CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER IV.THE GREAT TARTAR INVASIONS.From Jerusalem the reader must now transport himself beyond the Caspian Sea eastward if he would visit the early home of the Turks or Turcomans, or Turkmans, against which the first crusade was chiefly directed. TheirScythianempire of the sixth century was long since dissolved, the tribes of the nations, each a powerful and independent kingdom, were scattered over the deserts of Central Asia from China to the Oxus and the Danube. Hordes of these wandering shepherds were about to overspread the kingdoms of Persia, shake the thrones of China and India, and erect a solid and splendid empire from Samarcand to the confines of Greece and Egypt. Their conquests were not to cease till their victorious crescents had been planted on the walls of Constantinople, and unfurled to the breeze from the dome of the most magnificent Christian temple of the world—the dome of St. Sophia.One of the greatest of Turkish princes was Mahmood, who reigned over the eastern provinces of Persia one thousand years after the birth of Christ, (A. D. 997–1028.) For him the title of Sultan was first invented—a word that signifies Lord or Master. His kingdom stretched from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the mouth of the river Indus.In a series of twelve expeditions he waged a “Holy War” against the Gentoos of Hindustan. Never wasthe Mussulman hero dismayed by the inclemency of the seasons, the heights of the mountains, the breadths of the rivers, the barrenness of the desert, the multitudes of the enemy or the formidable array of their elephants of war. But we cannot spare even a page to describe his swift and terrible campaigns that brought the power and wealth of India to his feet. As in his old age he surveyed the vast millions of gold and silver, the countless spoils in pearls and diamonds and rubies that filled his treasure house, even his boundless avarice might have been satiated for a moment. As he reviewed the state of his regular military forces which comprised one hundred thousand foot, fifty-five thousand horse and thirteen hundred elephants of battle; he wept the instability of human greatness, his grief embittered by the hostile progress of the Turcomans whom as allies he had introduced into the heart of his Persian kingdom.He was admonished of his folly by the reply of the chief of the race of Seljuk of whom he had inquired what supply of men he could furnish for military service. “If you send,” replied Ishmael, “one of these arrows into our camp, fifty thousand of your servants will mount on horseback.”“And if that number should not be sufficient?” “Send this second arrow to the horde of Balik and you will find fifty thousand more.” “But,” said Mahmood, dissembling his anxiety, “if I should stand in need of the whole force of your kindred tribes?”“Despatch my bow,” was the last reply of Ishmael, “and as it is sent around, the summons will be obeyed by two hundred thousand horse.” Well might he fear, for the multitude of shepherds were converted into robbers; the bands of robbers only needed leaders tobecome an army of conquerors, that would not be ashamed or afraid to measure courage and power with the proudest sovereigns of Asia.Too long did his son and successor neglect the advice of his wise men. “Your enemies” they repeatedly urged “were in their origin a swarm of ants; they are now little snakes; and unless they be instantly crushed they will acquire the magnitude and venom of serpents.”When the day of battle came, the swarm of ants had grown into a horde of fierce and mighty warriors: and although “Massoud exhibited such acts of gigantic force and valor as never king had before displayed,” in the very hour when victory was about to perch on his banners in dismay, he beheld almost his whole army led by some generals of the Turkish race, “devouring the paths of flight.” This memorable day of Zendecan founded in Persia the dynasty of the Shepherd Kings.THE DYNASTY OF THE SELJUKIAN TURKS. (A. D. 1038–1152.)The victorious Turcomans, determined by lot, it is said, the selection of their King; and it fell to Togrul Beg, grandson of Seljuk, whose surname was immortalized in the greatness of his posterity. At the age of forty-five Togrul was invested with the title of Sultan in the royal city of Nishabur, and the sceptre of Irak passed from the Persian to the Turkish nation, that now and everywhere embraced with fervor and sincerity the religion of Mohammed.At the conquest of Mosul and Bagdad he received from the Caliph of the East the title of the lieutenant of the vicar of the prophet, his mystic veil was perfumedwith musk, two crowns were placed on his head; twoscimitarswere girded to his side as the symbol of a double reign over the East and the West.Soon myriads of Turkish horse went forth to conquest, overspreading the frontier of six hundred miles from Tauris to Erzeroum: and the blood of hundreds of thousands of Christians were a grateful sacrifice to the Arabian prophet.The first invasion of poor Armenia was with more than a hundred thousand men and twenty-four provinces were laid waste. The second was with two hundred thousand and they completed the utter ruin of those provinces, carrying into captivity all the inhabitants. In the year 1049 the armies of Togrul made a third invasion, besieging the city of Ardzan, which had a population of three hundred thousand souls, and contained eight hundred churches with schools and hospitals. Notwithstanding their utmost resistance it was taken and a hundred and forty thousand people were massacred, the remnant were carried into captivity and the city was burned. Many other cities were treated in the same way.At the same time there were in Armenia sixty thousand Greek Christian troops from Constantinople, ostensibly for the protection of Armenia, yet they did not take a single step to repel the invaders, preferring to see the Armenians slaughtered. Verily history repeated itself as the great “Christian” powers of Europe stood by witnessing the “reform of Armenia.”There is some small sense of satisfaction in the fact that before the Turks left Armenia they utterly defeated and dispersed these miserable “Defenders of the Faith.”Again in the year 1053 Togrul appeared in Armenia, destroying many cities, among them the capital city of Kars and then marched to the city of Manazguerd and laid siege to it.Basilius, the Chief of the city, was a man of great bravery and military skill. He was assisted in the defence of the city by a skillful Armenian priest who, by his inventions rendered the machines raised by the Persians against the walls entirely useless. Then they planned to undermine the fortifications; but this new design was revealed by a soldier who, smarting under somegrievousand unjust punishment, shot an arrow into the city to which was fastened a letter making known their plans. A countermine was dug, and the Persian miners being captured they were taken into the city and beheaded on the battlements.In his rage Togrul caused a huge wooden ballista to be erected,—so large that it required four hundred men to drag it before the walls. Basilius offered a great reward to the man who should succeed in burning it. There was a very ingenious Gaul in the city who, having composed an inflammable mixture, mounted a swift horse and proceeded to the Persian camp holding a letter in his outstretched hand. He went directly to the spot where the ballista stood and while the guards fancied him a messenger sent to the King he hurled the bottles filled with the combustible material into the machine and in the confusion that attended the burning of the ballista escaped back to the city.The siege was soon raised but other cities felt the fury of his baffled rage as leaving a trail of fire and blood behind him, Togrul returned to Persia. The native historian whom we are consulting, in simplestyet most telling pathos, writes: “Armenia, after this, enjoyed no repose.”“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.Upon the death of Togrul, (A. D. 1062) he was succeeded by his nephew, Alp Arslan who, in the following year came to wreak vengeance on unhappy Armenia. Everywhere he committed the most horrid devastation. Marching to the province of Ararat he laid siege to Ani the Magnificent, with its thousand and one churches.The city was lost by the cowardice of the Governor. A breach had been made in an unprotected part of the wall, but being narrow the citizens so valiantly defended it that they compelled the Sultan to retire; but the Governor, fancying that the Persians had succeeded in forcing an entrance, retired into the citadel. Thinking themselves deserted, a panic seized the Armenians and about fifty thousand of them fled into the country from the gates on the opposite side of the city.The retreat of the Persians was countermanded, the city was taken, orders being given to put every man to the sword. Human blood flowed in torrents. So great was the carnage that the streets were literally choked up with dead bodies, and the waters of the river Akhurian flowed in crimson tides. After his first fury was somewhat abated, Alp Arslan gave orders to seize the most wealthy citizens still alive and torture them to make them reveal places where their treasures were hidden. Then he pillaged the thousand and one churches, murdered all the priests found therein,—some were drowned, some he flayed alive, others died under tortures as excruciating as most fiendish imagination could conceive or invent. Finally, gathering his captives—men, women and children and his plunder, Alp Arslan returned to Persia.We must leave for awhile the bleeding Armenians whose kingdom had been annihilated, to the tender mercies of the wicked, to follow the path of rapine and horror as the torrents of unspeakable Turks flowed westward.They captured cities, put the inhabitants of Asia Minor to the sword and devastated the interior provinces to convert them into pasture lands for their nomad followers.Romanus, husband of the Greek Empress Eudocia took the field against them, and driving them back to the Euphrates, laid siege to the fortress of Manzikert or Malasgerd in Armenia midway between modern Erzeroum and Van. It was on the plain of Manzikert in 1071 after the capture of the fortress, that the East gained one of its greatest triumphs over the West. The Seljuk Sultan and the Roman Emperor met face to face. Romanus rejected in haughty pride the overtures of the Sultan that might have secured his retreat, perhaps peace—and prepared for battle. The Sultan with his own hands tied up the flowing tail of his horse, exchanged his bow and arrows for a mace andscimitar, clothed himself in a white garment, perfumed his body with musk, and declared that if he were vanquished, that spot should be the place of his burial. The Sultan himself had cast away his missile weapons, but his hopes of victory were in the arrows of his cavalry whose squadrons were loosely placed in the form of a crescent. Romanus led his army in a single and solid phalanx and pressed with vigor the artful and yielding resistance of the barbarians. Thusthe greater part of a hot summer’s day was spent in fruitless combat until fatigue compelled him to sound a return to camp. This was the fatal moment. The Turkish squadrons poured a cloud of arrows on the retreating army throwing them into confusion. The horns of the crescent closed in upon the rear of the Greeks.The destruction of the army was complete, the booty immense. Nobly did the Emperor with desperate courage maintain the fight till the close of the day. The imperial station was left naked on all sides to the victorious Turks. His body guard fell about him—his horse was slain and he himself was wounded, yet he stood as a lion at bay. He was captured, despoiled of his jewelled robes, bound and guarded all night on the field of the dead.In the morning the successor of Constantine in plebian habit was led into the presence of the Sultan and commanded to kiss the ground at the feet of the Lord of Asia. Reluctantly he obeyed, and Alp Arslan, starting from his throne, is said to have planted his foot on the neck of the Roman Emperor. No captive was ever more nobly treated than Romanus Diogenes; but no captivity ever wrought more lasting woe. Three years later the Seljuk was the recognized Lord of Asia Minor, and as such ventured to call himself the Lord of Rome. Following the defeat of the Romans the Turks marched into Syria and reduced Damascus by famine and the sword. Other cities in Palestine yielded until the victorious army passing southward stood on the banks of the Nile. The city of Cairo in desperate battle drove back the armies of the Sultan from the confines of Egypt; but in their retreat Jerusalem wasconquered and the house of Seljuk held the city for some twenty years.When Jerusalem fell before the arms of the Crusaders in 1099, the event was applauded as a deliverance in Europe, and was deplored as a calamity in Asia. The Syrian fugitives diffused everywhere their sorrow and consternation: Bagdad mourned in the dust; the Cadi of Damascus tore his beard in the Caliph’s presence; the Commanders of the faithful could only weep and vow vengeance on the head of the infidels who had defiled the Holy City.It is not our purpose to pursue the story of the crusades through all the years that made Jerusalem the prize of battle equally to Christian and Mohammedan. The life and exploits of Saladin and Richard, the lion-hearted are more thrilling than any romance. In a fanatic age, himself a fanatic, the genuine virtues of Saladin commanded the esteem of the Christians; the Emperor of Germany gloried in his friendship; the Greek Emperor solicited his alliance. Egypt, Syria, and Arabia were adorned by the royal foundations of hospitals, colleges and mosques; Cairo was fortified with a wall and citadel; but his works were consecrated to public use: nor did the Sultan indulge himself in a garden or palace of private luxury. The son of Job, a simple Kurd, Saladin was after the follies of a hot youth, a rigid Mussulman, his garment of coarse woolen, and water his only drink.But already had he won for himself the name of “The Scourge of God.” He had united all the forces and riches of Egypt and Asia under his sword and now (1187 A. D.) hastened with eighty thousand horse to the deliverance of Palestine.Three months after the battle of Tiberias (July 4 and 5, 1187) he appeared in arms before Jerusalem. When Saladin had partially completed its investment, he invited its principal inhabitants to meet him in council. When they were assembled he said: “I acknowledge that Jerusalem is the House of God. I do not wish to profane its sanctity by the shedding of blood. Abandon its walls and I will bestow on you a part of my treasures, and I will bestow on you as much land as you will be able to cultivate.” To which the Christians replied: “We cannot yield the city in which our God died: still less can we give it up to you.”This refusal enraged Saladin, and he swore to destroy the towers and ramparts of Jerusalem, and avenge the death of the Mussulmen slaughtered by the soldiers of Godfrey of Bouillon.The siege went on. Many and fierce the sorties from the gates of the city: but fight as they would the operations of the infidels could not be stayed. Despair set in, mingled with wailing, tears and prayers. Jerusalem was filled with sobs and groans.Deputies were sent out to propose a capitulation on the terms which he had first proposed. He sent them back without one word of hope. But one day as the deputies were pleading with unusual earnestness, Saladin pointed to his standards just placed upon the walls saying: “How can you ask me to grant conditions to a city which is already taken?” But he spoke too confidently, for at that moment they were stricken down again.As they went down Baleau the leader of the Christian forces spoke up: “You see Jerusalem is notwithout defenders. If we can obtain no mercy from you we will form a terrible resolution which will fill you with horror. These temples and palaces you are so anxious to conquer shall be destroyed. The riches which excite your cupidity shall be burned. We will destroy the mosque of Omar. We will pound into dust the stone of Jacob which is an object of your worship. We will stay our women and our children with our own hands that they shall never be your slaves. When the Holy City shall become a ruin—a vast tomb—we will march out of it armed with fire and sword and no one of us will ascend to Paradise without first consigning ten Mussulmen to hell. We shall thus obtain a glorious death and in dying shall call down on your head the maledictions of the God of Jerusalem.”Saladin was awed by this terrible speech: told the deputies to return the next day, when the terms of capitulation were signed in the tent of the great sultan, and Jerusalem passed again into the hands of the infidels, after having remained for eighty-eight years in thepossessionof the Christians. The Saracens boast that they retook the Holy City on Friday, the anniversary of the day on which Mohammed ascended from it into heaven: but the complete conquest of the Holy Land by the Turks was to be delayed yet an hundred years.Finally, however, before Mamelukes of Egypt, Jerusalem, and all the cities of the coast fell, and Acre became the last stronghold of the crusaders. Against it marched the Sultan Khali at the head of sixty thousand horse and one hundred and forty thousand foot.After a siege of thirty-three days the double wall was forced, the towers yielded to their engines, the Moslems stormed the city May 18, (A. D., 1291) carried it by the sword; and death or slavery was the lot of sixty thousand Christians. By the command of the Sultan the churches and the fortifications of the Latin cities were demolished, anda mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with theWorld’s Debate; and hundreds of thousands of warriors had found the “Paradise that lies under the shade of swords.”Again must we go to the “roof of the world” to behold the great eruption of Moguls and Tartars whose fierce and rapid and cruel conquests can only be compared with the destructive forces of nature in her wildest moods when she lets loose upon the earth fire and flood, earthquake, avalanche and volcano. From these spacious highlands the tides of emigration and the floods of war have repeatedly been poured. In the twelfth century the various tribes akin to Hun and Turk were united and led to conquest by the formidable Jenghiz Khan,i. e.the most great Khan or Emperor of the Moguls and Tartars.The code of laws which Jenghiz Khan dictated to his subjects was adapted to the preservation of domestic peace and the exercise of foreign hostility. These fiercest of men were mild and just in their intercourse with each other. Their primitive religion consisted in belief in the existence of one God, the author of all good, who fills by His presence the heavens and the earth which He has created by His power. The Tartars and Moguls were addicted to the idols of their various tribes yet there were among them convertsto the religions of Moses, Mohammed and of Christ.Soon all the kindred tribes from the great wall of China to the Volga owned his sway. He was the Khan of many millions of shepherds and warriors. The court of Pekin was astonished at receiving an embassy from a former vassal demanding the same tribute and obedience which he himself had but lately paid. On receiving a haughty answer innumerable squadrons soon pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall and ninety cities were laid low. On his second invasion he laid siege to Pekin. The famine was terrible. Men were chosen by lot to be slain for food. The Moguls mined under the capital and the conflagration of the city lasted for thirty days. China was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction and the five northern provinces were added to the empire of Jenghiz. On the west he touched the dominions of Mohammed, sultan of Carizme, who reigned from the Persian gulf to the borders of India and Turkestan.A caravan of three ambassadors and one hundred and fifty merchants having been put to death by the orders of Mohammed, after he had fasted and prayed for three nights on a mountain, Jenghiz appealed to the judgment of God and his own sword. Seven hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the banners of Jenghiz and his four sons. On the vast plains stretching north of the river Jaxartes (now Jihon) they encountered four hundred thousand soldiers of the Sultan. In the first battle it is said that one hundred and sixty thousand Carizmians were slain. The whole country then lay open to his fierce warriors and from the Caspian to the Indus, a tract of manyhundreds of miles, adorned with the habitations and labors of the most highly civilized races of Asia, was desolated so completely that five centuries have not repaired the ravages of four years. In all this Jenghiz Khan indulged and encouraged the fury of his army. He now yielded with reluctance to the murmurs of his weary but wealthy troops who sighed for the rest of their native lands.The return of Jenghiz was signalized by the overthrow of the few remaining independent kingdoms in Tartary: and he died in the fulness of years and glory, with his last breath exhorting his sons to achieve the conquest of the Chinese Empire. In the sixty-eight years of his first four successors the Mogul had subdued almost all Asia and a large portion of Europe.To the East China was subdued; to the South the conquest of Hindustan was reserved for the house of Timour or Tamerlane. While the hosts that went forth to conquer Russia, Poland, Hungary, etc., (1235–1245) inscribed on the military roll numbered fifteen hundred thousand men. Holagon the grandson of Jenghiz Khan had but to thrust at the phantom of power which the Caliphs of Bagdad enjoyed when it vanished like the mist. Bagdad after a siege of two brief months, was stormed and sacked and the savage Tartar pronounced the death of the Caliph Mostasem the last of the temporal successors of Mohammed whose noble kinsmen of the race of Abbas had reigned in Asia above five hundred years.Once more the torrents of woe flow in upon Armenia lying in the track of the Tartar armies westward. Ani is again besieged and soon a famine broke out within the walls and many of the citizens rushed outand gave themselves up to the mercy of their enemies. They were kindly received and a sufficient supply of food was given to them. Induced by this kindness more than half of the inhabitants were soon found in the camp of the Tartars. All at once the poor wretches were divided into small parties under the pretext of receiving better protection when the soldiers fell upon them and massacred every individual. Then the city was easily taken, destroyed by fire and the entire population put to the sword.Many cities suffered the desolations and horrors of Ani till the Khan ordered his chiefs on to other conquests. Then followed the infliction of a heavy capitation tax on all the remaining provinces—sixty pieces of money being demanded of every Armenian from the age of ten upwards. Those who were unable to pay this sum suffered intolerable tortures. Those who were possessed of lands lost them, their wives and children being seized and sold into slavery. Nothing ever equalled the horrors that now overspread this unhappy country, most of the inhabitants having no money to pay the tax and having no place to which to flee from their oppressors. Finally an embassy to Mangon Khan, a grandson of Jenghiz secured some little alleviation of their misery.Meantime there was growing up in Cilicia a subordinate kingdom of Armenia with Tarsus for its capital—and receiving favor from the Sultan of Egypt and the Khan of the Tartars. Leo III. resumed the kingly reins of his kingdom comprising all of Modern Anatolia. He repaired his cities; he erected public schools. He caused all the literary productions of the Armenians from the earliest ages to be recopied and distributedamong the convents of the kingdom. He reigned for twenty years ardently devoted to the service of God and died in the year 1289.His son, Hethum, was a prince who despised all worldly pomp and grandeur, seldom arrayed himself in royal apparel. He was greatly attached to the priests of his capital engaging daily with them in prayers and other religious exercises. He was particularly fond of the literary productions of the Fathers of the Church. His Bible was his daily companion. He caused a copy of it to be prepared expressly for himself, and at the end of it wrote some lines expressive of the high satisfaction and comfort he had derived from its frequent perusal.These paragraphs may show what has ever been the character of these people who are still being harried to death in the same provinces where they have lived and suffered for centuries.The decline of the spirit of conquest in the Mogul princes of Persia gave a free scope to the rise and progress of the Ottoman Empire which was soon to strike fear into the heart of the Emperor of Constantinople, and finally establish itself in Europe where it remains to this day a blot on Western civilization and a curse to all the people over which it rules.In 1360 we find the throne of the Ottoman Turks established at Adrianople almost within sight of Constantinople which after resisting for a thousand years the assaults of barbarians of the East and the West, now saw herself hemmed in, both in Europe and Asia, by the same hostile power and her Emperor following at his summons the court and camp of an Ottoman Prince.Bajazet surnamed Ilderim, or “The Lightning” whocame to the throne in 1389, and reigned fourteen years, fills a brilliant page in Ottoman history. He forced Constantinople to pay tribute and enjoyed the glory of being the first to found a royal Mosque in the glorious metropolis of the Eastern Church. He would speedily have forced its absolute surrender but that he was doomed to meet and be overthrown by a savage still more savage than himself—the name that caused all Europe and Asia to tremble with fear—the great, the terrible, the blood-thirsty Timour or Tamerlane. The family of Tamerlane was another branch of the imperial stem of Jenghiz Khan. He was born 1335 A. D., in a village that lies forty miles to the south of Samarcand, in a tribe of which his fathers were the hereditary chiefs. His birth was cast in a time of anarchy of bitter domestic feuds; when the Khans of Kashgar with an army of Calmucks harassed the Trans-oxian Kingdom. At the age of twenty-five he stood forth as the deliverer of his people: and in ten years he was invested with imperial command of the Zagatai. The rule over a fertile and populous land five hundred miles in extent either way, might have satisfied an ordinary man: but Timour aspired to the dominion of the world and before his death the crown of Zagatai was but one of twenty-seven which he had placed upon his head. He first swept Persia to the sea. The city of Ormuz bought its safety for an annual tribute of six hundred thousand pieces of gold. Bagdad was laid in ruins: and from the gulf to the mountains of Ararat the whole course of the Tigris and Euphrates was reduced to his obedience.The Khan of the Mogul Empire of the North swept down through the gates of Derbend entering Persia atthe head of ninety thousand horse, burned the palaces of Timour and compelled him amidst the snows of winter to contend for Samarcand and his life.After a mild expostulation, and a glorious victory he resolved on revenge. He invaded Tartary with armies so vast that thirteen miles stretched between his left and right wing. In a march of five months they rarely beheld the footsteps of man. At length the armies met in most fearful conflict. In the heat of conflict the treachery of the bearer of the imperial standard of Kipzak turned the tide of victory to the Zagatai, and Timour gave up the mingled hosts to the “wind of desolation.” The pursuit of a flying enemy led him into the provinces of Russia. