1650 a son of the leader, Tu-she-tu Khan, was made chief of the Mongol kutukhtus, or cardinals, with the title of Cheptsun Damba. This monsignor began the Urga hierarchy of Gigins, or god-priests, which has continued until the present time, when the eighth Gigin reigns at the Holy City. As the powerful Tu-she-tu clan lost its vitality, Chinese influence made itself felt. This was directed in general toward the encouragement of the priesthood, whose celibacy and other-worldliness dovetailed with Chinese control.

The Mongol khans, becoming through the years more and more unwarlike, had grown tired of internecine feuds. They were at last won over by China to a nominal allegiance and the payment of a formal tribute, reciprocating which, imperial gifts of tenfold value served as artful bribes. Modestly, diplomatically, came King Stork, leaving to the local Daimios, seemingly undisturbed, their feudal sway. With the coming of the first Manchu governor began the present era of Mongolia.