doms of Tartary; and he died in the fulness of years and glory, with his last breath exhorting and instructing his sons to achieve the conquest of the Chinese empire.

The haram of Zingis was composed of five hundred wives and concubines; and of his numerous progeny, four sons, illustrious by their birth and merit, exercised under their father the principal offices of peace and war. Toushi was his great huntsman, Zagatai* his judge, Octai his minister, and Tuli his general; and their names and actions are often conspicuous in the history of his conquests. Firmly united for their own and the public interest, the three brothers; and their families were content with dependent sceptres; and Octai, by general consent, was proclaimed great khan, or emperor of the Moguls and Tartars. He was succeeded by his son Gayuk, after whose death the empire devolved to his cousins Mangou and Cublai, the sons of Tuli, and the grandsons of Zingis. In the sixty-eight years of his four first successors, the Mogul subdued almost all Asia, and a large portion of Europe. Without confining myself to the order of time, without expatiating on the detail of events, I shall present a general picture of the progress of their arms; 1. In the East; 2. In the South; 3. In the West; and 4. In the North

I. Before the invasion of Zingis, China was divided into two empires or dynasties of the North and South ; and the difference of origin and interest was smoothed by a general conformity of laws, language, and national manners. The Northern empire, which had been dismembered by Zingis, was finally subdued seven years after his death. After the loss of Pekin, the emperor had fixed his residence at Kaifong, a city many leagues in circumference, and which contained, according to the Chinese annals, fourteen hundred thousand families of inhabitants and fugitives. He escaped

* Zagatai gave his name to his dominions of Maurenahar, or Transoxiana; and the Moguls of Hindostan, who emigrated from that country, are styled Zagatais by the Persians. This certain etymology, and the similar example of Uzbek, Nogai, &c. may warn us not absolutely to reject the derivations of a national from a personal name.

+ In Marco Polo, and the Oriental geographers, the names of Cathay and Mangi distinguish the northern and southern empires, which, from A.D. 1234 to 1279, were those of the great khan, and of the Chinese. The search of Cathay, after China had been found, excited and misled our navigators of the sixteenth century, in their attempts

from thence with only seven horsemen, and made his last stand in a third capital, till at length the hopeless monarch, protesting his innocence and accusing his fortune, ascended a funeral pile, and gave orders, that as soon as he had stabbed himself, the fire should be kindled by his attendants. The dynasty of the Song, the native and ancient sovereigns of the whole empire, survived about forty-five years the fall of the Northern usurpers; and the perfect conquest was reserved for the arms of Cublai. During this interval, the Moguls were often diverted by foreign wars; and, if the Chinese seldom dared to meet their victors in the field, their passive courage presented an endless succession of cities to storm and of millions to slaughter. In the attack and defence of places, the engines of antiquity and the Greek fire were alternately employed; the use of gunpowder in cannon and bombs appears as a familiar practice;* and the sieges were conducted by the Mahometans and

to discover the north-east passage. [See Bohn's Marco Polo, p. 163. 175. 294, &c.-ED.] I depend on the knowledge and fidelity of the Père Gaubil, who translates the Chinese text of the annals of the Moguls or Yuen (p. 71. 93. 153); but I am ignorant at what time these annals were composed and published. The two uncles of Marco Polo, who served as engineers at the siege of Siengyangfou (1. 2, c. 61, in Ramusio, tom. ii. See Gaubil, p. 155. 157), must have felt and related the effects of this destructive powder, and their silence is a weighty, and almost decisive, objection. I entertain a suspicion that the recent discovery was carried from Europe to China by the caravans of the fifteenth century, and falsely adopted as an old national discovery before the arrival of the Portuguese and Jesuits in the sixteenth. Yet the Père Gaubil affirms that the use of gunpowder has been known to the Chinese above sixteen hundred years. [While the father and uncle of Marco Polo were resident in the court of Cublai, they heard of the protracted siege of Sayanfu, and suggested that the place might be taken by means of balista or mangonels, such as were then used in the West. Under their directions, and with the assistance of some Nestorian Christians who were able mechanics, these machines were constructed, capable of projecting stones of three hundred pounds weight. They were conveyed to the army in ships, and on the fall of the first missile within the walls, the inhabitants were so terrified, that they immediately surrendered. (Travels of Marco Polo, p. 303, 304, edit. Bohn.) From this fact it is evident that the use of gunpowder was quite unknown among the Chinese at that period (A.D. 1273), nor is there any mention of it during the long intercourse of the Venetians travellers with that people. Marco himself was governor of Yangui, or Yangcheufu, three years, with twenty-four towns under its jurisdiction.-ED.]

Franks, who had been liberally invited into the service of Cublai. After passing the great river, the troops and artillery were conveyed along a series of canals, till they invested the royal residence of Hamcheu, or Quinsay, in the country of silk, the most delicious climate of China. The emperor, a defenceless youth, surrendered his person and sceptre; and before he was sent in exile into Tartary, he struck nine times the ground with his forehead, to adore in prayer or thanksgiving the mercy of the great khan. Yet the war (it was now styled a rebellion) was still maintained in the southern provinces from Hamcheu to Canton; and the obstinate remnant of independence and hostility was transported from the land to the sea. But when the fleet of the Song was surrounded and oppressed by a superior armament, their last champion leaped into the waves with his infant emperor in his arms. "It is more glorious," he cried, "to die a prince than to live a slave." A hundred thousand Chinese imitated his example; and the whole empire, from Tonkin to the great wall, submitted to the dominion of Cublai. His boundless ambition aspired to the conquest of Japan; his fleet was twice shipwrecked; and the lives of a hundred thousand Moguls and Chinese were sacrificed in the fruitless expedition. But the circumjacent kingdoms, Corea, Tonkin, Cochinchina, Pegu, Bengal, and Thibet, were reduced in different degrees of tribute and obedience by the effort or terror of his arms. He explored the Indian ocean with a fleet of a thousand ships; they sailed in sixty-eight days, most probably to the isle of Borneo, under the equinoctial line; and though they returned not without spoil or glory, the emperor was dissatisfied that the savage king had escaped from their hands.