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar, but he turned his armies southward, and on the banks of the Don received a deputation of the merchants of Egypt, Venice, Genoa, and Spain, who had built up the great commerce and the city of Azoph. They offered him gifts, admired his magnificence, trusted his word. But the peaceful visit of an Emir who explored the state of the magazines and harbors was speedily followed by the destructive presence of the Tartars, who reduced the city to ashes, pillaged the Moslems, and put every Christian to the sword or sold them into slavery. Having laid waste all the cities in Southern Russia, he returned to his capital at Samarcand.Samarcand, the center of his magnificence, the depot of all riches, arose and extended itself as by magic at each return of the world’s conqueror. It is said that Babylon, Bagdad, Persepolis, Palmyra, Baalbec and Damascus, were all cast into the shade by the mosques, palaces, gardens, and aqueducts which arose under thehands of most skillful artisans brought from every captured city to decorate the capital of a barbarian.Here amid the delights of his gardens, the love of his women, the conversation of his men of letters, the eulogies of poets, did Tamerlane refresh himself after the exploits of a five years’ campaign. But his loves, and delights of ease, did not make him forget that dream of all conquerors—India, and at this invasion he overran it from the Indus to Delhi, and from the Ocean to Thibet.As he proceeded on his march, his army became encumbered with the captives, and he ordered one hundred thousand of them slain in a single night. Remorse, pity, and indignation, seized even a Tartar army, but Tamerlane answered it only by the conquest and massacre of Delhi, that great and magnificent city which had flourished for three hundred years, under Mohammedan kings; the ruins of which are still seen for miles on every side of the modern city. The blood of the slain, crimsoned the waters of the Sacred Ganges for many, many miles on its course to the sea. The recital of his cruelties could not be believed, were they not recorded in the history of all the nations he conquered. The treasures were of incalculable value, and every soldier received one hundred slaves for his share and every Tartar camp follower, twenty.It was while camping on the bank of the Ganges that Tamerlane received from his couriers the tidings of the disturbances on the confines of Anatolia and Georgia, of the revolt of the Christians and the ambitious designs of Bajazet. He returned to Samarcand having accomplished in a twelve month the ten years’ campaign of Alexander the Great.After enjoying a few months tranquillity he proclaimed a seven years’ campaign against the countries of Western Asia. To the soldiers who had served in the Indian wars he granted their choice of home or camp, but the troops of all the kingdoms and provinces of Persia were commanded to assemble at Ispahan and await the imperial standard.With an army of eight hundred thousand fighting men and a multitude of slaves so vast that it is said that they dried up the earth as they marched, he started westward. Words are lacking to describe the desolation and cruelty that attended his march and the sacking of cities.Multitudes of Christians suffered untold horrors rather than deny their faith. The cities that attempted to resist behind their walls were effaced from the earth, and upon their sites towers were erected, the walls of which were composed of living men cemented in the lime.Pursuing the people of Georgia into the gorges of the Caucasus Mountains he inflicted upon them great slaughter, and discovering many caverns into which men, women and children had fled for safety he walled up their entrances and left them to perish.Ispahan in a moment of folly having rebelled and massacred three thousand Tartars he sent back one hundred thousand soldiers with orders that every man should bring him a head on penalty of losing his own. Ispahan in consternation and horror paid this price for its revolt, and on the site of a dismantled city, a mason-wrought pyramid of a hundred thousand heads told the awful story of their doom.Proceeding westward Tamerlane laid siege to Siwas,or Sebaste, modern Siwas, a city having walls of prodigious thickness and a broad moat filled with running water.It contained one hundred and fifty thousand souls, was defended by intrepid Armenians and seemed able to defy every assault of a Tartar multitude without battering artillery to shake the walls.But Tamerlane hesitated only a moment. Prodigal of men, he set thousands at work to undermine the rocks that formed the foundation of the walls. He emptied the moats by cutting deeper channels for the river. He cut down adjacent forests to prop up the mines dug under the towers of the walls; and then setting on fire this underground forest he saw the rocks give way engulfing walls, houses and defenders in the ruins. Twenty days and nights sufficed to open enormous breaches for his soldiers. The city naked and trembling before him awaited its fate. Timour promised to spare the lives of Mohammedans and Christians, and to be content with servitude. But scarcely had he entered it before he inundated it with the blood of its defenders. By his ferocity he made all the East and the West to shudder, and the world to stand aghast at its recital after more than four centuries have covered its horrors. Four thousand Ottomans were buried alive up to the neck and thus left to perish. Countless Christians were bound in couples and cast into trenches which were then covered with boards and earth, and over them the Tartars pitched their tents and took fiendish delight in their moanings. Women were bound by the hair of their heads to the tails of wild young horses and thus dragged to death. The young children were bound hand and foot and laid togetheron an open plain and trampled to death by his cavalry. With the exception of the male children fit for slavery, and the young girls reserved for the harem the entire population was destroyed.The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.THE NEW GRAND VIZIER. TASHIN BEY. THE SHEIK-AL-ISLAM.Do you shudder at even this cool recital? Far worse horrors are still being endured by the Christian people of Armenia this very day on ground that is dyed with the blood of a thousand years ofmartyrdom. And still Christian Europe is unmoved; and the Turk, drunk with the blood of his victims still is propped up on his throne by the arms that should drive him back to the deserts of Tartary: and Christian America contents itself with trying by their relief funds to keep alive the starving remnants of this harried race whose cry to Christendom is “either kill us or in God’s name redeem us.”As Timour took up again his march from desolated Siwas he dragged with cords along the stones of the road at the heels of his horse the head of the governor of Siwas, one of the sons of Bajazet who was then besieging Constantinople. Aroused by the danger that threatened him yet with a deep sadness caused by the death of his son which settled upon him as if in presentiment of his own fate, Bajazet raised the siege, called all his forces together to meet the bloody Conqueror of the East. Aleppo and Damascus meanwhile fell with terrible slaughter, and now on the plains not far from Siwas, Timour awaited the coming of Bajazet.Tamerlane hesitated to engage in this battle with a race of his own blood, the champions of the faith of the Prophet, who were fighting like himself for the triumph of Islam. His envoys were disgracefully treated and his messages were answered with most haughty and insultingletters. “Thy armies” said Bajazet “are innumerable; be they so: but what are the arrows of the flying Tartars against thescimitarsand battle-axes of my firm and invincible Janizaries?”Then this deadly insult: “If I fly from thy arms, may my wives be thrice divorced from my bed; but, if thou hast not courage to meet me in the field mayest thou again receive thy wives after they have thrice endured the embraces of a stranger.”On receiving this letter Timour exclaimed: “Decidedly the son of Mourad is mad.”All day long Timour reviewed his troops of horse as the squadrons passed before him, then turning again to the envoy he made a last offer of peace, “Say to your master that he can still, in accepting my just and moderate conditions, spare the fatal dissension of two servants of the one God, and torrents of human blood to Asia.”Bajazetwas both deaf and blind to the advice of his viziers, his generals and the last message of Tamerlane; and was determined to meet with his army of four hundred thousand men which he had seen gathering for two years, the well trained army of eight hundred thousand men who were formed in nine divisions under the four sons and five favored grandsons of the greatest warrior of the world.Never had the sun of Asia shed its light upon so vast a multitude of warriors gathered for so deadly a conflict on July 28, 1402. Timour brought forward only five hundred thousand of his choicest troops, horse and foot, yet they covered the amphitheater of the hills which arose behind the river in the basin to the north of Angora. He had most carefully chosen his field ofbattle and his position, and facing him was the vast army of Bajazet. All historians, Arabian, Greek and Ottoman agree that over one million men faced each other on this listed field. The situation added to the tragic majesty of the spectacle. The plain, the gradation of the hills and the rugged mountains of Angora made a circus worthy of these imperial gladiators of the two Asias.Timour was stationed on an elevated mound whence he could survey the whole field, while behind him and out of sight from the enemy were forty divisions of select cavalry ready at the critical moment to strengthen any wavering squadrons, or to be hurled on the field to consummate the victory.The first dawn of day upon the mountains of Angora illuminated those two armies in order of battle but motionless. But when the sun had dispelled the shade from the foot of the hills, at the rolling of drums of the Turks with the cry of Allah Achbar the army of Bajazet was put in motion. Soon the battle was on. The first charge of one wing of Tartar cavalry was broken by the immobility of the Servian mountaineers.Then in the rapid advance of his enemy’s troops Timour discovered that the Asiatic army of Bajazet had passed the level of the Ottoman lines in order to turn the hills he was occupying, and down he rushed with his reserve cavalry of forty divisions and cut in two the army of Europe and the army of Asia, throwing one of them back upon the hills and the other into the marshes on the left, slaughtering at the center some thousands of Ottomans and forcing Bajazet himself to fly with ten thousand of his Janizaries to a rising ground detached from the mountains whose steep declivities checked the impetuosity of the Tartar cavalry.Timour watched with admiration the retreat of the Servian mountaineers, as in dense columns clad in splendid mail, unshaken by repeated charges of his cavalry they forced their way obliquely through that multitude until they gained the foothills in safety. “These miserable peasants are lions,” he exclaimed in admiration of their discipline and their courage.Two sons of Bajazet were rescued by the bold daring of their devoted followers, but in vain did they urge the Emperor himself to seek refuge in flight. Satisfied that his sons were safe he continued to fight for glory or for death behind the rampart of his Janizaries who formed about him a circular wall with their dead bodies. Never was fidelity more desperate, more unswerving. Stolen from Christian homes at an early age and trained as warriors they knew no other home than the camp. They knew that their birth among the Christians and their name of renegades left them no other choice than that of death upon the field of battle or the field of torture. The retreat of the ten thousand after the death of Cyrus did not equal the glorious suicide of these ten thousand Janizaries about the body of their Sultan.As the shades of evening began to fall, Bajazet, his youngest son and a few faithful generals and a group of horsemen sought to escape into the woody recesses of the mountains. A troop of Tartar cavalry closely pursued the trail of the retreating Sultan. The day was about to break and they hoped to escape by swimming a swift stream, the horsemen they heard galloping behind them when a loose shoe caused the horse of the Sultan to stumble. None would save themselvesand leave their master, and as one of the Beys was presenting his own horse to him, a Tartar emir with a body of horsemen surrounded the small group of the Ottomans and they were prisoners.Before night had fallen the vanquished Sultan in chains, covered with dust and blood, was brought before Timour, who was seated in the shade of his tent playing chess with the son whom he called the hope of his race. The vanquisher showed neither pride nor insolence before the vanquished. He remembered the maxims and respected the finger of God even in the enemy overthrown at his feet. He remembered that he was of the same race, that they were fighting for the same faith and he almost begged his pardon for the victory. He ordered him to be released, begged him to take a seat with him at the front of his tent on the same rank with himself and promised him that his honor and his life would suffer no risk during his brief captivity. Three imperial tents were prepared for his use; and after the discovery of his attempt to escape, Bajazet was chained at night in one of those iron-barred litters wherein women in their journeys are carried between two mules. Hence the popular, but erroneous, tradition throughout the East about the iron cage wherein Timour had shut up the Sultan intending to exhibit him in his palace at Samarcand. Timour permitted Bajazet to send for his favorite wife, the Princess of Servia—exacting from her at a banquet, but only for a single time, that she should hand him a cup of Cyprus wine the sole vengeance he wished to take for the insulting letter wherein Bajazet had threatened him with taking off his harem.Bajazet died about nine months after his defeat atAntioch in Pisidia—his empire, lost in a single battle—having fallen into fragments before his eyes.Turning away from the possible conquest of Europe Tamerlane soon returned to Samarcand and in 1405 set out for the final and complete conquest of China. Neither age nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timour, he passed the Sihon on the ice, marched hundreds of miles, then pitching his last camp, died of fever and fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water April 1, 1405. The conqueror of Asia had reigned for thirty-five years and died at the age of seventy-one, having shed more blood and caused more misery than any other human being ever born on the earth.

CHAPTER IV.THE GREAT TARTAR INVASIONS.From Jerusalem the reader must now transport himself beyond the Caspian Sea eastward if he would visit the early home of the Turks or Turcomans, or Turkmans, against which the first crusade was chiefly directed. TheirScythianempire of the sixth century was long since dissolved, the tribes of the nations, each a powerful and independent kingdom, were scattered over the deserts of Central Asia from China to the Oxus and the Danube. Hordes of these wandering shepherds were about to overspread the kingdoms of Persia, shake the thrones of China and India, and erect a solid and splendid empire from Samarcand to the confines of Greece and Egypt. Their conquests were not to cease till their victorious crescents had been planted on the walls of Constantinople, and unfurled to the breeze from the dome of the most magnificent Christian temple of the world—the dome of St. Sophia.One of the greatest of Turkish princes was Mahmood, who reigned over the eastern provinces of Persia one thousand years after the birth of Christ, (A. D. 997–1028.) For him the title of Sultan was first invented—a word that signifies Lord or Master. His kingdom stretched from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the mouth of the river Indus.In a series of twelve expeditions he waged a “Holy War” against the Gentoos of Hindustan. Never wasthe Mussulman hero dismayed by the inclemency of the seasons, the heights of the mountains, the breadths of the rivers, the barrenness of the desert, the multitudes of the enemy or the formidable array of their elephants of war. But we cannot spare even a page to describe his swift and terrible campaigns that brought the power and wealth of India to his feet. As in his old age he surveyed the vast millions of gold and silver, the countless spoils in pearls and diamonds and rubies that filled his treasure house, even his boundless avarice might have been satiated for a moment. As he reviewed the state of his regular military forces which comprised one hundred thousand foot, fifty-five thousand horse and thirteen hundred elephants of battle; he wept the instability of human greatness, his grief embittered by the hostile progress of the Turcomans whom as allies he had introduced into the heart of his Persian kingdom.He was admonished of his folly by the reply of the chief of the race of Seljuk of whom he had inquired what supply of men he could furnish for military service. “If you send,” replied Ishmael, “one of these arrows into our camp, fifty thousand of your servants will mount on horseback.”“And if that number should not be sufficient?” “Send this second arrow to the horde of Balik and you will find fifty thousand more.” “But,” said Mahmood, dissembling his anxiety, “if I should stand in need of the whole force of your kindred tribes?”“Despatch my bow,” was the last reply of Ishmael, “and as it is sent around, the summons will be obeyed by two hundred thousand horse.” Well might he fear, for the multitude of shepherds were converted into robbers; the bands of robbers only needed leaders tobecome an army of conquerors, that would not be ashamed or afraid to measure courage and power with the proudest sovereigns of Asia.Too long did his son and successor neglect the advice of his wise men. “Your enemies” they repeatedly urged “were in their origin a swarm of ants; they are now little snakes; and unless they be instantly crushed they will acquire the magnitude and venom of serpents.”When the day of battle came, the swarm of ants had grown into a horde of fierce and mighty warriors: and although “Massoud exhibited such acts of gigantic force and valor as never king had before displayed,” in the very hour when victory was about to perch on his banners in dismay, he beheld almost his whole army led by some generals of the Turkish race, “devouring the paths of flight.” This memorable day of Zendecan founded in Persia the dynasty of the Shepherd Kings.THE DYNASTY OF THE SELJUKIAN TURKS. (A. D. 1038–1152.)The victorious Turcomans, determined by lot, it is said, the selection of their King; and it fell to Togrul Beg, grandson of Seljuk, whose surname was immortalized in the greatness of his posterity. At the age of forty-five Togrul was invested with the title of Sultan in the royal city of Nishabur, and the sceptre of Irak passed from the Persian to the Turkish nation, that now and everywhere embraced with fervor and sincerity the religion of Mohammed.At the conquest of Mosul and Bagdad he received from the Caliph of the East the title of the lieutenant of the vicar of the prophet, his mystic veil was perfumedwith musk, two crowns were placed on his head; twoscimitarswere girded to his side as the symbol of a double reign over the East and the West.Soon myriads of Turkish horse went forth to conquest, overspreading the frontier of six hundred miles from Tauris to Erzeroum: and the blood of hundreds of thousands of Christians were a grateful sacrifice to the Arabian prophet.The first invasion of poor Armenia was with more than a hundred thousand men and twenty-four provinces were laid waste. The second was with two hundred thousand and they completed the utter ruin of those provinces, carrying into captivity all the inhabitants. In the year 1049 the armies of Togrul made a third invasion, besieging the city of Ardzan, which had a population of three hundred thousand souls, and contained eight hundred churches with schools and hospitals. Notwithstanding their utmost resistance it was taken and a hundred and forty thousand people were massacred, the remnant were carried into captivity and the city was burned. Many other cities were treated in the same way.At the same time there were in Armenia sixty thousand Greek Christian troops from Constantinople, ostensibly for the protection of Armenia, yet they did not take a single step to repel the invaders, preferring to see the Armenians slaughtered. Verily history repeated itself as the great “Christian” powers of Europe stood by witnessing the “reform of Armenia.”There is some small sense of satisfaction in the fact that before the Turks left Armenia they utterly defeated and dispersed these miserable “Defenders of the Faith.”Again in the year 1053 Togrul appeared in Armenia, destroying many cities, among them the capital city of Kars and then marched to the city of Manazguerd and laid siege to it.Basilius, the Chief of the city, was a man of great bravery and military skill. He was assisted in the defence of the city by a skillful Armenian priest who, by his inventions rendered the machines raised by the Persians against the walls entirely useless. Then they planned to undermine the fortifications; but this new design was revealed by a soldier who, smarting under somegrievousand unjust punishment, shot an arrow into the city to which was fastened a letter making known their plans. A countermine was dug, and the Persian miners being captured they were taken into the city and beheaded on the battlements.In his rage Togrul caused a huge wooden ballista to be erected,—so large that it required four hundred men to drag it before the walls. Basilius offered a great reward to the man who should succeed in burning it. There was a very ingenious Gaul in the city who, having composed an inflammable mixture, mounted a swift horse and proceeded to the Persian camp holding a letter in his outstretched hand. He went directly to the spot where the ballista stood and while the guards fancied him a messenger sent to the King he hurled the bottles filled with the combustible material into the machine and in the confusion that attended the burning of the ballista escaped back to the city.The siege was soon raised but other cities felt the fury of his baffled rage as leaving a trail of fire and blood behind him, Togrul returned to Persia. The native historian whom we are consulting, in simplestyet most telling pathos, writes: “Armenia, after this, enjoyed no repose.”