Part 21
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:--
On every course he spurred his steed He raised the blood-dyed dust.
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.
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan A stately pleasure dome decree, Where Alph the sacred river ran, Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea.
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.