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APRIL, 1887.)
CHINGHIZ KHAN AND HIS ANCESTORS.
129
bravely, they would open their ranks to let him hecatomb which haunts the memory." In escape until the disorder of retreat made the Persia and its locality, he utterly laid prostrate work of destruction easy; and they wounded the the fairest and most flourishing provinces. horses and men from a distance by flights of “They came," said a fugitive poet from Bukarrows before they closed with them, so as to kara, reported by Juveni, "and they rifled, create a stampede." Their cavalry manceuvred they fired and they slew, trussed up their by signals and was very skilfully handled. loot and were gone." Najmu'd-dîn of Rai says They mercilessly killed cowards, and even put the same in most dismal phrases: " It was in to death a whole section if several men in the year 6178 (of the Hijra) that the army of the it tried to fly, and they similarly killed those reprobate Tâtárs (may God humiliate and who wilfully lagged behind when others were destroy them) conquered that country. Such charging ahead." Each man had several horses alarm, slaughter, slavery, destruction and 80 that when the enemy's cavalry showed burning as was caused by these accurged ones, signs of weariness, they secured remounts. was never seeni or heard of before in the land They would extend their lines quickly and thus of unbelievers or of Islam, and can only be envelop bodies of the enemy which had compared with what the Prophet announced imprudently advanced too far. Those who as signs of the Last Day, when he said : turned aside to loot were treated like cowards. | The Hour of Judgment shall not come until
In these expeditions the Mongols encamped ye shall have fought with the Turks, men small to rest and recruit their horses for a few months of eye and ruddy of countenance, whose noses every year. And, as the dradgery and the are flat and their faces like hide-covered shields.' dangerous work of war was chiefly done by the There shall be days of horror. And what meancaptives, their lordly masters easily kept up est thou by horror? said the Companions, and he their strength in the most distant expeditions. replied: 'Slaughter! Slaughter! This beheld During times of peace, the nation was annually the prophet in vision 600 years ago. And exercised in all the manoeuvres of war at the could there well be worse slaughter than there great winter hant, which, as we have seen, was in Rai where I, wretch that I am, was was organized like a military expedition, and born and bred, and where the whole popalaformed the best of all training.
tion of five hundred thousand souls was It is when we realize such facts as these in either butchered or carried into slavery,"31 detail, that we see how admirable a machine for It is curious to contrast these sombre phrases the purposes of war the Mongol army was. Pro- with the inflated rhetoric of the great traveller bably no army that ever existed could rival it and geographer, Ibn Yakut, in a letter preserved in the combined qualities of the hardihood of its by Ibn Khalikan, which he sent in the Hijra year men and horses, its complete independence of 617 from Mosul to the Vizier Jamalu'd-din. communications, in the excellence of its arma- It has been given at length by Von Hammers tare, its rigid discipline and loyalty, and in and in it the Persian art of concealing any its most skilful tactics and strategy. Certainly distinct statement of facts under a cloud of no army then existing could approach it in these turgid metaphors is carried out in an extraorrespects. And we must remember that a great dinary way, even when dealing with such a deal of its organization and character was terrible calamity. the actual work of Chinghiz himself, whose The progress of the Mongols was so destrucmilitary genius and resources can only be com- tive, that we are apt to overlook some of pared with those of Napoleon. No doubt, he the constructive elements which characterized used his power ruthlessly. It is awful to it and which very considerably affected the think that from 1211 to 1223, 18,470,000 hu- direction of subsequent human progress. In man beings are said to have perished in China the first placo, it was a great gain to secure and Tangut alone, at his hands-& fearful thnt, over the wide stretch of Asia, men
» Carpini, ed. D'Avezao, pp. 682-094. 15 d. p. 684.
** [If there figures mean anything, it is most probable that they represent the number of the transported, as well as of the killed. All through the narrative there is
more real evidence of Chinghiz Khan's making use of his captives than of his slaying them.-ED.)
30 id. p. 1230. 31 Von Hainmer, Gesch. der Gold. Horde, pp. 76-77; Yule's Marco Polo, Vol. I. p. 258.