“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.Upon the death of Togrul, (A. D. 1062) he was succeeded by his nephew, Alp Arslan who, in the following year came to wreak vengeance on unhappy Armenia. Everywhere he committed the most horrid devastation. Marching to the province of Ararat he laid siege to Ani the Magnificent, with its thousand and one churches.The city was lost by the cowardice of the Governor. A breach had been made in an unprotected part of the wall, but being narrow the citizens so valiantly defended it that they compelled the Sultan to retire; but the Governor, fancying that the Persians had succeeded in forcing an entrance, retired into the citadel. Thinking themselves deserted, a panic seized the Armenians and about fifty thousand of them fled into the country from the gates on the opposite side of the city.The retreat of the Persians was countermanded, the city was taken, orders being given to put every man to the sword. Human blood flowed in torrents. So great was the carnage that the streets were literally choked up with dead bodies, and the waters of the river Akhurian flowed in crimson tides. After his first fury was somewhat abated, Alp Arslan gave orders to seize the most wealthy citizens still alive and torture them to make them reveal places where their treasures were hidden. Then he pillaged the thousand and one churches, murdered all the priests found therein,—some were drowned, some he flayed alive, others died under tortures as excruciating as most fiendish imagination could conceive or invent. Finally, gathering his captives—men, women and children and his plunder, Alp Arslan returned to Persia.We must leave for awhile the bleeding Armenians whose kingdom had been annihilated, to the tender mercies of the wicked, to follow the path of rapine and horror as the torrents of unspeakable Turks flowed westward.They captured cities, put the inhabitants of Asia Minor to the sword and devastated the interior provinces to convert them into pasture lands for their nomad followers.Romanus, husband of the Greek Empress Eudocia took the field against them, and driving them back to the Euphrates, laid siege to the fortress of Manzikert or Malasgerd in Armenia midway between modern Erzeroum and Van. It was on the plain of Manzikert in 1071 after the capture of the fortress, that the East gained one of its greatest triumphs over the West. The Seljuk Sultan and the Roman Emperor met face to face. Romanus rejected in haughty pride the overtures of the Sultan that might have secured his retreat, perhaps peace—and prepared for battle. The Sultan with his own hands tied up the flowing tail of his horse, exchanged his bow and arrows for a mace andscimitar, clothed himself in a white garment, perfumed his body with musk, and declared that if he were vanquished, that spot should be the place of his burial. The Sultan himself had cast away his missile weapons, but his hopes of victory were in the arrows of his cavalry whose squadrons were loosely placed in the form of a crescent. Romanus led his army in a single and solid phalanx and pressed with vigor the artful and yielding resistance of the barbarians. Thusthe greater part of a hot summer’s day was spent in fruitless combat until fatigue compelled him to sound a return to camp. This was the fatal moment. The Turkish squadrons poured a cloud of arrows on the retreating army throwing them into confusion. The horns of the crescent closed in upon the rear of the Greeks.The destruction of the army was complete, the booty immense. Nobly did the Emperor with desperate courage maintain the fight till the close of the day. The imperial station was left naked on all sides to the victorious Turks. His body guard fell about him—his horse was slain and he himself was wounded, yet he stood as a lion at bay. He was captured, despoiled of his jewelled robes, bound and guarded all night on the field of the dead.In the morning the successor of Constantine in plebian habit was led into the presence of the Sultan and commanded to kiss the ground at the feet of the Lord of Asia. Reluctantly he obeyed, and Alp Arslan, starting from his throne, is said to have planted his foot on the neck of the Roman Emperor. No captive was ever more nobly treated than Romanus Diogenes; but no captivity ever wrought more lasting woe. Three years later the Seljuk was the recognized Lord of Asia Minor, and as such ventured to call himself the Lord of Rome. Following the defeat of the Romans the Turks marched into Syria and reduced Damascus by famine and the sword. Other cities in Palestine yielded until the victorious army passing southward stood on the banks of the Nile. The city of Cairo in desperate battle drove back the armies of the Sultan from the confines of Egypt; but in their retreat Jerusalem wasconquered and the house of Seljuk held the city for some twenty years.When Jerusalem fell before the arms of the Crusaders in 1099, the event was applauded as a deliverance in Europe, and was deplored as a calamity in Asia. The Syrian fugitives diffused everywhere their sorrow and consternation: Bagdad mourned in the dust; the Cadi of Damascus tore his beard in the Caliph’s presence; the Commanders of the faithful could only weep and vow vengeance on the head of the infidels who had defiled the Holy City.It is not our purpose to pursue the story of the crusades through all the years that made Jerusalem the prize of battle equally to Christian and Mohammedan. The life and exploits of Saladin and Richard, the lion-hearted are more thrilling than any romance. In a fanatic age, himself a fanatic, the genuine virtues of Saladin commanded the esteem of the Christians; the Emperor of Germany gloried in his friendship; the Greek Emperor solicited his alliance. Egypt, Syria, and Arabia were adorned by the royal foundations of hospitals, colleges and mosques; Cairo was fortified with a wall and citadel; but his works were consecrated to public use: nor did the Sultan indulge himself in a garden or palace of private luxury. The son of Job, a simple Kurd, Saladin was after the follies of a hot youth, a rigid Mussulman, his garment of coarse woolen, and water his only drink.But already had he won for himself the name of “The Scourge of God.” He had united all the forces and riches of Egypt and Asia under his sword and now (1187 A. D.) hastened with eighty thousand horse to the deliverance of Palestine.Three months after the battle of Tiberias (July 4 and 5, 1187) he appeared in arms before Jerusalem. When Saladin had partially completed its investment, he invited its principal inhabitants to meet him in council. When they were assembled he said: “I acknowledge that Jerusalem is the House of God. I do not wish to profane its sanctity by the shedding of blood. Abandon its walls and I will bestow on you a part of my treasures, and I will bestow on you as much land as you will be able to cultivate.” To which the Christians replied: “We cannot yield the city in which our God died: still less can we give it up to you.”This refusal enraged Saladin, and he swore to destroy the towers and ramparts of Jerusalem, and avenge the death of the Mussulmen slaughtered by the soldiers of Godfrey of Bouillon.The siege went on. Many and fierce the sorties from the gates of the city: but fight as they would the operations of the infidels could not be stayed. Despair set in, mingled with wailing, tears and prayers. Jerusalem was filled with sobs and groans.Deputies were sent out to propose a capitulation on the terms which he had first proposed. He sent them back without one word of hope. But one day as the deputies were pleading with unusual earnestness, Saladin pointed to his standards just placed upon the walls saying: “How can you ask me to grant conditions to a city which is already taken?” But he spoke too confidently, for at that moment they were stricken down again.As they went down Baleau the leader of the Christian forces spoke up: “You see Jerusalem is notwithout defenders. If we can obtain no mercy from you we will form a terrible resolution which will fill you with horror. These temples and palaces you are so anxious to conquer shall be destroyed. The riches which excite your cupidity shall be burned. We will destroy the mosque of Omar. We will pound into dust the stone of Jacob which is an object of your worship. We will stay our women and our children with our own hands that they shall never be your slaves. When the Holy City shall become a ruin—a vast tomb—we will march out of it armed with fire and sword and no one of us will ascend to Paradise without first consigning ten Mussulmen to hell. We shall thus obtain a glorious death and in dying shall call down on your head the maledictions of the God of Jerusalem.”Saladin was awed by this terrible speech: told the deputies to return the next day, when the terms of capitulation were signed in the tent of the great sultan, and Jerusalem passed again into the hands of the infidels, after having remained for eighty-eight years in thepossessionof the Christians. The Saracens boast that they retook the Holy City on Friday, the anniversary of the day on which Mohammed ascended from it into heaven: but the complete conquest of the Holy Land by the Turks was to be delayed yet an hundred years.Finally, however, before Mamelukes of Egypt, Jerusalem, and all the cities of the coast fell, and Acre became the last stronghold of the crusaders. Against it marched the Sultan Khali at the head of sixty thousand horse and one hundred and forty thousand foot.After a siege of thirty-three days the double wall was forced, the towers yielded to their engines, the Moslems stormed the city May 18, (A. D., 1291) carried it by the sword; and death or slavery was the lot of sixty thousand Christians. By the command of the Sultan the churches and the fortifications of the Latin cities were demolished, anda mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with theWorld’s Debate; and hundreds of thousands of warriors had found the “Paradise that lies under the shade of swords.”Again must we go to the “roof of the world” to behold the great eruption of Moguls and Tartars whose fierce and rapid and cruel conquests can only be compared with the destructive forces of nature in her wildest moods when she lets loose upon the earth fire and flood, earthquake, avalanche and volcano. From these spacious highlands the tides of emigration and the floods of war have repeatedly been poured. In the twelfth century the various tribes akin to Hun and Turk were united and led to conquest by the formidable Jenghiz Khan,i. e.the most great Khan or Emperor of the Moguls and Tartars.The code of laws which Jenghiz Khan dictated to his subjects was adapted to the preservation of domestic peace and the exercise of foreign hostility. These fiercest of men were mild and just in their intercourse with each other. Their primitive religion consisted in belief in the existence of one God, the author of all good, who fills by His presence the heavens and the earth which He has created by His power. The Tartars and Moguls were addicted to the idols of their various tribes yet there were among them convertsto the religions of Moses, Mohammed and of Christ.Soon all the kindred tribes from the great wall of China to the Volga owned his sway. He was the Khan of many millions of shepherds and warriors. The court of Pekin was astonished at receiving an embassy from a former vassal demanding the same tribute and obedience which he himself had but lately paid. On receiving a haughty answer innumerable squadrons soon pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall and ninety cities were laid low. On his second invasion he laid siege to Pekin. The famine was terrible. Men were chosen by lot to be slain for food. The Moguls mined under the capital and the conflagration of the city lasted for thirty days. China was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction and the five northern provinces were added to the empire of Jenghiz. On the west he touched the dominions of Mohammed, sultan of Carizme, who reigned from the Persian gulf to the borders of India and Turkestan.A caravan of three ambassadors and one hundred and fifty merchants having been put to death by the orders of Mohammed, after he had fasted and prayed for three nights on a mountain, Jenghiz appealed to the judgment of God and his own sword. Seven hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the banners of Jenghiz and his four sons. On the vast plains stretching north of the river Jaxartes (now Jihon) they encountered four hundred thousand soldiers of the Sultan. In the first battle it is said that one hundred and sixty thousand Carizmians were slain. The whole country then lay open to his fierce warriors and from the Caspian to the Indus, a tract of manyhundreds of miles, adorned with the habitations and labors of the most highly civilized races of Asia, was desolated so completely that five centuries have not repaired the ravages of four years. In all this Jenghiz Khan indulged and encouraged the fury of his army. He now yielded with reluctance to the murmurs of his weary but wealthy troops who sighed for the rest of their native lands.The return of Jenghiz was signalized by the overthrow of the few remaining independent kingdoms in Tartary: and he died in the fulness of years and glory, with his last breath exhorting his sons to achieve the conquest of the Chinese Empire. In the sixty-eight years of his first four successors the Mogul had subdued almost all Asia and a large portion of Europe.To the East China was subdued; to the South the conquest of Hindustan was reserved for the house of Timour or Tamerlane. While the hosts that went forth to conquer Russia, Poland, Hungary, etc., (1235–1245) inscribed on the military roll numbered fifteen hundred thousand men. Holagon the grandson of Jenghiz Khan had but to thrust at the phantom of power which the Caliphs of Bagdad enjoyed when it vanished like the mist. Bagdad after a siege of two brief months, was stormed and sacked and the savage Tartar pronounced the death of the Caliph Mostasem the last of the temporal successors of Mohammed whose noble kinsmen of the race of Abbas had reigned in Asia above five hundred years.Once more the torrents of woe flow in upon Armenia lying in the track of the Tartar armies westward. Ani is again besieged and soon a famine broke out within the walls and many of the citizens rushed outand gave themselves up to the mercy of their enemies. They were kindly received and a sufficient supply of food was given to them. Induced by this kindness more than half of the inhabitants were soon found in the camp of the Tartars. All at once the poor wretches were divided into small parties under the pretext of receiving better protection when the soldiers fell upon them and massacred every individual. Then the city was easily taken, destroyed by fire and the entire population put to the sword.Many cities suffered the desolations and horrors of Ani till the Khan ordered his chiefs on to other conquests. Then followed the infliction of a heavy capitation tax on all the remaining provinces—sixty pieces of money being demanded of every Armenian from the age of ten upwards. Those who were unable to pay this sum suffered intolerable tortures. Those who were possessed of lands lost them, their wives and children being seized and sold into slavery. Nothing ever equalled the horrors that now overspread this unhappy country, most of the inhabitants having no money to pay the tax and having no place to which to flee from their oppressors. Finally an embassy to Mangon Khan, a grandson of Jenghiz secured some little alleviation of their misery.Meantime there was growing up in Cilicia a subordinate kingdom of Armenia with Tarsus for its capital—and receiving favor from the Sultan of Egypt and the Khan of the Tartars. Leo III. resumed the kingly reins of his kingdom comprising all of Modern Anatolia. He repaired his cities; he erected public schools. He caused all the literary productions of the Armenians from the earliest ages to be recopied and distributedamong the convents of the kingdom. He reigned for twenty years ardently devoted to the service of God and died in the year 1289.His son, Hethum, was a prince who despised all worldly pomp and grandeur, seldom arrayed himself in royal apparel. He was greatly attached to the priests of his capital engaging daily with them in prayers and other religious exercises. He was particularly fond of the literary productions of the Fathers of the Church. His Bible was his daily companion. He caused a copy of it to be prepared expressly for himself, and at the end of it wrote some lines expressive of the high satisfaction and comfort he had derived from its frequent perusal.These paragraphs may show what has ever been the character of these people who are still being harried to death in the same provinces where they have lived and suffered for centuries.The decline of the spirit of conquest in the Mogul princes of Persia gave a free scope to the rise and progress of the Ottoman Empire which was soon to strike fear into the heart of the Emperor of Constantinople, and finally establish itself in Europe where it remains to this day a blot on Western civilization and a curse to all the people over which it rules.In 1360 we find the throne of the Ottoman Turks established at Adrianople almost within sight of Constantinople which after resisting for a thousand years the assaults of barbarians of the East and the West, now saw herself hemmed in, both in Europe and Asia, by the same hostile power and her Emperor following at his summons the court and camp of an Ottoman Prince.Bajazet surnamed Ilderim, or “The Lightning” whocame to the throne in 1389, and reigned fourteen years, fills a brilliant page in Ottoman history. He forced Constantinople to pay tribute and enjoyed the glory of being the first to found a royal Mosque in the glorious metropolis of the Eastern Church. He would speedily have forced its absolute surrender but that he was doomed to meet and be overthrown by a savage still more savage than himself—the name that caused all Europe and Asia to tremble with fear—the great, the terrible, the blood-thirsty Timour or Tamerlane. The family of Tamerlane was another branch of the imperial stem of Jenghiz Khan. He was born 1335 A. D., in a village that lies forty miles to the south of Samarcand, in a tribe of which his fathers were the hereditary chiefs. His birth was cast in a time of anarchy of bitter domestic feuds; when the Khans of Kashgar with an army of Calmucks harassed the Trans-oxian Kingdom. At the age of twenty-five he stood forth as the deliverer of his people: and in ten years he was invested with imperial command of the Zagatai. The rule over a fertile and populous land five hundred miles in extent either way, might have satisfied an ordinary man: but Timour aspired to the dominion of the world and before his death the crown of Zagatai was but one of twenty-seven which he had placed upon his head. He first swept Persia to the sea. The city of Ormuz bought its safety for an annual tribute of six hundred thousand pieces of gold. Bagdad was laid in ruins: and from the gulf to the mountains of Ararat the whole course of the Tigris and Euphrates was reduced to his obedience.The Khan of the Mogul Empire of the North swept down through the gates of Derbend entering Persia atthe head of ninety thousand horse, burned the palaces of Timour and compelled him amidst the snows of winter to contend for Samarcand and his life.After a mild expostulation, and a glorious victory he resolved on revenge. He invaded Tartary with armies so vast that thirteen miles stretched between his left and right wing. In a march of five months they rarely beheld the footsteps of man. At length the armies met in most fearful conflict. In the heat of conflict the treachery of the bearer of the imperial standard of Kipzak turned the tide of victory to the Zagatai, and Timour gave up the mingled hosts to the “wind of desolation.” The pursuit of a flying enemy led him into the provinces of Russia. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar, but he turned his armies southward, and on the banks of the Don received a deputation of the merchants of Egypt, Venice, Genoa, and Spain, who had built up the great commerce and the city of Azoph. They offered him gifts, admired his magnificence, trusted his word. But the peaceful visit of an Emir who explored the state of the magazines and harbors was speedily followed by the destructive presence of the Tartars, who reduced the city to ashes, pillaged the Moslems, and put every Christian to the sword or sold them into slavery. Having laid waste all the cities in Southern Russia, he returned to his capital at Samarcand.Samarcand, the center of his magnificence, the depot of all riches, arose and extended itself as by magic at each return of the world’s conqueror. It is said that Babylon, Bagdad, Persepolis, Palmyra, Baalbec and Damascus, were all cast into the shade by the mosques, palaces, gardens, and aqueducts which arose under thehands of most skillful artisans brought from every captured city to decorate the capital of a barbarian.Here amid the delights of his gardens, the love of his women, the conversation of his men of letters, the eulogies of poets, did Tamerlane refresh himself after the exploits of a five years’ campaign. But his loves, and delights of ease, did not make him forget that dream of all conquerors—India, and at this invasion he overran it from the Indus to Delhi, and from the Ocean to Thibet.As he proceeded on his march, his army became encumbered with the captives, and he ordered one hundred thousand of them slain in a single night. Remorse, pity, and indignation, seized even a Tartar army, but Tamerlane answered it only by the conquest and massacre of Delhi, that great and magnificent city which had flourished for three hundred years, under Mohammedan kings; the ruins of which are still seen for miles on every side of the modern city. The blood of the slain, crimsoned the waters of the Sacred Ganges for many, many miles on its course to the sea. The recital of his cruelties could not be believed, were they not recorded in the history of all the nations he conquered. The treasures were of incalculable value, and every soldier received one hundred slaves for his share and every Tartar camp follower, twenty.It was while camping on the bank of the Ganges that Tamerlane received from his couriers the tidings of the disturbances on the confines of Anatolia and Georgia, of the revolt of the Christians and the ambitious designs of Bajazet. He returned to Samarcand having accomplished in a twelve month the ten years’ campaign of Alexander the Great.After enjoying a few months tranquillity he proclaimed a seven years’ campaign against the countries of Western Asia. To the soldiers who had served in the Indian wars he granted their choice of home or camp, but the troops of all the kingdoms and provinces of Persia were commanded to assemble at Ispahan and await the imperial standard.With an army of eight hundred thousand fighting men and a multitude of slaves so vast that it is said that they dried up the earth as they marched, he started westward. Words are lacking to describe the desolation and cruelty that attended his march and the sacking of cities.Multitudes of Christians suffered untold horrors rather than deny their faith. The cities that attempted to resist behind their walls were effaced from the earth, and upon their sites towers were erected, the walls of which were composed of living men cemented in the lime.Pursuing the people of Georgia into the gorges of the Caucasus Mountains he inflicted upon them great slaughter, and discovering many caverns into which men, women and children had fled for safety he walled up their entrances and left them to perish.Ispahan in a moment of folly having rebelled and massacred three thousand Tartars he sent back one hundred thousand soldiers with orders that every man should bring him a head on penalty of losing his own. Ispahan in consternation and horror paid this price for its revolt, and on the site of a dismantled city, a mason-wrought pyramid of a hundred thousand heads told the awful story of their doom.Proceeding westward Tamerlane laid siege to Siwas,or Sebaste, modern Siwas, a city having walls of prodigious thickness and a broad moat filled with running water.It contained one hundred and fifty thousand souls, was defended by intrepid Armenians and seemed able to defy every assault of a Tartar multitude without battering artillery to shake the walls.But Tamerlane hesitated only a moment. Prodigal of men, he set thousands at work to undermine the rocks that formed the foundation of the walls. He emptied the moats by cutting deeper channels for the river. He cut down adjacent forests to prop up the mines dug under the towers of the walls; and then setting on fire this underground forest he saw the rocks give way engulfing walls, houses and defenders in the ruins. Twenty days and nights sufficed to open enormous breaches for his soldiers. The city naked and trembling before him awaited its fate. Timour promised to spare the lives of Mohammedans and Christians, and to be content with servitude. But scarcely had he entered it before he inundated it with the blood of its defenders. By his ferocity he made all the East and the West to shudder, and the world to stand aghast at its recital after more than four centuries have covered its horrors. Four thousand Ottomans were buried alive up to the neck and thus left to perish. Countless Christians were bound in couples and cast into trenches which were then covered with boards and earth, and over them the Tartars pitched their tents and took fiendish delight in their moanings. Women were bound by the hair of their heads to the tails of wild young horses and thus dragged to death. The young children were bound hand and foot and laid togetheron an open plain and trampled to death by his cavalry. With the exception of the male children fit for slavery, and the young girls reserved for the harem the entire population was destroyed.The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.THE NEW GRAND VIZIER. TASHIN BEY. THE SHEIK-AL-ISLAM.Do you shudder at even this cool recital? Far worse horrors are still being endured by the Christian people of Armenia this very day on ground that is dyed with the blood of a thousand years ofmartyrdom. And still Christian Europe is unmoved; and the Turk, drunk with the blood of his victims still is propped up on his throne by the arms that should drive him back to the deserts of Tartary: and Christian America contents itself with trying by their relief funds to keep alive the starving remnants of this harried race whose cry to Christendom is “either kill us or in God’s name redeem us.”As Timour took up again his march from desolated Siwas he dragged with cords along the stones of the road at the heels of his horse the head of the governor of Siwas, one of the sons of Bajazet who was then besieging Constantinople. Aroused by the danger that threatened him yet with a deep sadness caused by the death of his son