Chapter X: Part 10

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.

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.

As time went on, the Chinese, more astute and cunning, took little by little from the careless hands of the nomad princes the reins of real political power. The native chiefs were wheedled into giving up many ancient rights over the vassals, as well as their general taxing powers. The celibate priests, who were draining the manhood of their idle but powerful hierarchy, were subsidized and directed by the interlopers. They preached to their confiding countrymen obedience and submission. In the Mongol Gigin of Urga, the Chinese raised up a native power superior to all the old feudal lords, whose armies melted away beneath the ecclesiastical dominion. When the Gigin became in turn too great a menace, they caused it to be decreed that each succeeding incarnated Buddha must come from Tibet, and that his main powers must be delegated to a “Council of Lamas.”

In the train of the Manchus came the Chinese traders, polite, supple, calling themselves friends of the Mongols, offering their alluring wares on undefined credit terms which tangled the unsuspicious natives in inextricable usury. Peking-brought gewgaws were paid for a hundred times over in the food and clothing which the natives kept giving to the compounding voracity of the debt.

Chinese coolies pressed up the river-valleys, begging land here, intruding themselves there; more followed, and ever more, until the best of the pastures were filched away, and the nomads, in order to exist, were forced to trek to the more distant and barren slopes. Deforesting transformed into deserts whole provinces. The once famed virtue of the Tatar women is forgotten, and every Chinaman has his “friend” whom he leaves behind when he returns to his native land. The big prosperous Mongol families, that early travelers noted, are no more. Two or three children are the most that one sees to a _yurta_, and the population, owing to lama celibacy and the decreased means of subsistence, is declining from year to year.

This is the people and this the land which sent horde after horde through centuries to conquer the world; where in half a dozen generations a little band of blacksmiths like the Turks could breed a nation that would dominate Asia. With narrowing means of subsistence, and aliens draining their small surplus capital, the Mongol race lies prostrate beneath the Yellow Empire. The grim Malthusian tenet that the world cannot give food for all its children falls short here of the grim actuality. The silent invasion of the Chinese has been as ruthless as was the march of Genghis Khan. The economic garroting of a race is what the world has seen in Mongolia.

No longer are there men to lead or men to fight. Obediently and submissively the once fierce, ranging warriors have yielded to the artfully-imposed yoke. The army of unmatched cavalry has become a memory, and a nation of fighters has become a race of timid herders, with little heart or brain. The sons of the old soldiers have learned to shave their heads and croon Tibetan prayers, and the fires of a people’s ambition are quenched in the creed that makes abstention from effort a cardinal virtue, and annihilation life’s supreme objective. What there was of virtue and of valor lies buried in distant graves. Ringed with the bones of slaughtered captives, rusted swords at their sides, they sleep well, those old forgotten warriors. In poverty and hardship, priest-ridden and debt-ridden, decimated and degenerated, their descendants eke out their sterile days. But there lingers yet among them a half-forgotten memory of the heroic past. The wandering chanter still sings in the twilight the old “Song of Tamerlane”--Tamerlane who will come again, they say, and lead the hordes once more to victory.

When the divine Timur dwelt in our tents,
The Mongol Nation was redoubtable and warlike.
Its least movements made the earth bend;
Its mens’ look froze with fear
The ten thousand people upon whom the sun shines.
O Divine Timur, will thy great soul soon return?
Return, return; we await thee, O Timur!

IX

CHINA

Destiny has bequeathed to his once subject-race the heritage of Genghis Khan, but whether its Manchu possessor can or cannot hold even his own birthright is to-day an enigma. The last few years have seen the gathering of the eagles, disputing the mastery of eastern Asia, where China stands against the world. Slav, Saxon, and Frank press in, upon the supine empire. Has this yellow race the manhood and the capacity to rally against them and retrieve its national integrity?

The cession of Formosa after the war of 1895 began the partition. China’s defenselessness was then visualized. The revelation of her easy defeat set every predatory nation on the alert. Watchful for an occasion, which two murdered missionaries supplied, Germany, by clumsy but successful unscrupulousness, seized Kiao-chow and two hundred miles of hinterland. Three weeks after the bludgeoned ratification of Admiral Diedrich’s grab, Russia procured the signature of the intimidated Emperor to the lease of Port Arthur. France demanded and secured the cession of Kwang-chow-wan, on the mainland opposite the island of Hainan. England acquired the lease of Wei-hai-wei, and continental territory opposite Hong-kong. Italy came to claim as its portion Sanmen Bay; but this at least China found courage to refuse.