II. The conquest of Hindostan by the Moguls was reserved in a later period for the house of Timour; but that of Iran, or Persia, was achieved by Holagou Khan, the grandson of Zingis, the brother and licutenant of the two successive emperors, Mangou and Cublai. I shall not enumerate the crowd of sultans, emirs, and atabeks, whom he trampled into dust; but the extirpation of the Assassins, or Ismaelians of Persia, may be considered as a service to mankind.

*

* All that can be known of the Assassins of Persia and Syria is poured from the copious, and even profuse, erudition of M. Falconet,

Among the hills to the south of the Caspian, these odious sectaries had reigned with impunity above a hundred and sixty years; and their prince, or imam, established his lieutenant to lead and govern the colony of mount Libanus, so famous and formidable in the history of the crusades.* With the fanaticism of the Koran, the Ismaelians had blended the Indian transmigration, and the visions of their own prophets; and it was their first duty to devote their souls and bodies in blind obedience to the vicar of God. The daggers of his missionaries were felt both in the East and West; the Christians and the Moslems enumerate, and perhaps multiply, the iliustrious victims that were sacrificed to the zeal, avarice, or resentment of "the old man,' as he was corruptly styled, "of the mountain." But these daggers, his only arms, were broken by the sword of Holagou, and not a vestige is left of the enemies of mankind, except the word assassin, which, in the most odious sense, has been adopted in the languages of Europe. The extinction of the Abbassides cannot be indifferent to the spectators of their greatness and decline. Since the fall of their Seljukian tyrants, the caliphs had recovered their lawful dominion of Bagdad and the Arabian Irak; but the city was distracted by theological factions, and the commander of the faithful was lost in a harem of seven hundred concubines. The invasion of the Moguls he encountered with feeble arms and haughty embassies. "On the divine decree," said the caliph Mostasem, "is founded the throne of the sons of Abbas; and their foes shall surely be destroyed in this world and in the next. Who is this Holagou that dares to arise against them? If he be desirous of peace, him instantly depart from the sacred territory; and perhaps may obtain from our clemency the pardon of his fault."

he

let

in two Mémoires read before the Academy of Inscriptions (tom. xvii. p. 127-170). [Wilken (Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, 2. 239, 240) has selected from Mirchond (Histoire des Ismaliens en Perse, 1812), from Von Hammer (Geschichte der Assassinen, 1818), and other moderns, the best information as to this atrocious combination. Their attempt on the life of Saladin may be seen in the same work (3. 166, 167) and on that of Edward of England (7. 604). Their extirpation in Persia by Hulaku, in 1256, is related there (7. 405).—ED.]

* The Ismaelians of Syria, forty thousand assassins, had acquired, or founded, ten castles in the hills above Tortosa. About the year 1280, they were extirpated by the Mamelukes.

This presumption was cherished by a perfidious vizir, who assured his master, that, even if the Barbarians had entered the city, the women and children, from the terraces, would be sufficient to overwhelm them with stones. But when Holagou touched the phantom, it instantly vanished into smoke. After a siege of two months, Bagdad was stormed and sacked by the Moguls; and their savage commander pronounced the death of the caliph Mostasem, the last of the temporal successors of Mahomet; whose noble kinsmen, of the race of Abbas, had reigned in Asia above five hundred years. Whatever might be the designs of the conqueror, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina* were protected by the Arabian desert; but the Moguls spread beyond the Tigris and Euphrates, pillaged Aleppo and Damascus, and threatened to join the Franks in the deliverance of Jerusalem. Egypt was lost, had she been defended only by her feeble offspring; but the Mamalukes had breathed in their infancy the keenness of a Scythian air; equal in valour, superior in discipline, they met the Moguls in many a well-fought field; and drove back the stream of hostility to the eastward of the Euphrates. But it overflowed, with resistless violence, the kingdoms of Armenia and Anatolia, of which the former was possessed by the Christians, and the latter by the Turks. The sultans of Iconium opposed some resistance to the Mogul arms, till Azzadin sought a refuge among the Greeks of Constantinople, and his feeble successors, the last of the Seljukian dynasty, were finally extirpated by the khans of Persia.

III. No sooner had Octai subverted the northern empire of China, than he resolved to visit with his arms the most remote countries of the West. Fifteen hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars were inscribed on the military roll; of these the great khan selected a third, which he intrusted to the command of his nephew Batou, the son of Tuli, who reigned over his father's conquests to the north of the Caspian sea. After a festival of forty days, Batou set forward on this great expedition; and such was the speed and ardour of his innumerable squadrons, that, in less

* As a proof of the ignorance of the Chinese in foreign transactions, I must observe, that some of their historians extend the conquests of Zingis himself to Medina, the country of Mahomet. (Gaubil, p. 42.)