which settled upon him as if in presentiment of his own fate, Bajazet raised the siege, called all his forces together to meet the bloody Conqueror of the East. Aleppo and Damascus meanwhile fell with terrible slaughter, and now on the plains not far from Siwas, Timour awaited the coming of Bajazet.Tamerlane hesitated to engage in this battle with a race of his own blood, the champions of the faith of the Prophet, who were fighting like himself for the triumph of Islam. His envoys were disgracefully treated and his messages were answered with most haughty and insultingletters. “Thy armies” said Bajazet “are innumerable; be they so: but what are the arrows of the flying Tartars against thescimitarsand battle-axes of my firm and invincible Janizaries?”Then this deadly insult: “If I fly from thy arms, may my wives be thrice divorced from my bed; but, if thou hast not courage to meet me in the field mayest thou again receive thy wives after they have thrice endured the embraces of a stranger.”On receiving this letter Timour exclaimed: “Decidedly the son of Mourad is mad.”All day long Timour reviewed his troops of horse as the squadrons passed before him, then turning again to the envoy he made a last offer of peace, “Say to your master that he can still, in accepting my just and moderate conditions, spare the fatal dissension of two servants of the one God, and torrents of human blood to Asia.”Bajazetwas both deaf and blind to the advice of his viziers, his generals and the last message of Tamerlane; and was determined to meet with his army of four hundred thousand men which he had seen gathering for two years, the well trained army of eight hundred thousand men who were formed in nine divisions under the four sons and five favored grandsons of the greatest warrior of the world.Never had the sun of Asia shed its light upon so vast a multitude of warriors gathered for so deadly a conflict on July 28, 1402. Timour brought forward only five hundred thousand of his choicest troops, horse and foot, yet they covered the amphitheater of the hills which arose behind the river in the basin to the north of Angora. He had most carefully chosen his field ofbattle and his position, and facing him was the vast army of Bajazet. All historians, Arabian, Greek and Ottoman agree that over one million men faced each other on this listed field. The situation added to the tragic majesty of the spectacle. The plain, the gradation of the hills and the rugged mountains of Angora made a circus worthy of these imperial gladiators of the two Asias.Timour was stationed on an elevated mound whence he could survey the whole field, while behind him and out of sight from the enemy were forty divisions of select cavalry ready at the critical moment to strengthen any wavering squadrons, or to be hurled on the field to consummate the victory.The first dawn of day upon the mountains of Angora illuminated those two armies in order of battle but motionless. But when the sun had dispelled the shade from the foot of the hills, at the rolling of drums of the Turks with the cry of Allah Achbar the army of Bajazet was put in motion. Soon the battle was on. The first charge of one wing of Tartar cavalry was broken by the immobility of the Servian mountaineers.Then in the rapid advance of his enemy’s troops Timour discovered that the Asiatic army of Bajazet had passed the level of the Ottoman lines in order to turn the hills he was occupying, and down he rushed with his reserve cavalry of forty divisions and cut in two the army of Europe and the army of Asia, throwing one of them back upon the hills and the other into the marshes on the left, slaughtering at the center some thousands of Ottomans and forcing Bajazet himself to fly with ten thousand of his Janizaries to a rising ground detached from the mountains whose steep declivities checked the impetuosity of the Tartar cavalry.Timour watched with admiration the retreat of the Servian mountaineers, as in dense columns clad in splendid mail, unshaken by repeated charges of his cavalry they forced their way obliquely through that multitude until they gained the foothills in safety. “These miserable peasants are lions,” he exclaimed in admiration of their discipline and their courage.Two sons of Bajazet were rescued by the bold daring of their devoted followers, but in vain did they urge the Emperor himself to seek refuge in flight. Satisfied that his sons were safe he continued to fight for glory or for death behind the rampart of his Janizaries who formed about him a circular wall with their dead bodies. Never was fidelity more desperate, more unswerving. Stolen from Christian homes at an early age and trained as warriors they knew no other home than the camp. They knew that their birth among the Christians and their name of renegades left them no other choice than that of death upon the field of battle or the field of torture. The retreat of the ten thousand after the death of Cyrus did not equal the glorious suicide of these ten thousand Janizaries about the body of their Sultan.As the shades of evening began to fall, Bajazet, his youngest son and a few faithful generals and a group of horsemen sought to escape into the woody recesses of the mountains. A troop of Tartar cavalry closely pursued the trail of the retreating Sultan. The day was about to break and they hoped to escape by swimming a swift stream, the horsemen they heard galloping behind them when a loose shoe caused the horse of the Sultan to stumble. None would save themselvesand leave their master, and as one of the Beys was presenting his own horse to him, a Tartar emir with a body of horsemen surrounded the small group of the Ottomans and they were prisoners.Before night had fallen the vanquished Sultan in chains, covered with dust and blood, was brought before Timour, who was seated in the shade of his tent playing chess with the son whom he called the hope of his race. The vanquisher showed neither pride nor insolence before the vanquished. He remembered the maxims and respected the finger of God even in the enemy overthrown at his feet. He remembered that he was of the same race, that they were fighting for the same faith and he almost begged his pardon for the victory. He ordered him to be released, begged him to take a seat with him at the front of his tent on the same rank with himself and promised him that his honor and his life would suffer no risk during his brief captivity. Three imperial tents were prepared for his use; and after the discovery of his attempt to escape, Bajazet was chained at night in one of those iron-barred litters wherein women in their journeys are carried between two mules. Hence the popular, but erroneous, tradition throughout the East about the iron cage wherein Timour had shut up the Sultan intending to exhibit him in his palace at Samarcand. Timour permitted Bajazet to send for his favorite wife, the Princess of Servia—exacting from her at a banquet, but only for a single time, that she should hand him a cup of Cyprus wine the sole vengeance he wished to take for the insulting letter wherein Bajazet had threatened him with taking off his harem.Bajazet died about nine months after his defeat atAntioch in Pisidia—his empire, lost in a single battle—having fallen into fragments before his eyes.Turning away from the possible conquest of Europe Tamerlane soon returned to Samarcand and in 1405 set out for the final and complete conquest of China. Neither age nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timour, he passed the Sihon on the ice, marched hundreds of miles, then pitching his last camp, died of fever and fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water April 1, 1405. The conqueror of Asia had reigned for thirty-five years and died at the age of seventy-one, having shed more blood and caused more misery than any other human being ever born on the earth.

CHAPTER IV.THE GREAT TARTAR INVASIONS.

From Jerusalem the reader must now transport himself beyond the Caspian Sea eastward if he would visit the early home of the Turks or Turcomans, or Turkmans, against which the first crusade was chiefly directed. TheirScythianempire of the sixth century was long since dissolved, the tribes of the nations, each a powerful and independent kingdom, were scattered over the deserts of Central Asia from China to the Oxus and the Danube. Hordes of these wandering shepherds were about to overspread the kingdoms of Persia, shake the thrones of China and India, and erect a solid and splendid empire from Samarcand to the confines of Greece and Egypt. Their conquests were not to cease till their victorious crescents had been planted on the walls of Constantinople, and unfurled to the breeze from the dome of the most magnificent Christian temple of the world—the dome of St. Sophia.One of the greatest of Turkish princes was Mahmood, who reigned over the eastern provinces of Persia one thousand years after the birth of Christ, (A. D. 997–1028.) For him the title of Sultan was first invented—a word that signifies Lord or Master. His kingdom stretched from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the mouth of the river Indus.In a series of twelve expeditions he waged a “Holy War” against the Gentoos of Hindustan. Never wasthe Mussulman hero dismayed by the inclemency of the seasons, the heights of the mountains, the breadths of the rivers, the barrenness of the desert, the multitudes of the enemy or the formidable array of their elephants of war. But we cannot spare even a page to describe his swift and terrible campaigns that brought the power and wealth of India to his feet. As in his old age he surveyed the vast millions of gold and silver, the countless spoils in pearls and diamonds and rubies that filled his treasure house, even his boundless avarice might have been satiated for a moment. As he reviewed the state of his regular military forces which comprised one hundred thousand foot, fifty-five thousand horse and thirteen hundred elephants of battle; he wept the instability of human greatness, his grief embittered by the hostile progress of the Turcomans whom as allies he had introduced into the heart of his Persian kingdom.He was admonished of his folly by the reply of the chief of the race of Seljuk of whom he had inquired what supply of men he could furnish for military service. “If you send,” replied Ishmael, “one of these arrows into our camp, fifty thousand of your servants will mount on horseback.”“And if that number should not be sufficient?” “Send this second arrow to the horde of Balik and you will find fifty thousand more.” “But,” said Mahmood, dissembling his anxiety, “if I should stand in need of the whole force of your kindred tribes?”“Despatch my bow,” was the last reply of Ishmael, “and as it is sent around, the summons will be obeyed by two hundred thousand horse.” Well might he fear, for the multitude of shepherds were converted into robbers; the bands of robbers only needed leaders tobecome an army of conquerors, that would not be ashamed or afraid to measure courage and power with the proudest sovereigns of Asia.Too long did his son and successor neglect the advice of his wise men. “Your enemies” they repeatedly urged “were in their origin a swarm of ants; they are now little snakes; and unless they be instantly crushed they will acquire the magnitude and venom of serpents.”When the day of battle came, the swarm of ants had grown into a horde of fierce and mighty warriors: and although “Massoud exhibited such acts of gigantic force and valor as never king had before displayed,” in the very hour when victory was about to perch on his banners in dismay, he beheld almost his whole army led by some generals of the Turkish race, “devouring the paths of flight.” This memorable day of Zendecan founded in Persia the dynasty of the Shepherd Kings.THE DYNASTY OF THE SELJUKIAN TURKS. (A. D. 1038–1152.)The victorious Turcomans, determined by lot, it is said, the selection of their King; and it fell to Togrul Beg, grandson of Seljuk, whose surname was immortalized in the greatness of his posterity. At the age of forty-five Togrul was invested with the title of Sultan in the royal city of Nishabur, and the sceptre of Irak passed from the Persian to the Turkish nation, that now and everywhere embraced with fervor and sincerity the religion of Mohammed.At the conquest of Mosul and Bagdad he received from the Caliph of the East the title of the lieutenant of the vicar of the prophet, his mystic veil was perfumedwith musk, two crowns were placed on his head; twoscimitarswere girded to his side as the symbol of a double reign over the East and the West.Soon myriads of Turkish horse went forth to conquest, overspreading the frontier of six hundred miles from Tauris to Erzeroum: and the blood of hundreds of thousands of Christians were a grateful sacrifice to the Arabian prophet.The first invasion of poor Armenia was with more than a hundred thousand men and twenty-four provinces were laid waste. The second was with two hundred thousand and they completed the utter ruin of those provinces, carrying into captivity all the inhabitants. In the year 1049 the armies of Togrul made a third invasion, besieging the city of Ardzan, which had a population of three hundred thousand souls, and contained eight hundred churches with schools and hospitals. Notwithstanding their utmost resistance it was taken and a hundred and forty thousand people were massacred, the remnant were carried into captivity and the city was burned. Many other cities were treated in the same way.At the same time there were in Armenia sixty thousand Greek Christian troops from Constantinople, ostensibly for the protection of Armenia, yet they did not take a single step to repel the invaders, preferring to see the Armenians slaughtered. Verily history repeated itself as the great “Christian” powers of Europe stood by witnessing the “reform of Armenia.”There is some small sense of satisfaction in the fact that before the Turks left Armenia they utterly defeated and dispersed these miserable “Defenders of the Faith.”Again in the year 1053 Togrul appeared in Armenia, destroying many cities, among them the capital city of Kars and then marched to the city of Manazguerd and laid siege to it.Basilius, the Chief of the city, was a man of great bravery and military skill. He was assisted in the defence of the city by a skillful Armenian priest who, by his inventions rendered the machines raised by the Persians against the walls entirely useless. Then they planned to undermine the fortifications; but this new design was revealed by a soldier who, smarting under somegrievousand unjust punishment, shot an arrow into the city to which was fastened a letter making known their plans. A countermine was dug, and the Persian miners being captured they were taken into the city and beheaded on the battlements.In his rage Togrul caused a huge wooden ballista to be erected,—so large that it required four hundred men to drag it before the walls. Basilius offered a great reward to the man who should succeed in burning it. There was a very ingenious Gaul in the city who, having composed an inflammable mixture, mounted a swift horse and proceeded to the Persian camp holding a letter in his outstretched hand. He went directly to the spot where the ballista stood and while the guards fancied him a messenger sent to the King he hurled the bottles filled with the combustible material into the machine and in the confusion that attended the burning of the ballista escaped back to the city.The siege was soon raised but other cities felt the fury of his baffled rage as leaving a trail of fire and blood behind him, Togrul returned to Persia. The native historian whom we are consulting, in simplestyet most telling pathos, writes: “Armenia, after this, enjoyed no repose.”“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.Upon the death of Togrul, (A. D. 1062) he was succeeded by his nephew, Alp Arslan who, in the following year came to wreak vengeance on unhappy Armenia. Everywhere he committed the most horrid devastation. Marching to the province of Ararat he laid siege to Ani the Magnificent, with its thousand and one churches.The city was lost by the cowardice of the Governor. A breach had been made in an unprotected part of the wall, but being narrow the citizens so valiantly defended it that they compelled the Sultan to retire; but the Governor, fancying that the Persians had succeeded in forcing an entrance, retired into the citadel. Thinking themselves deserted, a panic seized the Armenians and about fifty thousand of them fled into the country from the gates on the opposite side of the city.The retreat of the Persians was countermanded, the city was taken, orders being given to put every man to the sword. Human blood flowed in torrents. So great was the carnage that the streets were literally choked up with dead bodies, and the waters of the river Akhurian flowed in crimson tides. After his first fury was somewhat abated, Alp Arslan gave orders to seize the most wealthy citizens still alive and torture them to make them reveal places where their treasures were hidden. Then he pillaged the thousand and one churches, murdered all the priests found therein,—some were drowned, some he flayed alive, others died under tortures as excruciating as most fiendish imagination could conceive or invent. Finally, gathering his captives—men, women and children and his plunder, Alp Arslan returned to Persia.We must leave for awhile the bleeding Armenians whose kingdom had been annihilated, to the tender mercies of the wicked, to follow the path of rapine and horror as the torrents of unspeakable Turks flowed westward.They captured cities, put the inhabitants of Asia Minor to the sword and devastated the interior provinces to convert them into pasture lands for their nomad followers.Romanus, husband of the Greek Empress Eudocia took the field against them, and driving them back to the Euphrates, laid siege to the fortress of Manzikert or Malasgerd in Armenia midway between modern Erzeroum and Van. It was on the plain of Manzikert in 1071 after the capture of the fortress, that the East gained one of its greatest triumphs over the West. The Seljuk Sultan and the Roman Emperor met face to face. Romanus rejected in haughty pride the overtures of the Sultan that might have secured his retreat, perhaps peace—and prepared for battle. The Sultan with his own hands tied up the flowing tail of his horse, exchanged his bow and arrows for a mace andscimitar, clothed himself in a white garment, perfumed his body with musk, and declared that if he were vanquished, that spot should be the place of his burial. The Sultan himself had cast away his missile weapons, but his hopes of victory were in the arrows of his cavalry whose squadrons were loosely placed in the form of a crescent. Romanus led his army in a single and solid phalanx and pressed with vigor the artful and yielding resistance of the barbarians. Thusthe greater part of a hot summer’s day was spent in fruitless combat until fatigue compelled him to sound a return to camp. This was the fatal moment. The Turkish squadrons poured a cloud of arrows on the retreating army throwing them into confusion. The horns of the crescent closed in upon the rear of the Greeks.The destruction of the army was complete, the booty immense. Nobly did the Emperor with desperate courage maintain the fight till the close of the day. The imperial station was left naked on all sides to the victorious Turks. His body guard fell about him—his horse was slain and he himself was wounded, yet he stood as a lion at bay. He was captured, despoiled of his jewelled robes, bound and guarded all night on the field of the dead.In the morning the successor of Constantine in plebian habit was led into the presence of the Sultan and commanded to kiss the ground at the feet of the Lord of Asia. Reluctantly he obeyed, and Alp Arslan, starting from his throne, is said to have planted his foot on the neck of the Roman Emperor. No captive was ever more nobly treated than Romanus Diogenes; but no captivity ever wrought more lasting woe. Three years later the Seljuk was the recognized Lord of Asia Minor, and as such ventured to call himself the Lord of Rome. Following the defeat of the Romans the Turks marched into Syria and reduced Damascus by famine and the sword. Other cities in Palestine yielded until the victorious army passing southward stood on the banks of the Nile. The city of Cairo in desperate battle drove back the armies of the Sultan from the confines of Egypt; but in their retreat Jerusalem wasconquered and the house of Seljuk held the city for some twenty years.When Jerusalem fell before the arms of the Crusaders in 1099, the event was applauded as a deliverance in Europe, and was deplored as a calamity in Asia. The Syrian fugitives diffused everywhere their sorrow and consternation: Bagdad mourned in the dust; the Cadi of Damascus tore his beard in the Caliph’s presence; the Commanders of the faithful could only weep and vow vengeance on the head of the infidels who had defiled the Holy City.It is not our purpose to pursue the story of the crusades through all the years that made Jerusalem the prize of battle equally to Christian and Mohammedan. The life and exploits of Saladin and Richard, the lion-hearted are more thrilling than any romance. In a fanatic age, himself a fanatic, the genuine virtues of Saladin commanded the esteem of the Christians; the Emperor of Germany gloried in his friendship; the Greek Emperor solicited his alliance. Egypt, Syria, and Arabia were adorned by the royal foundations of hospitals, colleges and mosques; Cairo was fortified with a wall and citadel; but his works were consecrated to public use: nor did the Sultan indulge himself in a garden or palace of private luxury. The son of Job, a simple Kurd, Saladin was after the follies of a hot youth, a rigid Mussulman, his garment of coarse woolen, and water his only drink.But already had he won for himself the name of “The Scourge of God.” He had united all the forces and riches of Egypt and Asia under his sword and now (1187 A. D.) hastened with eighty thousand horse to the deliverance of Palestine.Three months after the battle of Tiberias (July 4 and 5, 1187) he appeared in arms before Jerusalem. When Saladin had partially completed its investment, he invited its principal inhabitants to meet him in council. When they were assembled he said: “I acknowledge that Jerusalem is the House of God. I do not wish to profane its sanctity by the shedding of blood. Abandon its walls and I will bestow on you a part of my treasures, and I will bestow on you as much land as you will be able to cultivate.” To which the Christians replied: “We cannot yield the city in which our God died: still less can we give it up to you.”This refusal enraged Saladin, and he swore to destroy the towers and ramparts of Jerusalem, and avenge the death of the Mussulmen slaughtered by the soldiers of Godfrey of Bouillon.The siege went on. Many and fierce the sorties from the gates of the city: but fight as they would the operations of the infidels could not be stayed. Despair set in, mingled with wailing, tears and prayers. Jerusalem was filled with sobs and groans.Deputies were sent out to propose a capitulation on the terms which he had first proposed. He sent them back without one word of hope. But one day as the deputies were pleading with unusual earnestness, Saladin pointed to his standards just placed upon the walls saying: “How can you ask me to grant conditions to a city which is already taken?” But he spoke too confidently, for at that moment they were stricken down again.As they went down Baleau the leader of the Christian forces spoke up: “You see Jerusalem is notwithout defenders. If we can obtain no mercy from you we will form a terrible resolution which will fill you with horror. These temples and palaces you are so anxious to conquer shall be destroyed. The riches which excite your cupidity shall be burned. We will destroy the mosque of Omar. We will pound into dust the stone of Jacob which is an object of your worship. We will stay our women and our children with our own hands that they shall never be your slaves. When the Holy City shall become a ruin—a vast tomb—we will march out of it armed with fire and sword and no one of us will ascend to Paradise without first consigning ten Mussulmen to hell. We shall thus obtain a glorious death and in dying shall call down on your head the maledictions of the God of Jerusalem.”Saladin was awed by this terrible speech: told the deputies to return the next day, when the terms of capitulation were signed in the tent of the great sultan, and Jerusalem passed again into the hands of the infidels, after having remained for eighty-eight years in thepossessionof the Christians. The Saracens boast that they retook the Holy City on Friday, the anniversary of the day on which Mohammed ascended from it into heaven: but the complete conquest of the Holy Land by the Turks was to be delayed yet an hundred years.Finally, however, before Mamelukes of Egypt, Jerusalem, and all the cities of the coast fell, and Acre became the last stronghold of the crusaders. Against it marched the Sultan Khali at the head of sixty thousand horse and one hundred and forty thousand foot.After a siege of thirty-three days the double wall was forced, the towers yielded to their engines, the Moslems stormed the city May 18, (A. D., 1291) carried it by the sword; and death or slavery was the lot of sixty thousand Christians. By the command of the Sultan the churches and the fortifications of the Latin cities were demolished, anda mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with theWorld’s Debate; and hundreds of thousands of warriors had found the “Paradise that lies under the shade of swords.”Again must we go to the “roof of the world” to behold the great eruption of Moguls and Tartars whose fierce and rapid and cruel conquests can only be compared with the destructive forces of nature in her wildest