Then followed a period when, backed each by its government, invading cohorts of promoters scooped in franchises and special privileges of every description. The latter part of 1899 saw foreigners pushing in from Manchuria on the north, where Russia with her so-termed railway guards held the strategic route, and from Yun-nan on the south, where France was constructing a similar road of conquest. It showed four European nations so established along the coast that only by courtesy of a foreign government could a Chinese vessel cast anchor in some of the principal ports of China. It saw a Belgian-French railway driving from Peking into the heart of the Empire at Hankow; an American line started north from Canton to the same objective; an English line controlling the territory between the main northern trade-centres, Niu-chwang and Tien-tsin; a French society in possession of a great south-country copper concession; Russians with the exclusive right to all the gold in two _eimucks_ of Mongolia; and an English syndicate deeded the best of the Chinese coal-fields.

The partition was thus far accomplished. The continental nations seemed to be ready for all that they could get. The strength of Great Britain’s traditional position, based upon maintaining the integrity of China, was shaken by her lease of Wei-hai-wei, although this lease was to run only so long as Russia should hold Port Arthur. England was on the point of recognizing openly “spheres of influence,” as is shown by the inferential claim to special British rights in the Yangtse region set forth in the official transactions of Sir Claude McDonald, and brought out under parliamentary interpellation, when a Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the Balfour Ministry spoke of “British rights” to the provinces adjoining the Yangtse River and Ho-nan and Che-kiang.

There was apparently good warrant for the general belief that in expectation of an impending partition a provisional understanding had been reached by the different chancelleries, regarding the share of each nation, England being allotted the mighty domain from the Yellow Sea to Burma and Afghanistan, including all Tibet, as well as six hundred and fifty thousand square miles in China proper. In general, from Shan-tung inland the valley of the Hoang-ho was destined for Germany; the district north of her Anamese possessions for France; all Mongolia and Manchuria for Russia; Corea and the province of Fokien on the mainland opposite Formosa, for Japan. Peking and the surrounding district, whose disposition was embarrassed by jealousy if not by scruples, was alone left for the Chinese.

At this critical juncture, when the day of dismemberment seemed indeed to have arrived, the United States came forward in behalf of the “open-door” doctrine, as a means of preserving the nationality and the integrity of China. In a circular letter to the Powers, our Secretary of State, Mr. John Hay, asked that adhesion be given in writing to three main propositions, appertaining to each country “within its respective sphere, of whatever influence.” These points were that no treaty port rights or other vested interests should be interfered with; that the Chinese tariff should be maintained; that no discriminating railway charges or harbor-dues should be imposed.

America’s might, thrown into the wavering balance, turned the scale. Great Britain gave ready adhesion. Though the responses of some of the other Powers were evasive, none was at this time willing to bear the onus of an adverse stand: each nation nominally accepted, and the movement toward partition was checked.

To most people Chinese matters seemed settled. The preservation of a nation had been combined with the guaranteeing of a great free market; the orgy of grabbing had ceased. Russia, assenting to the open door, had promised to evacuate Manchuria. The special concessions, though secured by stand-and-deliver methods, it was felt would bring economic improvements and would furnish to the Chinese a demonstration of the beneficent results of Western civilization.

It was recognized that there would be frictions: misunderstandings are inevitable when old ways are faced with new. The extra-territorial rights of foreigners and their converts, absolutely necessary to protect their liberties if not their lives, could not but create occasional unharmonious situations, in which the consuls would have to intervene. The severity of the judicial punishment meted out at times to rioting cities for harm done to the protégés of the Powers was to be deplored, each nation grieving at the atrocities the others had seen fit to perpetrate.

But periodic local and temporary disturbances had been going on from time immemorial. Did not the Chinese realize, we reasoned, that their old corrupt government had been given another undeserved chance to try and march with the rest of the race; that this world is not the place for graft-ridden relics from the fifth century B.C.? The least we felt was that, thanks to the bearer of the “Flowery Banner,” the Chinese had been given a last opportunity. A self-denying Occident had guaranteed the nation’s existence and had presumably earned its everlasting gratitude. “Let China get up and do something--let it redeem itself.”

A very small circle of Chinese shared this Western view, and realized at their true value the mights if not the rights. There existed among the literati at Peking and in the coast cities the rudiments of a foreign liberal party. Recognizing that Western methods must come, they had been in favor of accepting foreign improvements even at the cost of railway concessions and the violated dwellings of wind and water spirits. When this party won over the young Emperor, there began the period of foreign concessions. Reforms, too, covering every subject, from queue-cutting to postage-stamps, were inaugurated.