moods when she lets loose upon the earth fire and flood, earthquake, avalanche and volcano. From these spacious highlands the tides of emigration and the floods of war have repeatedly been poured. In the twelfth century the various tribes akin to Hun and Turk were united and led to conquest by the formidable Jenghiz Khan,i. e.the most great Khan or Emperor of the Moguls and Tartars.The code of laws which Jenghiz Khan dictated to his subjects was adapted to the preservation of domestic peace and the exercise of foreign hostility. These fiercest of men were mild and just in their intercourse with each other. Their primitive religion consisted in belief in the existence of one God, the author of all good, who fills by His presence the heavens and the earth which He has created by His power. The Tartars and Moguls were addicted to the idols of their various tribes yet there were among them convertsto the religions of Moses, Mohammed and of Christ.Soon all the kindred tribes from the great wall of China to the Volga owned his sway. He was the Khan of many millions of shepherds and warriors. The court of Pekin was astonished at receiving an embassy from a former vassal demanding the same tribute and obedience which he himself had but lately paid. On receiving a haughty answer innumerable squadrons soon pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall and ninety cities were laid low. On his second invasion he laid siege to Pekin. The famine was terrible. Men were chosen by lot to be slain for food. The Moguls mined under the capital and the conflagration of the city lasted for thirty days. China was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction and the five northern provinces were added to the empire of Jenghiz. On the west he touched the dominions of Mohammed, sultan of Carizme, who reigned from the Persian gulf to the borders of India and Turkestan.A caravan of three ambassadors and one hundred and fifty merchants having been put to death by the orders of Mohammed, after he had fasted and prayed for three nights on a mountain, Jenghiz appealed to the judgment of God and his own sword. Seven hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the banners of Jenghiz and his four sons. On the vast plains stretching north of the river Jaxartes (now Jihon) they encountered four hundred thousand soldiers of the Sultan. In the first battle it is said that one hundred and sixty thousand Carizmians were slain. The whole country then lay open to his fierce warriors and from the Caspian to the Indus, a tract of manyhundreds of miles, adorned with the habitations and labors of the most highly civilized races of Asia, was desolated so completely that five centuries have not repaired the ravages of four years. In all this Jenghiz Khan indulged and encouraged the fury of his army. He now yielded with reluctance to the murmurs of his weary but wealthy troops who sighed for the rest of their native lands.The return of Jenghiz was signalized by the overthrow of the few remaining independent kingdoms in Tartary: and he died in the fulness of years and glory, with his last breath exhorting his sons to achieve the conquest of the Chinese Empire. In the sixty-eight years of his first four successors the Mogul had subdued almost all Asia and a large portion of Europe.To the East China was subdued; to the South the conquest of Hindustan was reserved for the house of Timour or Tamerlane. While the hosts that went forth to conquer Russia, Poland, Hungary, etc., (1235–1245) inscribed on the military roll numbered fifteen hundred thousand men. Holagon the grandson of Jenghiz Khan had but to thrust at the phantom of power which the Caliphs of Bagdad enjoyed when it vanished like the mist. Bagdad after a siege of two brief months, was stormed and sacked and the savage Tartar pronounced the death of the Caliph Mostasem the last of the temporal successors of Mohammed whose noble kinsmen of the race of Abbas had reigned in Asia above five hundred years.Once more the torrents of woe flow in upon Armenia lying in the track of the Tartar armies westward. Ani is again besieged and soon a famine broke out within the walls and many of the citizens rushed outand gave themselves up to the mercy of their enemies. They were kindly received and a sufficient supply of food was given to them. Induced by this kindness more than half of the inhabitants were soon found in the camp of the Tartars. All at once the poor wretches were divided into small parties under the pretext of receiving better protection when the soldiers fell upon them and massacred every individual. Then the city was easily taken, destroyed by fire and the entire population put to the sword.Many cities suffered the desolations and horrors of Ani till the Khan ordered his chiefs on to other conquests. Then followed the infliction of a heavy capitation tax on all the remaining provinces—sixty pieces of money being demanded of every Armenian from the age of ten upwards. Those who were unable to pay this sum suffered intolerable tortures. Those who were possessed of lands lost them, their wives and children being seized and sold into slavery. Nothing ever equalled the horrors that now overspread this unhappy country, most of the inhabitants having no money to pay the tax and having no place to which to flee from their oppressors. Finally an embassy to Mangon Khan, a grandson of Jenghiz secured some little alleviation of their misery.Meantime there was growing up in Cilicia a subordinate kingdom of Armenia with Tarsus for its capital—and receiving favor from the Sultan of Egypt and the Khan of the Tartars. Leo III. resumed the kingly reins of his kingdom comprising all of Modern Anatolia. He repaired his cities; he erected public schools. He caused all the literary productions of the Armenians from the earliest ages to be recopied and distributedamong the convents of the kingdom. He reigned for twenty years ardently devoted to the service of God and died in the year 1289.His son, Hethum, was a prince who despised all worldly pomp and grandeur, seldom arrayed himself in royal apparel. He was greatly attached to the priests of his capital engaging daily with them in prayers and other religious exercises. He was particularly fond of the literary productions of the Fathers of the Church. His Bible was his daily companion. He caused a copy of it to be prepared expressly for himself, and at the end of it wrote some lines expressive of the high satisfaction and comfort he had derived from its frequent perusal.These paragraphs may show what has ever been the character of these people who are still being harried to death in the same provinces where they have lived and suffered for centuries.The decline of the spirit of conquest in the Mogul princes of Persia gave a free scope to the rise and progress of the Ottoman Empire which was soon to strike fear into the heart of the Emperor of Constantinople, and finally establish itself in Europe where it remains to this day a blot on Western civilization and a curse to all the people over which it rules.In 1360 we find the throne of the Ottoman Turks established at Adrianople almost within sight of Constantinople which after resisting for a thousand years the assaults of barbarians of the East and the West, now saw herself hemmed in, both in Europe and Asia, by the same hostile power and her Emperor following at his summons the court and camp of an Ottoman Prince.Bajazet surnamed Ilderim, or “The Lightning” whocame to the throne in 1389, and reigned fourteen years, fills a brilliant page in Ottoman history. He forced Constantinople to pay tribute and enjoyed the glory of being the first to found a royal Mosque in the glorious metropolis of the Eastern Church. He would speedily have forced its absolute surrender but that he was doomed to meet and be overthrown by a savage still more savage than himself—the name that caused all Europe and Asia to tremble with fear—the great, the terrible, the blood-thirsty Timour or Tamerlane. The family of Tamerlane was another branch of the imperial stem of Jenghiz Khan. He was born 1335 A. D., in a village that lies forty miles to the south of Samarcand, in a tribe of which his fathers were the hereditary chiefs. His birth was cast in a time of anarchy of bitter domestic feuds; when the Khans of Kashgar with an army of Calmucks harassed the Trans-oxian Kingdom. At the age of twenty-five he stood forth as the deliverer of his people: and in ten years he was invested with imperial command of the Zagatai. The rule over a fertile and populous land five hundred miles in extent either way, might have satisfied an ordinary man: but Timour aspired to the dominion of the world and before his death the crown of Zagatai was but one of twenty-seven which he had placed upon his head. He first swept Persia to the sea. The city of Ormuz bought its safety for an annual tribute of six hundred thousand pieces of gold. Bagdad was laid in ruins: and from the gulf to the mountains of Ararat the whole course of the Tigris and Euphrates was reduced to his obedience.The Khan of the Mogul Empire of the North swept down through the gates of Derbend entering Persia atthe head of ninety thousand horse, burned the palaces of Timour and compelled him amidst the snows of winter to contend for Samarcand and his life.After a mild expostulation, and a glorious victory he resolved on revenge. He invaded Tartary with armies so vast that thirteen miles stretched between his left and right wing. In a march of five months they rarely beheld the footsteps of man. At length the armies met in most fearful conflict. In the heat of conflict the treachery of the bearer of the imperial standard of Kipzak turned the tide of victory to the Zagatai, and Timour gave up the mingled hosts to the “wind of desolation.” The pursuit of a flying enemy led him into the provinces of Russia. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar, but he turned his armies southward, and on the banks of the Don received a deputation of the merchants of Egypt, Venice, Genoa, and Spain, who had built up the great commerce and the city of Azoph. They offered him gifts, admired his magnificence, trusted his word. But the peaceful visit of an Emir who explored the state of the magazines and harbors was speedily followed by the destructive presence of the Tartars, who reduced the city to ashes, pillaged the Moslems, and put every Christian to the sword or sold them into slavery. Having laid waste all the cities in Southern Russia, he returned to his capital at Samarcand.Samarcand, the center of his magnificence, the depot of all riches, arose and extended itself as by magic at each return of the world’s conqueror. It is said that Babylon, Bagdad, Persepolis, Palmyra, Baalbec and Damascus, were all cast into the shade by the mosques, palaces, gardens, and aqueducts which arose under thehands of most skillful artisans brought from every captured city to decorate the capital of a barbarian.Here amid the delights of his gardens, the love of his women, the conversation of his men of letters, the eulogies of poets, did Tamerlane refresh himself after the exploits of a five years’ campaign. But his loves, and delights of ease, did not make him forget that dream of all conquerors—India, and at this invasion he overran it from the Indus to Delhi, and from the Ocean to Thibet.As he proceeded on his march, his army became encumbered with the captives, and he ordered one hundred thousand of them slain in a single night. Remorse, pity, and indignation, seized even a Tartar army, but Tamerlane answered it only by the conquest and massacre of Delhi, that great and magnificent city which had flourished for three hundred years, under Mohammedan kings; the ruins of which are still seen for miles on every side of the modern city. The blood of the slain, crimsoned the waters of the Sacred Ganges for many, many miles on its course to the sea. The recital of his cruelties could not be believed, were they not recorded in the history of all the nations he conquered. The treasures were of incalculable value, and every soldier received one hundred slaves for his share and every Tartar camp follower, twenty.It was while camping on the bank of the Ganges that Tamerlane received from his couriers the tidings of the disturbances on the confines of Anatolia and Georgia, of the revolt of the Christians and the ambitious designs of Bajazet. He returned to Samarcand having accomplished in a twelve month the ten years’ campaign of Alexander the Great.After enjoying a few months tranquillity he proclaimed a seven years’ campaign against the countries of Western Asia. To the soldiers who had served in the Indian wars he granted their choice of home or camp, but the troops of all the kingdoms and provinces of Persia were commanded to assemble at Ispahan and await the imperial standard.With an army of eight hundred thousand fighting men and a multitude of slaves so vast that it is said that they dried up the earth as they marched, he started westward. Words are lacking to describe the desolation and cruelty that attended his march and the sacking of cities.Multitudes of Christians suffered untold horrors rather than deny their faith. The cities that attempted to resist behind their walls were effaced from the earth, and upon their sites towers were erected, the walls of which were composed of living men cemented in the lime.Pursuing the people of Georgia into the gorges of the Caucasus Mountains he inflicted upon them great slaughter, and discovering many caverns into which men, women and children had fled for safety he walled up their entrances and left them to perish.Ispahan in a moment of folly having rebelled and massacred three thousand Tartars he sent back one hundred thousand soldiers with orders that every man should bring him a head on penalty of losing his own. Ispahan in consternation and horror paid this price for its revolt, and on the site of a dismantled city, a mason-wrought pyramid of a hundred thousand heads told the awful story of their doom.Proceeding westward Tamerlane laid siege to Siwas,or Sebaste, modern Siwas, a city having walls of prodigious thickness and a broad moat filled with running water.It contained one hundred and fifty thousand souls, was defended by intrepid Armenians and seemed able to defy every assault of a Tartar multitude without battering artillery to shake the walls.But Tamerlane hesitated only a moment. Prodigal of men, he set thousands at work to undermine the rocks that formed the foundation of the walls. He emptied the moats by cutting deeper channels for the river. He cut down adjacent forests to prop up the mines dug under the towers of the walls; and then setting on fire this underground forest he saw the rocks give way engulfing walls, houses and defenders in the ruins. Twenty days and nights sufficed to open enormous breaches for his soldiers. The city naked and trembling before him awaited its fate. Timour promised to spare the lives of Mohammedans and Christians, and to be content with servitude. But scarcely had he entered it before he inundated it with the blood of its defenders. By his ferocity he made all the East and the West to shudder, and the world to stand aghast at its recital after more than four centuries have covered its horrors. Four thousand Ottomans were buried alive up to the neck and thus left to perish. Countless Christians were bound in couples and cast into trenches which were then covered with boards and earth, and over them the Tartars pitched their tents and took fiendish delight in their moanings. Women were bound by the hair of their heads to the tails of wild young horses and thus dragged to death. The young children were bound hand and foot and laid togetheron an open plain and trampled to death by his cavalry. With the exception of the male children fit for slavery, and the young girls reserved for the harem the entire population was destroyed.The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.THE NEW GRAND VIZIER. TASHIN BEY. THE SHEIK-AL-ISLAM.Do you shudder at even this cool recital? Far worse horrors are still being endured by the Christian people of Armenia this very day on ground that is dyed with the blood of a thousand years ofmartyrdom. And still Christian Europe is unmoved; and the Turk, drunk with the blood of his victims still is propped up on his throne by the arms that should drive him back to the deserts of Tartary: and Christian America contents itself with trying by their relief funds to keep alive the starving remnants of this harried race whose cry to Christendom is “either kill us or in God’s name redeem us.”As Timour took up again his march from desolated Siwas he dragged with cords along the stones of the road at the heels of his horse the head of the governor of Siwas, one of the sons of Bajazet who was then besieging Constantinople. Aroused by the danger that threatened him yet with a deep sadness caused by the death of his son which settled upon him as if in presentiment of his own fate, Bajazet raised the siege, called all his forces together to meet the bloody Conqueror of the East. Aleppo and Damascus meanwhile fell with terrible slaughter, and now on the plains not far from Siwas, Timour awaited the coming of Bajazet.Tamerlane hesitated to engage in this battle with a race of his own blood, the champions of the faith of the Prophet, who were fighting like himself for the triumph of Islam. His envoys were disgracefully treated and his messages were answered with most haughty and insultingletters. “Thy armies” said Bajazet “are innumerable; be they so: but what are the arrows of the flying Tartars against thescimitarsand battle-axes of my firm and invincible Janizaries?”Then this deadly insult: “If I fly from thy arms, may my wives be thrice divorced from my bed; but, if thou hast not courage to meet me in the field mayest thou again receive thy wives after they have thrice endured the embraces of a stranger.”On receiving this letter Timour exclaimed: “Decidedly the son of Mourad is mad.”All day long Timour reviewed his troops of horse as the squadrons passed before him, then turning again to the envoy he made a last offer of peace, “Say to your master that he can still, in accepting my just and moderate conditions, spare the fatal dissension of two servants of the one God, and torrents of human blood to Asia.”Bajazetwas both deaf and blind to the advice of his viziers, his generals and the last message of Tamerlane; and was determined to meet with his army of four hundred thousand men which he had seen gathering for two years, the well trained army of eight hundred thousand men who were formed in nine divisions under the four sons and five favored grandsons of the greatest warrior of the world.Never had the sun of Asia shed its light upon so vast a multitude of warriors gathered for so deadly a conflict on July 28, 1402. Timour brought forward only five hundred thousand of his choicest troops, horse and foot, yet they covered the amphitheater of the hills which arose behind the river in the basin to the north of Angora. He had most carefully chosen his field ofbattle and his position, and facing him was the vast army of Bajazet. All historians, Arabian, Greek and Ottoman agree that over one million men faced each other on this listed field. The situation added to the tragic majesty of the spectacle. The plain, the gradation of the hills and the rugged mountains of Angora made a circus worthy of these imperial gladiators of the two Asias.Timour was stationed on an elevated mound whence he could survey the whole field, while behind him and out of sight from the enemy were forty divisions of select cavalry ready at the critical moment to strengthen any wavering squadrons, or to be hurled on the field to consummate the victory.The first dawn of day upon the mountains of Angora illuminated those two armies in order of battle but motionless. But when the sun had dispelled the shade from the foot of the hills, at the rolling of drums of the Turks with the cry of Allah Achbar the army of Bajazet was put in motion. Soon the battle was on. The first charge of one wing of Tartar cavalry was broken by the immobility of the Servian mountaineers.Then in the rapid advance of his enemy’s troops Timour discovered that the Asiatic army of Bajazet had passed the level of the Ottoman lines in order to turn the hills he was occupying, and down he rushed with his reserve cavalry of forty divisions and cut in two the army of Europe and the army of Asia, throwing one of them back upon the hills and the other into the marshes on the left, slaughtering at the center some thousands of Ottomans and forcing Bajazet himself to fly with ten thousand of his Janizaries to a rising ground detached from the mountains whose steep declivities checked the impetuosity of the Tartar cavalry.Timour watched with admiration the retreat of the Servian mountaineers, as in dense columns clad in splendid mail, unshaken by repeated charges of his cavalry they forced their way obliquely through that multitude until they gained the foothills in safety. “These miserable peasants are lions,” he exclaimed in admiration of their discipline and their courage.Two sons of Bajazet were rescued by the bold daring of their devoted followers, but in vain did they urge the Emperor himself to seek refuge in flight. Satisfied that his sons were safe he continued to fight for glory or for death behind the rampart of his Janizaries who formed about him a circular wall with their dead bodies. Never was fidelity more desperate, more unswerving. Stolen from Christian homes at an early age and trained as warriors they knew no other home than the camp. They knew that their birth among the Christians and their name of renegades left them no other choice than that of death upon the field of battle or the field of torture. The retreat of the ten thousand after the death of Cyrus did not equal the glorious suicide of these ten thousand Janizaries about the body of their Sultan.As the shades of evening began to fall, Bajazet, his youngest son and a few faithful generals and a group of horsemen sought to escape into the woody recesses of the mountains. A troop of Tartar cavalry closely pursued the trail of the retreating Sultan. The day was about to break and they hoped to escape by swimming a swift stream, the horsemen they heard galloping behind them when a loose shoe caused the horse of the Sultan to stumble. None would save themselvesand leave their master, and as one of the Beys was presenting his own horse to him, a Tartar emir with a body of horsemen surrounded the small group of the Ottomans and they were prisoners.Before night had fallen the vanquished Sultan in chains, covered with dust and blood, was brought before Timour, who was seated in the shade of his tent playing chess with the son whom he called the hope of his race. The vanquisher showed neither pride nor insolence before the vanquished. He remembered the maxims and respected the finger of God even in the enemy overthrown at his feet. He remembered that he was of the same race, that they were fighting for the same faith and he almost begged his pardon for the victory. He ordered him to be released, begged him to take a seat with him at the front of his tent on the same rank with himself and promised him that his honor and his life would suffer no risk during his brief captivity. Three imperial tents were prepared for his use; and after the discovery of his attempt to escape, Bajazet was chained at night in one of those iron-barred litters wherein women in their journeys are carried between two mules. Hence the popular, but erroneous, tradition throughout the East about the iron cage wherein Timour had shut up the Sultan intending to exhibit him in his palace at Samarcand. Timour permitted Bajazet to send for his favorite wife, the Princess of Servia—exacting from her at a banquet, but only for a single time, that she should hand him a cup of Cyprus wine the sole vengeance he wished to take for the insulting letter wherein Bajazet had threatened him with taking off his harem.Bajazet died about nine months after his defeat atAntioch in Pisidia—his empire, lost in a single battle—having fallen into fragments before his eyes.Turning away from the possible conquest of Europe Tamerlane soon returned to Samarcand and in 1405 set out for the final and complete conquest of China. Neither age nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timour, he passed the Sihon on the ice, marched hundreds of miles, then pitching his last camp, died of fever and fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water April 1, 1405. The conqueror of Asia had reigned for thirty-five years and died at the age of seventy-one, having shed more blood and caused more misery than any other human being ever born on the earth.

From Jerusalem the reader must now transport himself beyond the Caspian Sea eastward if he would visit the early home of the Turks or Turcomans, or Turkmans, against which the first crusade was chiefly directed. TheirScythianempire of the sixth century was long since dissolved, the tribes of the nations, each a powerful and independent kingdom, were scattered over the deserts of Central Asia from China to the Oxus and the Danube. Hordes of these wandering shepherds were about to overspread the kingdoms of Persia, shake the thrones of China and India, and erect a solid and splendid empire from Samarcand to the confines of Greece and Egypt. Their conquests were not to cease till their victorious crescents had been planted on the walls of Constantinople, and unfurled to the breeze from the dome of the most magnificent Christian temple of the world—the dome of St. Sophia.

One of the greatest of Turkish princes was Mahmood, who reigned over the eastern provinces of Persia one thousand years after the birth of Christ, (A. D. 997–1028.) For him the title of Sultan was first invented—a word that signifies Lord or Master. His kingdom stretched from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the mouth of the river Indus.