The summer of 1898 saw the important edict which ordered the abolition of the Wen-chang essays and the penmanship posts, with the Emperor’s personal comment that the examinations should test “a knowledge of ancient and modern history, and information in regard to the present state of affairs, with special reference to the governments and institutions of the countries of the five great continents, and their arts and sciences.” A Bureau of Mines was established, a patent-office, schools, a scheme of army reform.

The climaxing decree was the one abolishing sinecures. For the Emperor’s unreconstructed entourage this last was too much. Foreign aggression had embittered to the point of unreason mandarin and coolie alike. The _coup d’état_ planned by the Dowager Empress, and executed by the reactionaries, virtually dethroned the Emperor, exiled his advisers, and ended the foreign-encouragement reform.

Indeed it was not within human nature for it to endure. From the point of view of the party of the second part the aspect of the whole foreign relationship, even after the Hay Note, looked very ugly indeed. The fact of guaranteed integrity was obscured by the _laissez-faire_ of the already consummated grabs. The idea that gripped them was the humiliation of foreign occupation and foreign aggression. It was as if the Russians and the English had just seized rival reservations on Long Island and the Jersey coast, commanding New York City; as if the English had wrenched away Charleston; the Germans, Philadelphia; the French, New Orleans; and Cossacks were garrisoned in strategic points throughout New England. It was as if the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railway were manned and guarded by Slavs, the New York Central by Belgians, the Pennsylvania by Prussians; as if the Pittsburgh mines were handed over _en bloc_ to an English corporation, and the Russians had exclusive mining rights to the gold of Alaska’s Yukon region. It was as if America’s protective-tariff and contract-labor laws were repealed at foreign dictation, and a flood of foreign machine-made goods and undesired immigrants were poured into the unwilling country. It was as if yellow-robed Buddhist lamas were everywhere haranguing the Yankee farmers, telling them of the fraudulent nature of the Christian creed, and urging upon them an approved canine method for disposing of deceased ancestors, to replace their superstitious funeral services. It was as if astrologers, calling themselves engineers, were to dig up New York cemeteries in order to erect prayer-wheels; as if the apostates whom these yellow priests had drawn into their joss-houses were enabled to dodge part of the taxes, which consequently fell with added oppression on the rest of the people; and as if, when they did something which others would in the normal course of events get punished for, a lama came before the magistrate and got them off. As if the President and the Senate were given a weekly wigging by the diplomatic corps, and were periodically forced to deed away sections of the forest reserve and tracts of particularly desirable territory.

With such an aspect as this, which represents what in an undefined, bewildered way the Chinese saw and felt, it is no wonder that they considered the Confucian dictum obsolete: “Do not unto others, what you would not that they should do unto you”; and joined the patriotic harmonious Fists,--the Boxers.

Chinese sentiment was ungauged in the West because we had never put ourselves in their places. Unforeseen save by a few unheeded Cassandras, and unprepared for, there broke out the planless, leaderless Boxer Rebellion, grim fruitage of the national resentment. A few hastily gathered legation guards were alone available for defense. Spreading from the Shan-tung Province, where the severity of the Germans had goaded the usually peaceable people to madness, the I-Ho-Chuan besieged the legations at Peking. It was the infuriated and ill-directed rush of a patriotism real if futile,--a turning against the spoilers.

The movement was crushed in a torrent of blood, and with a devastation that for long will leave its mark upon the northern provinces. The closing year of the nineteenth century saw the Taku forts stormed, Tien-tsin, the Liverpool of the North, taken over and administered by a foreign board, Manchuria and Mongolia swarming with Cossacks, the Dowager Empress in flight, and her capital looted by foreign armies.

The coming of alien soldiery to the Forbidden Palace left its impress in the fiercer though more carefully smothered hatred of mandarins and people. It was still a blind resentment. They were injured, stung in all their pride and self-sufficiency, but dumb, bewildered, not knowing what to do, which way to turn. The liberals with their solution were gone; with them had passed the hopes of a progressive policy.

The people, perplexed, looked to their reëstablished reactionary rulers for guidance. But these officials, mostly of advanced age, and steeped in the ideas and ideals of the Confucian classics, were anxious mainly to close the ears and eyes of the masses to the unpleasant realities; to feather their own nests and finish off their lives in tranquility.

The Chinese Minister to the United States, Wu Ting Fang, gives a graphic picture of these Celestial Bourbons:--