In a series of twelve expeditions he waged a “Holy War” against the Gentoos of Hindustan. Never wasthe Mussulman hero dismayed by the inclemency of the seasons, the heights of the mountains, the breadths of the rivers, the barrenness of the desert, the multitudes of the enemy or the formidable array of their elephants of war. But we cannot spare even a page to describe his swift and terrible campaigns that brought the power and wealth of India to his feet. As in his old age he surveyed the vast millions of gold and silver, the countless spoils in pearls and diamonds and rubies that filled his treasure house, even his boundless avarice might have been satiated for a moment. As he reviewed the state of his regular military forces which comprised one hundred thousand foot, fifty-five thousand horse and thirteen hundred elephants of battle; he wept the instability of human greatness, his grief embittered by the hostile progress of the Turcomans whom as allies he had introduced into the heart of his Persian kingdom.

He was admonished of his folly by the reply of the chief of the race of Seljuk of whom he had inquired what supply of men he could furnish for military service. “If you send,” replied Ishmael, “one of these arrows into our camp, fifty thousand of your servants will mount on horseback.”

“And if that number should not be sufficient?” “Send this second arrow to the horde of Balik and you will find fifty thousand more.” “But,” said Mahmood, dissembling his anxiety, “if I should stand in need of the whole force of your kindred tribes?”

“Despatch my bow,” was the last reply of Ishmael, “and as it is sent around, the summons will be obeyed by two hundred thousand horse.” Well might he fear, for the multitude of shepherds were converted into robbers; the bands of robbers only needed leaders tobecome an army of conquerors, that would not be ashamed or afraid to measure courage and power with the proudest sovereigns of Asia.

Too long did his son and successor neglect the advice of his wise men. “Your enemies” they repeatedly urged “were in their origin a swarm of ants; they are now little snakes; and unless they be instantly crushed they will acquire the magnitude and venom of serpents.”

When the day of battle came, the swarm of ants had grown into a horde of fierce and mighty warriors: and although “Massoud exhibited such acts of gigantic force and valor as never king had before displayed,” in the very hour when victory was about to perch on his banners in dismay, he beheld almost his whole army led by some generals of the Turkish race, “devouring the paths of flight.” This memorable day of Zendecan founded in Persia the dynasty of the Shepherd Kings.

THE DYNASTY OF THE SELJUKIAN TURKS. (A. D. 1038–1152.)The victorious Turcomans, determined by lot, it is said, the selection of their King; and it fell to Togrul Beg, grandson of Seljuk, whose surname was immortalized in the greatness of his posterity. At the age of forty-five Togrul was invested with the title of Sultan in the royal city of Nishabur, and the sceptre of Irak passed from the Persian to the Turkish nation, that now and everywhere embraced with fervor and sincerity the religion of Mohammed.At the conquest of Mosul and Bagdad he received from the Caliph of the East the title of the lieutenant of the vicar of the prophet, his mystic veil was perfumedwith musk, two crowns were placed on his head; twoscimitarswere girded to his side as the symbol of a double reign over the East and the West.Soon myriads of Turkish horse went forth to conquest, overspreading the frontier of six hundred miles from Tauris to Erzeroum: and the blood of hundreds of thousands of Christians were a grateful sacrifice to the Arabian prophet.The first invasion of poor Armenia was with more than a hundred thousand men and twenty-four provinces were laid waste. The second was with two hundred thousand and they completed the utter ruin of those provinces, carrying into captivity all the inhabitants. In the year 1049 the armies of Togrul made a third invasion, besieging the city of Ardzan, which had a population of three hundred thousand souls, and contained eight hundred churches with schools and hospitals. Notwithstanding their utmost resistance it was taken and a hundred and forty thousand people were massacred, the remnant were carried into captivity and the city was burned. Many other cities were treated in the same way.At the same time there were in Armenia sixty thousand Greek Christian troops from Constantinople, ostensibly for the protection of Armenia, yet they did not take a single step to repel the invaders, preferring to see the Armenians slaughtered. Verily history repeated itself as the great “Christian” powers of Europe stood by witnessing the “reform of Armenia.”There is some small sense of satisfaction in the fact that before the Turks left Armenia they utterly defeated and dispersed these miserable “Defenders of the Faith.”Again in the year 1053 Togrul appeared in Armenia, destroying many cities, among them the capital city of Kars and then marched to the city of Manazguerd and laid siege to it.Basilius, the Chief of the city, was a man of great bravery and military skill. He was assisted in the defence of the city by a skillful Armenian priest who, by his inventions rendered the machines raised by the Persians against the walls entirely useless. Then they planned to undermine the fortifications; but this new design was revealed by a soldier who, smarting under somegrievousand unjust punishment, shot an arrow into the city to which was fastened a letter making known their plans. A countermine was dug, and the Persian miners being captured they were taken into the city and beheaded on the battlements.In his rage Togrul caused a huge wooden ballista to be erected,—so large that it required four hundred men to drag it before the walls. Basilius offered a great reward to the man who should succeed in burning it. There was a very ingenious Gaul in the city who, having composed an inflammable mixture, mounted a swift horse and proceeded to the Persian camp holding a letter in his outstretched hand. He went directly to the spot where the ballista stood and while the guards fancied him a messenger sent to the King he hurled the bottles filled with the combustible material into the machine and in the confusion that attended the burning of the ballista escaped back to the city.The siege was soon raised but other cities felt the fury of his baffled rage as leaving a trail of fire and blood behind him, Togrul returned to Persia. The native historian whom we are consulting, in simplestyet most telling pathos, writes: “Armenia, after this, enjoyed no repose.”“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.Upon the death of Togrul, (A. D. 1062) he was succeeded by his nephew, Alp Arslan who, in the following year came to wreak vengeance on unhappy Armenia. Everywhere he committed the most horrid devastation. Marching to the province of Ararat he laid siege to Ani the Magnificent, with its thousand and one churches.The city was lost by the cowardice of the Governor. A breach had been made in an unprotected part of the wall, but being narrow the citizens so valiantly defended it that they compelled the Sultan to retire; but the Governor, fancying that the Persians had succeeded in forcing an entrance, retired into the citadel. Thinking themselves deserted, a panic seized the Armenians and about fifty thousand of them fled into the country from the gates on the opposite side of the city.The retreat of the Persians was countermanded, the city was taken, orders being given to put every man to the sword. Human blood flowed in torrents. So great was the carnage that the streets were literally choked up with dead bodies, and the waters of the river Akhurian flowed in crimson tides. After his first fury was somewhat abated, Alp Arslan gave orders to seize the most wealthy citizens still alive and torture them to make them reveal places where their treasures were hidden. Then he pillaged the thousand and one churches, murdered all the priests found therein,—some were drowned, some he flayed alive, others died under tortures as excruciating as most fiendish imagination could conceive or invent. Finally, gathering his captives—men, women and children and his plunder, Alp Arslan returned to Persia.We must leave for awhile the bleeding Armenians whose kingdom had been annihilated, to the tender mercies of the wicked, to follow the path of rapine and horror as the torrents of unspeakable Turks flowed westward.They captured cities, put the inhabitants of Asia Minor to the sword and devastated the interior provinces to convert them into pasture lands for their nomad followers.Romanus, husband of the Greek Empress Eudocia took the field against them, and driving them back to the Euphrates, laid siege to the fortress of Manzikert or Malasgerd in Armenia midway between modern Erzeroum and Van. It was on the plain of Manzikert in 1071 after the capture of the fortress, that the East gained one of its greatest triumphs over the West. The Seljuk Sultan and the Roman Emperor met face to face. Romanus rejected in haughty pride the overtures of the Sultan that might have secured his retreat, perhaps peace—and prepared for battle. The Sultan with his own hands tied up the flowing tail of his horse, exchanged his bow and arrows for a mace andscimitar, clothed himself in a white garment, perfumed his body with musk, and declared that if he were vanquished, that spot should be the place of his burial. The Sultan himself had cast away his missile weapons, but his hopes of victory were in the arrows of his cavalry whose squadrons were loosely placed in the form of a crescent. Romanus led his army in a single and solid phalanx and pressed with vigor the artful and yielding resistance of the barbarians. Thusthe greater part of a hot summer’s day was spent in fruitless combat until fatigue compelled him to sound a return to camp. This was the fatal moment. The Turkish squadrons poured a cloud of arrows on the retreating army throwing them into confusion. The horns of the crescent closed in upon the rear of the Greeks.The destruction of the army was complete, the booty immense. Nobly did the Emperor with desperate courage maintain the fight till the close of the day. The imperial station was left naked on all sides to the victorious Turks. His body guard fell about him—his horse was slain and he himself was wounded, yet he stood as a lion at bay. He was captured, despoiled of his jewelled robes, bound and guarded all night on the field of the dead.In the morning the successor of Constantine in plebian habit was led into the presence of the Sultan and commanded to kiss the ground at the feet of the Lord of Asia. Reluctantly he obeyed, and Alp Arslan, starting from his throne, is said to have planted his foot on the neck of the Roman Emperor. No captive was ever more nobly treated than Romanus Diogenes; but no captivity ever wrought more lasting woe. Three years later the Seljuk was the recognized Lord of Asia Minor, and as such ventured to call himself the Lord of Rome. Following the defeat of the Romans the Turks marched into Syria and reduced Damascus by famine and the sword. Other cities in Palestine yielded until the victorious army passing southward stood on the banks of the Nile. The city of Cairo in desperate battle drove back the armies of the Sultan from the confines of Egypt; but in their retreat Jerusalem wasconquered and the house of Seljuk held the city for some twenty years.When Jerusalem fell before the arms of the Crusaders in 1099, the event was applauded as a deliverance in Europe, and was deplored as a calamity in Asia. The Syrian fugitives diffused everywhere their sorrow and consternation: Bagdad mourned in the dust; the Cadi of Damascus tore his beard in the Caliph’s presence; the Commanders of the faithful could only weep and vow vengeance on the head of the infidels who had defiled the Holy City.It is not our purpose to pursue the story of the crusades through all the years that made Jerusalem the prize of battle equally to Christian and Mohammedan. The life and exploits of Saladin and Richard, the lion-hearted are more thrilling than any romance. In a fanatic age, himself a fanatic, the genuine virtues of Saladin commanded the esteem of the Christians; the Emperor of Germany gloried in his friendship; the Greek Emperor solicited his alliance. Egypt, Syria, and Arabia were adorned by the royal foundations of hospitals, colleges and mosques; Cairo was fortified with a wall and citadel; but his works were consecrated to public use: nor did the Sultan indulge himself in a garden or palace of private luxury. The son of Job, a simple Kurd, Saladin was after the follies of a hot youth, a rigid Mussulman, his garment of coarse woolen, and water his only drink.But already had he won for himself the name of “The Scourge of God.” He had united all the forces and riches of Egypt and Asia under his sword and now (1187 A. D.) hastened with eighty thousand horse to the deliverance of Palestine.Three months after the battle of Tiberias (July 4 and 5, 1187) he appeared in arms before Jerusalem. When Saladin had partially completed its investment, he invited its principal inhabitants to meet him in council. When they were assembled he said: “I acknowledge that Jerusalem is the House of God. I do not wish to profane its sanctity by the shedding of blood. Abandon its walls and I will bestow on you a part of my treasures, and I will bestow on you as much land as you will be able to cultivate.” To which the Christians replied: “We cannot yield the city in which our God died: still less can we give it up to you.”This refusal enraged Saladin, and he swore to destroy the towers and ramparts of Jerusalem, and avenge the death of the Mussulmen slaughtered by the soldiers of Godfrey of Bouillon.The siege went on. Many and fierce the sorties from the gates of the city: but fight as they would the operations of the infidels could not be stayed. Despair set in, mingled with wailing, tears and prayers. Jerusalem was filled with sobs and groans.Deputies were sent out to propose a capitulation on the terms which he had first proposed. He sent them back without one word of hope. But one day as the deputies were pleading with unusual earnestness, Saladin pointed to his standards just placed upon the walls saying: “How can you ask me to grant conditions to a city which is already taken?” But he spoke too confidently, for at that moment they were stricken down again.As they went down Baleau the leader of the Christian forces spoke up: “You see Jerusalem is notwithout defenders. If we can obtain no mercy from you we will form a terrible resolution which will fill you with horror. These temples and palaces you are so anxious to conquer shall be destroyed. The riches which excite your cupidity shall be burned. We will destroy the mosque of Omar. We will pound into dust the stone of Jacob which is an object of your worship. We will stay our women and our children with our own hands that they shall never be your slaves. When the Holy City shall become a ruin—a vast tomb—we will march out of it armed with fire and sword and no one of us will ascend to Paradise without first consigning ten Mussulmen to hell. We shall thus obtain a glorious death and in dying shall call down on your head the maledictions of the God of Jerusalem.”Saladin was awed by this terrible speech: told the deputies to return the next day, when the terms of capitulation were signed in the tent of the great sultan, and Jerusalem passed again into the hands of the infidels, after having remained for eighty-eight years in thepossessionof the Christians. The Saracens boast that they retook the Holy City on Friday, the anniversary of the day on which Mohammed ascended from it into heaven: but the complete conquest of the Holy Land by the Turks was to be delayed yet an hundred years.Finally, however, before Mamelukes of Egypt, Jerusalem, and all the cities of the coast fell, and Acre became the last stronghold of the crusaders. Against it marched the Sultan Khali at the head of sixty thousand horse and one hundred and forty thousand foot.After a siege of thirty-three days the double wall was forced, the towers yielded to their engines, the Moslems stormed the city May 18, (A. D., 1291) carried it by the sword; and death or slavery was the lot of sixty thousand Christians. By the command of the Sultan the churches and the fortifications of the Latin cities were demolished, anda mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with theWorld’s Debate; and hundreds of thousands of warriors had found the “Paradise that lies under the shade of swords.”Again must we go to the “roof of the world” to behold the great eruption of Moguls and Tartars whose fierce and rapid and cruel conquests can only be compared with the destructive forces of nature in her wildest moods when she lets loose upon the earth fire and flood, earthquake, avalanche and volcano. From these spacious highlands the tides of emigration and the floods of war have repeatedly been poured. In the twelfth century the various tribes akin to Hun and Turk were united and led to conquest by the formidable Jenghiz Khan,i. e.the most great Khan or Emperor of the Moguls and Tartars.The code of laws which Jenghiz Khan dictated to his subjects was adapted to the preservation of domestic peace and the exercise of foreign hostility. These fiercest of men were mild and just in their intercourse with each other. Their primitive religion consisted in belief in the existence of one God, the author of all good, who fills by His presence the heavens and the earth which He has created by His power. The Tartars and Moguls were addicted to the idols of their various tribes yet there were among them convertsto the religions of Moses, Mohammed and of Christ.Soon all the kindred tribes from the great wall of China to the Volga owned his sway. He was the Khan of many millions of shepherds and warriors. The court of Pekin was astonished at receiving an embassy from a former vassal demanding the same tribute and obedience which he himself had but lately paid. On receiving a haughty answer innumerable squadrons soon pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall and ninety cities were laid low. On his second invasion he laid siege to Pekin. The famine was terrible. Men were chosen by lot to be slain for food. The Moguls mined under the capital and the conflagration of the city lasted for thirty days. China was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction and the five northern provinces were added to the empire of Jenghiz. On the west he touched the dominions of Mohammed, sultan of Carizme, who reigned from the Persian gulf to the borders of India and Turkestan.A caravan of three ambassadors and one hundred and fifty merchants having been put to death by the orders of Mohammed, after he had fasted and prayed for three nights on a mountain, Jenghiz appealed to the judgment of God and his own sword. Seven hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the banners of Jenghiz and his four sons. On the vast plains stretching north of the river Jaxartes (now Jihon) they encountered four hundred thousand soldiers of the Sultan. In the first battle it is said that one hundred and sixty thousand Carizmians were slain. The whole country then lay open to his fierce warriors and from the Caspian to the Indus, a tract of manyhundreds of miles, adorned with the habitations and labors of the most highly civilized races of Asia, was desolated so completely that five centuries have not repaired the ravages of four years. In all this Jenghiz Khan indulged and encouraged the fury of his army. He now yielded with reluctance to the murmurs of his weary but wealthy troops who sighed for the rest of their native lands.The return of Jenghiz was signalized by the overthrow of the few remaining independent kingdoms in Tartary: and he died in the fulness of years and glory, with his last breath exhorting his sons to achieve the conquest of the Chinese Empire. In the sixty-eight years of his first four successors the Mogul had subdued almost all Asia and a large portion of Europe.To the East China was subdued; to the South the conquest of Hindustan was reserved for the house of Timour or Tamerlane. While the hosts that went forth to conquer Russia, Poland, Hungary, etc., (1235–1245) inscribed on the military roll numbered fifteen hundred thousand men. Holagon the grandson of Jenghiz Khan had but to thrust at the phantom of power which the Caliphs of Bagdad enjoyed when it vanished like the mist. Bagdad after a siege of two brief months, was stormed and sacked and the savage Tartar pronounced the death of the Caliph Mostasem the last of the temporal successors of Mohammed whose noble kinsmen of the race of Abbas had reigned in Asia above five hundred years.Once more the torrents of woe flow in upon Armenia lying in the track of the Tartar armies westward. Ani is again besieged and soon a famine broke out within the walls and many of the citizens rushed outand gave themselves up to the mercy of their enemies. They were kindly received and a sufficient supply of food was given to them. Induced by this kindness more than half of the inhabitants were soon found in the camp of the Tartars. All at once the poor wretches were divided into small parties under the pretext of receiving better protection when the soldiers fell upon them and massacred every individual. Then the city was easily taken, destroyed by fire and the entire population put to the sword.Many cities suffered the desolations and horrors of Ani till the Khan ordered his chiefs on to other conquests. Then followed the infliction of a heavy capitation tax on all the remaining provinces—sixty pieces of money being demanded of every Armenian from the age of ten upwards. Those who were unable to pay this sum suffered intolerable tortures. Those who were possessed of lands lost them, their wives and children being seized and sold into slavery. Nothing ever equalled the horrors that now overspread this unhappy country, most of the inhabitants having no money to pay the tax and having no place to which to flee from their oppressors. Finally an embassy to Mangon Khan, a grandson of Jenghiz secured some little alleviation of their misery.Meantime there was growing up in Cilicia a subordinate kingdom of Armenia with Tarsus for its capital—and receiving favor from the Sultan of Egypt and the Khan of the Tartars. Leo III. resumed the kingly reins of his kingdom comprising all of Modern Anatolia. He repaired his cities; he erected public schools. He caused all the literary productions of the Armenians from the earliest ages to be recopied and distributedamong the convents of the kingdom. He reigned for twenty years ardently devoted to the service of God and died in the year 1289.His son, Hethum, was a prince who despised all worldly pomp and grandeur, seldom arrayed himself in royal apparel. He was greatly attached to the priests of his capital engaging daily with them in prayers and other religious exercises. He was particularly fond of the literary productions of the Fathers of the Church. His Bible was his daily companion. He caused a copy of it to be prepared expressly for himself, and at the end of it wrote some lines expressive of the high satisfaction and comfort he had derived from its frequent perusal.These paragraphs may show what has ever been the character of these people who are still being harried to death in the same provinces where they have lived and suffered for centuries.The decline of the spirit of conquest in the Mogul princes of Persia gave a free scope to the rise and progress of the Ottoman Empire which was soon to strike fear into the heart of the Emperor of Constantinople, and finally establish itself in Europe where it remains to this day a blot on Western civilization and a curse to all the people over which it rules.In 1360 we find the throne of the Ottoman Turks established at Adrianople almost within sight of Constantinople which after resisting for a thousand years the assaults of barbarians of the East and the West, now saw herself hemmed in, both in Europe and Asia, by the same hostile power and her Emperor following at his summons the court and camp of an Ottoman Prince.Bajazet surnamed Ilderim, or “The Lightning” whocame to the throne in 1389, and reigned fourteen years, fills a brilliant page in Ottoman history. He forced Constantinople to pay tribute and enjoyed the glory of being the first to found a royal Mosque in the glorious metropolis of the Eastern Church. He would speedily have forced its absolute surrender but that he was doomed to meet and be overthrown by a savage still more savage than himself—the name that caused all Europe and Asia to tremble with fear—the great, the terrible, the blood-thirsty Timour or Tamerlane. The family of Tamerlane was another branch of the imperial stem of Jenghiz Khan. He was born 1335 A. D., in a village that lies forty miles to the south of Samarcand, in a tribe of which his fathers were the hereditary chiefs. His birth was cast in a time of anarchy of bitter domestic feuds; when the Khans of Kashgar with an army of Calmucks harassed the Trans-oxian Kingdom. At the age of twenty-five he stood forth as the deliverer of his people: and in ten years he was invested with imperial command of the Zagatai. The rule over a fertile and populous land five hundred miles in extent either way, might have satisfied an ordinary man: but Timour aspired to the dominion of the world and before his death the crown of Zagatai was but one of twenty-seven which he had placed upon his head. He first swept Persia to the sea. The city of Ormuz bought its safety for an annual tribute of six hundred thousand pieces of gold. Bagdad was laid in ruins: and from the gulf to the mountains of Ararat the whole course of the Tigris and Euphrates was reduced to his obedience.The Khan of the Mogul Empire of the North swept down through the gates of Derbend entering Persia atthe head of ninety thousand horse, burned the palaces of Timour and compelled him amidst the snows of winter to contend for Samarcand and his life.After a mild expostulation, and a glorious victory he resolved on revenge. He invaded Tartary with armies so vast that thirteen miles stretched between his left and right wing. In a march of five months they rarely beheld the footsteps of man. At length the armies met in most fearful conflict. In the heat of conflict the treachery of the bearer of the imperial standard of Kipzak turned the tide of victory to the Zagatai, and Timour gave up the mingled hosts to the “wind of desolation.” The pursuit of a flying enemy led him into the provinces of Russia. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar, but he turned his armies southward, and on the banks of the Don received a deputation of the merchants of Egypt, Venice, Genoa, and Spain, who had built up the great commerce and the city of Azoph. They offered him gifts, admired his magnificence, trusted his word. But the peaceful visit of an Emir who explored the state of the magazines and harbors was speedily followed by the destructive presence of the Tartars, who reduced the city to ashes, pillaged the Moslems, and put every Christian to the sword or sold them into slavery. Having laid waste all the cities in Southern Russia, he returned to his capital at Samarcand.Samarcand, the center of his magnificence, the depot of all riches, arose and extended itself as by magic at each return of the world’s conqueror. It is said that Babylon, Bagdad, Persepolis, Palmyra, Baalbec and Damascus, were all cast into the shade by the mosques, palaces, gardens, and aqueducts which arose under thehands of most skillful artisans brought from every captured city to decorate the capital of a barbarian.Here amid the delights of his gardens, the love of his women, the conversation of his men of letters, the eulogies of poets, did Tamerlane refresh himself after the exploits of a five years’ campaign. But his loves, and delights of ease, did not make him forget that dream of all conquerors—India, and at this invasion he overran it from the Indus to Delhi, and from the Ocean to Thibet.As he proceeded on his march, his army became encumbered with the captives, and he ordered one hundred thousand of them slain in a single night. Remorse, pity, and indignation, seized even a Tartar army, but Tamerlane answered it only by the conquest and massacre of Delhi, that great and magnificent city which had flourished for three hundred years, under Mohammedan kings; the ruins of which are still seen for miles on every side of the modern city. The blood of the slain, crimsoned the waters of the Sacred Ganges for many, many miles on its course to the sea. The recital of his cruelties could not be believed, were they not recorded in the history of all the nations he conquered. The treasures were of incalculable value, and every soldier received one hundred slaves for his share and every Tartar camp follower, twenty.It was while camping on the bank of the Ganges that Tamerlane received from his couriers the tidings of the disturbances on the confines of Anatolia and Georgia, of the revolt of the Christians and the ambitious designs of Bajazet. He returned to Samarcand having accomplished in a twelve month the ten years’ campaign of Alexander the Great.After enjoying a few months tranquillity he proclaimed a seven years’ campaign against the countries of Western Asia. To the soldiers who had served in the Indian wars he granted their choice of home or camp, but the troops of all the kingdoms and provinces of Persia were commanded to assemble at Ispahan and await the imperial standard.With an army of eight hundred thousand fighting men and a multitude of slaves so vast that it is said that they dried up the earth as they marched, he started westward. Words are lacking to describe the desolation and cruelty that attended his march and the sacking of cities.Multitudes of Christians suffered untold horrors rather than deny their faith. The cities that attempted to resist behind their walls were effaced from the earth, and upon their sites towers were erected, the walls of which were composed of living men cemented in the lime.Pursuing the people of Georgia into the gorges of the Caucasus Mountains he inflicted upon them great slaughter, and discovering many caverns into which men, women and children had fled for safety he walled up their entrances and left them to perish.Ispahan in a moment of folly having rebelled and massacred three thousand Tartars he sent back one hundred thousand soldiers with orders that every man should bring him a head on penalty of losing his own. Ispahan in consternation and horror paid this price for its revolt, and on the site of a dismantled city, a mason-wrought pyramid of a hundred thousand heads told the awful story of their doom.Proceeding westward Tamerlane laid siege to Siwas,or Sebaste, modern Siwas, a city having walls of prodigious thickness and a broad moat filled with running water.It contained one hundred and fifty thousand souls, was defended by intrepid Armenians and seemed able to defy every assault of a Tartar multitude without battering artillery to shake the walls.But Tamerlane hesitated only a moment. Prodigal of men, he set thousands at work to undermine the rocks that formed the foundation of the walls. He emptied the moats by cutting deeper channels for the river. He cut down adjacent forests to prop up the mines dug under the towers of the walls; and then setting on fire this underground forest he saw the rocks give way engulfing walls, houses and defenders in the ruins. Twenty days and nights sufficed to open enormous breaches for his soldiers. The city naked and trembling before him awaited its fate. Timour promised to spare the lives of Mohammedans and Christians, and to be content with servitude. But scarcely had he entered it before he inundated it with the blood of its defenders. By his ferocity he made all the East and the West to shudder, and the world to stand aghast at its recital after more than four centuries have covered its horrors. Four thousand Ottomans were buried alive up to the neck and thus left to perish. Countless Christians were bound in couples and cast into trenches which were then covered with boards and earth, and over them the Tartars pitched their tents and took fiendish delight in their moanings. Women were bound by the hair of their heads to the tails of wild young horses and thus dragged to death. The young children were bound hand and foot and laid togetheron an open plain and trampled to death by his cavalry. With the exception of the male children fit for slavery, and the young girls reserved for the harem the entire population was destroyed.The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.THE NEW GRAND VIZIER. TASHIN BEY. THE SHEIK-AL-ISLAM.Do you shudder at even this cool recital? Far worse horrors are still being endured by the Christian people of Armenia this very day on ground that is dyed with the blood of a thousand years ofmartyrdom. And still Christian Europe is unmoved; and the Turk, drunk with the blood of his victims still is propped up on his throne by the arms that should drive him back to the deserts of Tartary: and Christian America contents itself with trying by their relief funds to keep alive the starving remnants of this harried race whose cry to Christendom is “either kill us or in God’s name redeem us.”As Timour took up again his march from desolated Siwas he dragged with cords along the stones of the road at the heels of his horse the head of the governor of Siwas, one of the sons of Bajazet who was then besieging Constantinople. Aroused by the danger that threatened him yet with a deep sadness caused by the death of his son which settled upon him as if in presentiment of his own fate, Bajazet raised the siege, called all his forces together to meet the bloody Conqueror of the East. Aleppo and Damascus meanwhile fell with terrible slaughter, and now on the plains not far from Siwas, Timour awaited the coming of Bajazet.Tamerlane hesitated to engage in this battle with a race of his own blood, the champions of the faith of the Prophet, who were fighting like himself for the triumph of Islam. His envoys were disgracefully treated and his messages were answered with most haughty and insultingletters. “Thy armies” said Bajazet “are innumerable; be they so: but what are the arrows of the flying Tartars against thescimitarsand battle-axes of my firm and invincible Janizaries?”Then this deadly insult: “If I fly from thy arms, may my wives be thrice divorced from my bed; but, if thou hast not courage to meet me in the field mayest thou again receive thy wives after they have thrice endured the embraces of a stranger.”On receiving this letter Timour exclaimed: “Decidedly the son of Mourad is mad.”All day long Timour reviewed his troops of horse as the squadrons passed before him, then turning again to the envoy he made a last offer of peace, “Say to your master that he can still, in accepting my just and moderate conditions, spare the fatal dissension of two servants of the one God, and torrents of human blood to Asia.”Bajazetwas both deaf and blind to the advice of his viziers, his generals and the last message of Tamerlane; and was determined to meet with his army of four hundred thousand men which he had seen gathering for two years, the well trained army of eight hundred thousand men who were formed in nine divisions under the four sons and five favored grandsons of the greatest warrior of the world.Never had the sun of Asia shed its light upon so vast a multitude of warriors gathered for so deadly a conflict on July 28, 1402. Timour brought forward only five hundred thousand of his choicest troops, horse and foot, yet they covered the amphitheater of the hills which arose behind the river in the basin to the north of Angora. He had most carefully chosen his field ofbattle and his position, and facing him was the vast army of Bajazet. All historians, Arabian, Greek and Ottoman agree that over one million men faced each other on this listed field. The situation added to the tragic majesty of the spectacle. The plain, the gradation of the hills and the rugged mountains of Angora made a circus worthy of these imperial gladiators of the two Asias.Timour was stationed on an elevated mound whence he could survey the whole field, while behind him and out of sight from the enemy were forty divisions of select cavalry ready at the critical moment to strengthen any wavering squadrons, or to be hurled on the field to consummate the victory.The first dawn of day upon the mountains of Angora illuminated those two armies in order of battle but motionless. But when the sun had dispelled the shade from the foot of the hills, at the rolling of drums of the Turks with the cry of Allah Achbar the army of Bajazet was put in motion. Soon the battle was on. The first charge of one wing of Tartar cavalry was broken by the immobility of the Servian mountaineers.Then in the rapid advance of his enemy’s troops Timour discovered that the Asiatic army of Bajazet had passed the level of the Ottoman lines in order to turn the hills he was occupying, and down he rushed with his reserve cavalry of forty divisions and cut in two the army of Europe and the army of Asia, throwing one of them back upon the hills and the other into the marshes on the left, slaughtering at the center some thousands of Ottomans and forcing Bajazet himself to fly with ten thousand of his Janizaries to a rising ground detached from the mountains whose steep declivities checked the impetuosity of the Tartar cavalry.Timour watched with admiration the retreat of the Servian mountaineers, as in dense columns clad in splendid mail, unshaken by repeated charges of his cavalry they forced their way obliquely through that multitude until they gained the foothills in safety. “These miserable peasants are lions,” he exclaimed in admiration of their discipline and their courage.Two sons of Bajazet were rescued by the bold daring of their devoted followers, but in vain did they urge the Emperor himself to seek refuge in flight. Satisfied that his sons were safe he continued to fight for glory or for death behind the rampart of his Janizaries who formed about him a circular wall with their dead bodies. Never was fidelity more desperate, more unswerving. Stolen from Christian homes at an early age and trained as warriors they knew no other home than the camp. They knew that their birth among the Christians and their name of renegades left them no other choice than that of death upon the field of battle or the field of torture. The retreat of the ten thousand after the death of Cyrus did not equal the glorious suicide of these ten thousand Janizaries about the body of their Sultan.As the shades of evening began to fall, Bajazet, his youngest son and a few faithful generals and a group of horsemen sought to escape into the woody recesses of the mountains. A troop of Tartar cavalry closely pursued the trail of the retreating Sultan. The day was about to break and they hoped to escape by swimming a swift stream, the horsemen they heard galloping behind them when a loose shoe caused the horse of the Sultan to stumble. None would save themselvesand leave their master, and as one of the Beys was presenting his own horse to him, a Tartar emir with a body of horsemen surrounded the small group of the Ottomans and they were prisoners.Before night had fallen the vanquished Sultan in chains, covered with dust and blood, was brought before Timour, who was seated in the shade of his tent playing chess with the son whom he called the hope of his race. The vanquisher showed neither pride nor insolence before the vanquished. He remembered the maxims and respected the finger of God even in the enemy overthrown at his feet. He remembered that he was of the same race, that they were fighting for the same faith and he almost begged his pardon for the victory. He ordered him to be released, begged him to take a seat with him at the front of his tent on the same rank with himself and promised him that his honor and his life would suffer no risk during his brief captivity. Three imperial tents were prepared for his use; and after the discovery of his attempt to escape, Bajazet was chained at night in one of those iron-barred litters wherein women in their journeys are carried between two mules. Hence the popular, but erroneous, tradition throughout the East about the iron cage wherein Timour had shut up the Sultan intending to exhibit him in his palace at Samarcand. Timour permitted Bajazet to send for his favorite wife, the Princess of Servia—exacting from her at a banquet, but only for a single time, that she should hand him a cup of Cyprus wine the sole vengeance he wished to take for the insulting letter wherein Bajazet had threatened him with taking off his harem.Bajazet died about nine months after his defeat atAntioch in Pisidia—his empire, lost in a single battle—having fallen into fragments before his eyes.Turning away from the possible conquest of Europe Tamerlane soon returned to Samarcand and in 1405 set out for the final and complete conquest of China. Neither age nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timour, he passed the Sihon on the ice, marched hundreds of miles, then pitching his last camp, died of fever and fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water April 1, 1405. The conqueror of Asia had reigned for thirty-five years and died at the age of seventy-one, having shed more blood and caused more misery than any other human being ever born on the earth.

THE DYNASTY OF THE SELJUKIAN TURKS. (A. D. 1038–1152.)

The victorious Turcomans, determined by lot, it is said, the selection of their King; and it fell to Togrul Beg, grandson of Seljuk, whose surname was immortalized in the greatness of his posterity. At the age of forty-five Togrul was invested with the title of Sultan in the royal city of Nishabur, and the sceptre of Irak passed from the Persian to the Turkish nation, that now and everywhere embraced with fervor and sincerity the religion of Mohammed.At the conquest of Mosul and Bagdad he received from the Caliph of the East the title of the lieutenant of the vicar of the prophet, his mystic veil was perfumedwith musk, two crowns were placed on his head; twoscimitarswere girded to his side as the symbol of a double reign over the East and the West.Soon myriads of Turkish horse went forth to conquest, overspreading the frontier of six hundred miles from Tauris to Erzeroum: and the blood of hundreds of thousands of Christians were a grateful sacrifice to the Arabian prophet.The first invasion of poor Armenia was with more than a hundred thousand men and twenty-four provinces were laid waste. The second was with two hundred thousand and they completed the utter ruin of those provinces, carrying into captivity all the inhabitants. In the year 1049 the armies of Togrul made a third invasion, besieging the city of Ardzan, which had a population of three hundred thousand souls, and contained eight hundred churches with schools and hospitals. Notwithstanding their utmost resistance it was taken and a hundred and forty thousand people were massacred, the remnant were carried into captivity and the city was burned. Many other cities were treated in the same way.At the same time there were in Armenia sixty thousand Greek Christian troops from Constantinople, ostensibly for the protection of Armenia, yet they did not take a single step to repel the invaders, preferring to see the Armenians slaughtered. Verily history repeated itself as the great “Christian” powers of Europe stood by witnessing the “reform of Armenia.”There is some small sense of satisfaction in the fact that before the Turks left Armenia they utterly defeated and dispersed these miserable “Defenders of the Faith.”Again in the year 1053 Togrul appeared in Armenia, destroying many cities, among them the capital city of Kars and then marched to the city of Manazguerd and laid siege to it.Basilius, the Chief of the city, was a man of great bravery and military skill. He was assisted in the defence of the city by a skillful Armenian priest who, by his inventions rendered the machines raised by the Persians against the walls entirely useless. Then they planned to undermine the fortifications; but this new design was revealed by a soldier who, smarting under somegrievousand unjust punishment, shot an arrow into the city to which was fastened a letter making known their plans. A countermine was dug, and the Persian miners being captured they were taken into the city and beheaded on the battlements.In his rage Togrul caused a huge wooden ballista to be erected,—so large that it required four hundred men to drag it before the walls. Basilius offered a great reward to the man who should succeed in burning it. There was a very ingenious Gaul in the city who, having composed an inflammable mixture, mounted a swift horse and proceeded to the Persian camp holding a letter in his outstretched hand. He went directly to the spot where the ballista stood and while the guards fancied him a messenger sent to the King he hurled the bottles filled with the combustible material into the machine and in the confusion that attended the burning of the ballista escaped back to the city.The siege was soon raised but other cities felt the fury of his baffled rage as leaving a trail of fire and blood behind him, Togrul returned to Persia. The native historian whom we are consulting, in simplestyet most telling pathos, writes: “Armenia, after this, enjoyed no repose.”“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.Upon the death of Togrul, (A. D. 1062) he was succeeded by his nephew, Alp Arslan who, in the following year came to wreak vengeance on unhappy Armenia. Everywhere he committed the most horrid devastation. Marching to the province of Ararat he laid siege to Ani the Magnificent, with its thousand and one churches.The city was lost by the cowardice of the Governor. A breach had been made in an unprotected part of the wall, but being narrow the citizens so valiantly defended it that they compelled the Sultan to retire; but the Governor, fancying that the Persians had succeeded in forcing an entrance, retired into the citadel. Thinking themselves deserted, a panic seized the Armenians and about fifty thousand of them fled into the country from the gates on the opposite side of the city.The retreat of the Persians was countermanded, the city was taken, orders being given to put every man to the sword. Human blood flowed in torrents. So great was the carnage that the streets were literally choked up with dead bodies, and the waters of the river Akhurian flowed in crimson tides. After his first fury was somewhat abated, Alp Arslan gave orders to seize the most wealthy citizens still alive and torture them to make them reveal places where their treasures were hidden. Then he pillaged the thousand and one churches, murdered all the priests found therein,—some were drowned, some he flayed alive, others died under tortures as excruciating as most fiendish imagination could conceive or invent. Finally, gathering his captives—men, women and children and his plunder, Alp Arslan returned to Persia.We must leave for awhile the bleeding Armenians whose kingdom had been annihilated, to the tender mercies of the wicked, to follow the path of rapine and horror as the torrents of unspeakable Turks flowed westward.They captured cities, put the inhabitants of Asia Minor to the sword and devastated the interior provinces to convert them into pasture lands for their nomad followers.Romanus, husband of the Greek Empress Eudocia took the field against them, and driving them back to the Euphrates, laid siege to the fortress of Manzikert or Malasgerd in Armenia midway between modern Erzeroum and Van. It was on the plain of Manzikert in 1071 after the capture of the fortress, that the East gained one of its greatest triumphs over the West. The Seljuk Sultan and the Roman Emperor met face to face. Romanus rejected in haughty pride the overtures of the Sultan that might have secured his retreat, perhaps peace—and prepared for battle. The Sultan with his own hands tied up the flowing tail of his horse, exchanged his bow and arrows for a mace andscimitar, clothed himself in a white garment, perfumed his body with musk, and declared that if he were vanquished, that spot should be the place of his burial. The Sultan himself had cast away his missile weapons, but his hopes of victory were in the arrows of his cavalry whose squadrons were loosely placed in the form of a crescent. Romanus led his army in a single and solid phalanx and pressed with vigor the artful and yielding resistance of the barbarians. Thusthe greater part of a hot summer’s day was spent in fruitless combat until fatigue compelled him to sound a return to camp. This was the fatal moment. The Turkish squadrons poured a cloud of arrows on the retreating army throwing them into confusion. The horns of the crescent closed in upon the rear of the Greeks.The destruction of the army was complete, the booty immense. Nobly did the Emperor with desperate courage maintain the fight till the close of the day. The imperial station was left naked on all sides to the victorious Turks. His body guard fell about him—his horse was slain and he himself was wounded, yet he stood as a lion at bay. He was captured, despoiled of his jewelled robes, bound and guarded all night on the field of the dead.In the morning the successor of Constantine in plebian habit was led into the presence of the Sultan and commanded to kiss the ground at the feet of the Lord of Asia. Reluctantly he obeyed, and Alp Arslan, starting from his throne, is said to have planted his foot on the neck of the Roman Emperor. No captive was ever more nobly treated than Romanus Diogenes; but no captivity ever wrought more lasting woe. Three years later the Seljuk was the recognized Lord of Asia Minor, and as such ventured to call himself the Lord of Rome. Following the defeat of the Romans the Turks marched into Syria and reduced Damascus by famine and the sword. Other cities in Palestine yielded until the victorious army passing southward stood on the banks of the Nile. The city of Cairo in desperate battle drove back the armies of the Sultan from the confines of Egypt; but in their retreat Jerusalem wasconquered and the house of Seljuk held the city for some twenty years.When Jerusalem fell before the arms of the Crusaders in 1099, the event was applauded as a deliverance in Europe, and was deplored as a calamity in Asia. The Syrian fugitives diffused everywhere their sorrow and consternation: Bagdad mourned in the dust; the Cadi of Damascus tore his beard in the Caliph’s presence; the Commanders of the faithful could only weep and vow vengeance on the head of the infidels who had defiled the Holy City.It is not our purpose to pursue the story of the crusades through all the years that made Jerusalem the prize of battle equally to Christian and Mohammedan. The life and exploits of Saladin and Richard, the lion-hearted are more thrilling than any romance. In a fanatic age, himself a fanatic, the genuine virtues of Saladin commanded the esteem of the Christians; the Emperor of Germany gloried in his friendship; the Greek Emperor solicited his alliance. Egypt, Syria, and Arabia were adorned by the royal foundations of hospitals, colleges and mosques; Cairo was fortified with a wall and citadel; but his works were consecrated to public use: nor did the Sultan indulge himself in a garden or palace of private luxury. The son of Job, a simple Kurd, Saladin was after the follies of a hot youth, a rigid Mussulman, his garment of coarse woolen, and water his only drink.But already had he won for himself the name of “The Scourge of God.” He had united all the forces and riches of Egypt and Asia under his sword and now (1187 A. D.) hastened with eighty thousand horse to the deliverance of Palestine.Three months after the battle of Tiberias (July 4 and 5, 1187) he appeared in arms before Jerusalem. When Saladin had partially completed its investment, he invited its principal inhabitants to meet him in council. When they were assembled he said: “I acknowledge that Jerusalem is the House of God. I do not wish to profane its sanctity by the shedding of blood. Abandon its walls and I will bestow on you a part of my treasures, and I will bestow on you as much land as you will be able to cultivate.” To which the Christians replied: “We cannot yield the city in which our God died: still less can we give it up to you.”This refusal enraged Saladin, and he swore to destroy the towers and ramparts of Jerusalem, and avenge the death of the Mussulmen slaughtered by the soldiers of Godfrey of Bouillon.The siege went on. Many and fierce the sorties from the gates of the city: but fight as they would the operations of the infidels could not be stayed. Despair set in, mingled with wailing, tears and prayers. Jerusalem was filled with sobs and groans.Deputies were sent out to propose a capitulation on the terms which he had first proposed. He sent them back without one word of hope. But one day as the deputies were pleading with unusual earnestness, Saladin pointed to his standards just placed upon the walls saying: “How can you ask me to grant conditions to a city which is already taken?” But he spoke too confidently, for at that moment they were stricken down again.As they went down Baleau the leader of the Christian forces spoke up: “You see Jerusalem is notwithout defenders. If we can obtain no mercy from you we will form a terrible resolution which will fill you with horror. These temples and palaces you are so anxious to conquer shall be destroyed. The riches which excite your cupidity shall be burned. We will destroy the mosque of Omar. We will pound into dust the stone of Jacob which is an object of your worship. We will stay our women and our children with our own hands that they shall never be your slaves. When the Holy City shall become a ruin—a vast tomb—we will march out of it armed with fire and sword and no one of us will ascend to Paradise without first consigning ten Mussulmen to hell. We shall thus obtain a glorious death and in dying shall call down on your head the maledictions of the God of Jerusalem.”Saladin was awed by this terrible speech: told the deputies to return the next day, when the terms of capitulation were signed in the tent of the great sultan, and Jerusalem passed again into the hands of the infidels, after having remained for eighty-eight years in thepossessionof the Christians. The Saracens boast that they retook the Holy City on Friday, the anniversary of the day on which Mohammed ascended from it into heaven: but the complete conquest of the Holy Land by the Turks was to be delayed yet an hundred years.Finally, however, before Mamelukes of Egypt, Jerusalem, and all the cities of the coast fell, and Acre became the last stronghold of the crusaders. Against it marched the Sultan Khali at the head of sixty thousand horse and one hundred and forty thousand foot.After a siege of thirty-three days the double wall was forced, the towers yielded to their engines, the Moslems stormed the city May 18, (A. D., 1291) carried it by the sword; and death or slavery was the lot of sixty thousand Christians. By the command of the Sultan the churches and the fortifications of the Latin cities were demolished, anda mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with theWorld’s Debate; and hundreds of thousands of warriors had found the “Paradise that lies under the shade of swords.”Again must we go to the “roof of the world” to behold the great eruption of Moguls and Tartars whose fierce and rapid and cruel conquests can only be compared with the destructive forces of nature in her wildest moods when she lets loose upon the earth fire and flood, earthquake, avalanche and volcano. From these spacious highlands the tides of emigration and the floods of war have repeatedly been poured. In the twelfth century the various tribes akin to Hun and Turk were united and led to conquest by the formidable Jenghiz Khan,i. e.the most great Khan or Emperor of the Moguls and Tartars.The code of laws which Jenghiz Khan dictated to his subjects was adapted to the preservation of domestic peace and the exercise of foreign hostility. These fiercest of men were mild and just in their intercourse with each other. Their primitive religion consisted in belief in the existence of one God, the author of all good, who fills by His presence the heavens and the earth which He has created by His power. The Tartars and Moguls were addicted to the idols of their various tribes yet there were among them convertsto the religions of Moses, Mohammed and of Christ.Soon all the kindred tribes from the great wall of China to the Volga owned his sway. He was the Khan of many millions of shepherds and warriors. The court of Pekin was astonished at receiving an embassy from a former vassal demanding the same tribute and obedience which he himself had but lately paid. On receiving a haughty answer innumerable squadrons soon pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall and ninety cities were laid low. On his second invasion he laid siege to Pekin. The famine was terrible. Men were chosen by lot to be slain for food. The Moguls mined under the capital and the conflagration of the city lasted for thirty days. China was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction and the five northern provinces were added to the empire of Jenghiz. On the west he touched the dominions of Mohammed, sultan of Carizme, who reigned from the Persian gulf to the borders of India and Turkestan.A caravan of three ambassadors and one hundred and fifty merchants having been put to death by the orders of Mohammed, after he had fasted and prayed for three nights on a mountain, Jenghiz appealed to the judgment of God and his own sword. Seven hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the banners of Jenghiz and his four sons. On the vast plains stretching north of the river Jaxartes (now Jihon) they encountered four hundred thousand soldiers of the Sultan. In the first battle it is said that one hundred and sixty thousand Carizmians were slain. The whole country then lay open to his fierce warriors and from the Caspian to the Indus, a tract of manyhundreds of miles, adorned with the habitations and labors of the most highly civilized races of Asia, was desolated so completely that five centuries have not repaired the ravages of four years. In all this Jenghiz Khan indulged and encouraged the fury of his army. He now yielded with reluctance to the murmurs of his weary but wealthy troops who sighed for the rest of their native lands.The return of Jenghiz was signalized by the overthrow of the few remaining independent kingdoms in Tartary: and he died in the fulness of years and glory, with his last breath exhorting his sons to achieve the conquest of the Chinese Empire. In the sixty-eight years of his first four successors the Mogul had subdued almost all Asia and a large portion of Europe.To the East China was subdued; to the South the conquest of Hindustan was reserved for the house of Timour or Tamerlane. While the hosts that went forth to conquer Russia, Poland, Hungary, etc., (1235–1245) inscribed on the military roll numbered fifteen hundred thousand men. Holagon the grandson of Jenghiz Khan had but to thrust at the phantom of power which the Caliphs of Bagdad enjoyed when it vanished like the mist. Bagdad after a siege of two brief months, was stormed and sacked and the savage Tartar pronounced the death of the Caliph Mostasem the last of the temporal successors of Mohammed whose noble kinsmen of the race of Abbas had reigned in Asia above five hundred years.Once more the torrents of woe flow in upon Armenia lying in the track of the Tartar armies westward. Ani is again besieged and soon a famine broke out within the walls and many of the citizens rushed outand gave themselves up to the mercy of their enemies. They were kindly received and a sufficient supply of food was given to them. Induced by this kindness more than half of the inhabitants were soon found in the camp of the Tartars. All at once the poor wretches were divided into small parties under the pretext of receiving better protection when the soldiers fell upon them and massacred every individual. Then the city was easily taken, destroyed by fire and the entire population put to the sword.Many cities suffered the desolations and horrors of Ani till the Khan ordered his chiefs on to other conquests. Then followed the infliction of a heavy capitation tax on all the remaining provinces—sixty pieces of money being demanded of every Armenian from the age of ten upwards. Those who were unable to pay this sum suffered intolerable tortures. Those who were possessed of lands lost them, their wives and children being seized and sold into slavery. Nothing ever equalled the horrors that now overspread this unhappy country, most of the inhabitants having no money to pay the tax and having no place to which to flee from their oppressors. Finally an embassy to Mangon Khan, a grandson of Jenghiz secured some little alleviation of their misery.Meantime there was growing up in Cilicia a subordinate kingdom of Armenia with Tarsus for its capital—and receiving favor from the Sultan of Egypt and the Khan of the Tartars. Leo III. resumed the kingly reins of his kingdom comprising all of Modern Anatolia. He repaired his cities; he erected public schools. He caused all the literary productions of the Armenians from the earliest ages to be recopied and distributedamong the convents of the kingdom. He reigned for twenty years ardently devoted to the service of God and died in the year 1289.His son, Hethum, was a prince who despised all worldly pomp and grandeur, seldom arrayed himself in royal apparel. He was greatly attached to the priests of his capital engaging daily with them in prayers and other religious exercises. He was particularly fond of the literary productions of the Fathers of the Church. His Bible was his daily companion. He caused a copy of it to be prepared expressly for himself, and at the end of it wrote some lines expressive of the high satisfaction and comfort he had derived from its frequent perusal.These paragraphs may show what has ever been the character of these people who are still being harried to death in the same provinces where they have lived and suffered for centuries.The decline of the spirit of conquest in the Mogul princes of Persia gave a free scope to the rise and progress of the Ottoman Empire which was soon to strike fear into the heart of the Emperor of Constantinople, and finally establish itself in Europe where it remains to this day a blot on Western civilization and a curse to all the people over which it rules.In 1360 we find the throne of the Ottoman Turks established at Adrianople almost within sight of Constantinople which after resisting for a thousand years the assaults of barbarians of the East and the West, now saw herself hemmed in, both in Europe and Asia, by the same hostile power and her Emperor following at his summons the court and camp of an Ottoman Prince.Bajazet surnamed Ilderim, or “The Lightning” whocame to the throne in 1389, and reigned fourteen years, fills a brilliant page in Ottoman history. He forced Constantinople to pay tribute and enjoyed the glory of being the first to found a royal Mosque in the glorious metropolis of the Eastern Church. He would speedily have forced its absolute surrender but that he was doomed to meet and be overthrown by a savage still more savage than himself—the name that caused all Europe and Asia to tremble with fear—the great, the terrible, the blood-thirsty Timour or Tamerlane. The family of Tamerlane was another branch of the imperial stem of Jenghiz Khan. He was born 1335 A. D., in a village that lies forty miles to the south of Samarcand, in a tribe of which his fathers were the hereditary chiefs. His birth was cast in a time of anarchy of bitter domestic feuds; when the Khans of Kashgar with an army of Calmucks harassed the Trans-oxian Kingdom. At the age of twenty-five he stood forth as the deliverer of his people: and in ten years he was invested with imperial command of the Zagatai. The rule over a fertile and populous land five hundred miles in extent either way, might have satisfied an ordinary man: but Timour aspired to the dominion of the world and before his death the crown of Zagatai was but one of twenty-seven which he had placed upon his head. He first swept Persia to the sea. The city of Ormuz bought its safety for an annual tribute of six hundred thousand pieces of gold. Bagdad was laid in ruins: and from the gulf to the mountains of Ararat the whole course of the Tigris and Euphrates was reduced to his obedience.The Khan of the Mogul Empire of the North swept down through the gates of Derbend entering Persia atthe head of ninety thousand horse, burned the palaces of Timour and compelled him amidst the snows of winter to contend for Samarcand and his life.After a mild expostulation, and a glorious victory he resolved on revenge. He invaded Tartary with armies so vast that thirteen miles stretched between his left and right wing. In a march of five months they rarely beheld the footsteps of man. At length the armies met in most fearful conflict. In the heat of conflict the treachery of the bearer of the imperial standard of Kipzak turned the tide of victory to the Zagatai, and Timour gave up the mingled hosts to the “wind of desolation.” The pursuit of a flying enemy led him into the provinces of Russia. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar, but he turned his armies southward, and on the banks of the Don received a deputation of the merchants of Egypt, Venice, Genoa, and Spain, who had built up the great commerce and the city of Azoph. They offered him gifts, admired his magnificence, trusted his word. But the peaceful visit of an Emir who explored the state of the magazines and harbors was speedily followed by the destructive presence of the Tartars, who reduced the city to ashes, pillaged the Moslems, and put every Christian to the sword or sold them into slavery. Having laid waste all the cities in Southern Russia, he returned to his capital at Samarcand.Samarcand, the center of his magnificence, the depot of all riches, arose and extended itself as by magic at each return of the world’s conqueror. It is said that Babylon, Bagdad, Persepolis, Palmyra, Baalbec and Damascus, were all cast into the shade by the mosques, palaces, gardens, and aqueducts which arose under thehands of most skillful artisans brought from every captured city to decorate the capital of a barbarian.Here amid the delights of his gardens, the love of his women, the conversation of his men of letters, the eulogies of poets, did Tamerlane refresh himself after the exploits of a five years’ campaign. But his loves, and delights of ease, did not make him forget that dream of all conquerors—India, and at this invasion he overran it from the Indus to Delhi, and from the Ocean to Thibet.As he proceeded on his march, his army became encumbered with the captives, and he ordered one hundred thousand of them slain in a single night. Remorse, pity, and indignation, seized even a Tartar army, but Tamerlane answered it only by the conquest and massacre of Delhi, that great and magnificent city which had flourished for three hundred years, under Mohammedan kings; the ruins of which are still seen for miles on every side of the modern city. The blood of the slain, crimsoned the waters of the Sacred Ganges for many, many miles on its course to the sea. The recital of his cruelties could not be believed, were they not recorded in the history of all the nations he conquered. The treasures were of incalculable value, and every soldier received one hundred slaves for his share and every Tartar camp follower, twenty.It was while camping on the bank of the Ganges that Tamerlane received from his couriers the tidings of the disturbances on the confines of Anatolia and Georgia, of the revolt of the Christians and the ambitious designs of Bajazet. He returned to Samarcand having accomplished in a twelve month the ten years’ campaign of Alexander the Great.After enjoying a few months tranquillity he proclaimed a seven years’ campaign against the countries of Western Asia. To the soldiers who had served in the Indian wars he granted their choice of home or camp, but the troops of all the kingdoms and provinces of Persia were commanded to assemble at Ispahan and await the imperial standard.With an army of eight hundred thousand fighting men and a multitude of slaves so vast that it is said that they dried up the earth as they marched, he started westward. Words are lacking to describe the desolation and cruelty that attended his march and the sacking of cities.Multitudes of Christians suffered untold horrors rather than deny their faith. The cities that attempted to resist behind their walls were effaced from the earth, and upon their sites towers were erected, the walls of which were composed of living men cemented in the lime.Pursuing the people of Georgia into the gorges of the Caucasus Mountains he inflicted upon them great slaughter, and discovering many caverns into which men, women and children had fled for safety he walled up their entrances and left them to perish.Ispahan in a moment of folly having rebelled and massacred three thousand Tartars he sent back one hundred thousand soldiers with orders that every man should bring him a head on penalty of losing his own. Ispahan in consternation and horror paid this price for its revolt, and on the site of a dismantled city, a mason-wrought pyramid of a hundred thousand heads told the awful story of their doom.Proceeding westward Tamerlane laid siege to Siwas,or Sebaste, modern Siwas, a city having walls of prodigious thickness and a broad moat filled with running water.It contained one hundred and fifty thousand souls, was defended by intrepid Armenians and seemed able to defy every assault of a Tartar multitude without battering artillery to shake the walls.But Tamerlane hesitated only a moment. Prodigal of men, he set thousands at work to undermine the rocks that formed the foundation of the walls. He emptied the moats by cutting deeper channels for the river. He cut down adjacent forests to prop up the mines dug under the towers of the walls; and then setting on fire this underground forest he saw the rocks give way engulfing walls, houses and defenders in the ruins. Twenty days and nights sufficed to open enormous breaches for his soldiers. The city naked and trembling before him awaited its fate. Timour promised to spare the lives of Mohammedans and Christians, and to be content with servitude. But scarcely had he entered it before he inundated it with the blood of its defenders. By his ferocity he made all the East and the West to shudder, and the world to stand aghast at its recital after more than four centuries have covered its horrors. Four thousand Ottomans were buried alive up to the neck and thus left to perish. Countless Christians were bound in couples and cast into trenches which were then covered with boards and earth, and over them the Tartars pitched their tents and took fiendish delight in their moanings. Women were bound by the hair of their heads to the tails of wild young horses and thus dragged to death. The young children were bound hand and foot and laid togetheron an open plain and trampled to death by his cavalry. With the exception of the male children fit for slavery, and the young girls reserved for the harem the entire population was destroyed.The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.THE NEW GRAND VIZIER. TASHIN BEY. THE SHEIK-AL-ISLAM.Do you shudder at even this cool recital? Far worse horrors are still being endured by the Christian people of Armenia this very day on ground that is dyed with the blood of a thousand years ofmartyrdom. And still Christian Europe is unmoved; and the Turk, drunk with the blood of his victims still is propped up on his throne by the arms that should drive him back to the deserts of Tartary: and Christian America contents itself with trying by their relief funds to keep alive the starving remnants of this harried race whose cry to Christendom is “either kill us or in God’s name redeem us.”As Timour took up again his march from desolated Siwas he dragged with cords along the stones of the road at the heels of his horse the head of the governor of Siwas, one of the sons of Bajazet who was then besieging Constantinople. Aroused by the danger that threatened him yet with a deep sadness caused by the death of his son which settled upon him as if in presentiment of his own fate, Bajazet raised the siege, called all his forces together to meet the bloody Conqueror of the East. Aleppo and Damascus meanwhile fell with terrible slaughter, and now on the plains not far from Siwas, Timour awaited the coming of Bajazet.Tamerlane hesitated to engage in this battle with a race of his own blood, the champions of the faith of the Prophet, who were fighting like himself for the triumph of Islam. His envoys were disgracefully treated and his messages were answered with most haughty and insultingletters. “Thy armies” said Bajazet “are innumerable; be they so: but what are the arrows of the flying Tartars against thescimitarsand battle-axes of my firm and invincible Janizaries?”Then this deadly insult: “If I fly from thy arms, may my wives be thrice divorced from my bed; but, if thou hast not courage to meet me in the field mayest thou again receive thy wives after they have thrice endured the embraces of a stranger.”On receiving this letter Timour exclaimed: “Decidedly the son of Mourad is mad.”All day long Timour reviewed his troops of horse as the squadrons passed before him, then turning again to the envoy he made a last offer of peace, “Say to your master that he can still, in accepting my just and moderate conditions, spare the fatal dissension of two servants of the one God, and torrents of human blood to Asia.”Bajazetwas both deaf and blind to the advice of his viziers, his generals and the last message of Tamerlane; and was determined to meet with his army of four hundred thousand men which he had seen gathering for two years, the well trained army of eight hundred thousand men who were formed in nine divisions under the four sons and five favored grandsons of the greatest warrior of the world.Never had the sun of Asia shed its light upon so vast a multitude of warriors gathered for so deadly a conflict on July 28, 1402. Timour brought forward only five hundred thousand of his choicest troops, horse and foot, yet they covered the amphitheater of the hills which arose behind the river in the basin to the north of Angora. He had most carefully chosen his field ofbattle and his position, and facing him was the vast army of Bajazet. All historians, Arabian, Greek and Ottoman agree that over one million men faced each other on this listed field. The situation added to the tragic majesty of the spectacle. The plain, the gradation of the hills and the rugged mountains of Angora made a circus worthy of these imperial gladiators of the two Asias.Timour was stationed on an elevated mound whence he could survey the whole field, while behind him and out of sight from the enemy were forty divisions of select cavalry ready at the critical moment to strengthen any wavering squadrons, or to be hurled on the field to consummate the victory.The first dawn of day upon the mountains of Angora illuminated those two armies in order of battle but motionless. But when the sun had dispelled the shade from the foot of the hills, at the rolling of drums of the Turks with the cry of Allah Achbar the army of Bajazet was put in motion. Soon the battle was on. The first charge of one wing of Tartar cavalry was broken by the immobility of the Servian mountaineers.Then in the rapid advance of his enemy’s troops Timour discovered that the Asiatic army of Bajazet had passed the level of the Ottoman lines in order to turn the hills he was occupying, and down he rushed with his reserve cavalry of forty divisions and cut in two the army of Europe and the army of Asia, throwing one of them back upon the hills and the other into the marshes on the left, slaughtering at the center some thousands of Ottomans and forcing Bajazet himself to fly with ten thousand of his Janizaries to a rising ground detached from the mountains whose steep declivities checked the impetuosity of the Tartar cavalry.Timour watched with admiration the retreat of the Servian mountaineers, as in dense columns clad in splendid mail, unshaken by repeated charges of his cavalry they forced their way obliquely through that multitude until they gained the foothills in safety. “These miserable peasants are lions,” he exclaimed in admiration of their discipline and their courage.Two sons of Bajazet were rescued by the bold daring of their devoted followers, but in vain did they urge the Emperor himself to seek refuge in flight. Satisfied that his sons were safe he continued to fight for glory or for death behind the rampart of his Janizaries who formed about him a circular wall with their dead bodies. Never was fidelity more desperate, more unswerving. Stolen from Christian homes at an early age and trained as warriors they knew no other home than the camp. They knew that their birth among the Christians and their name of renegades left them no other choice than that of death upon the field of battle or the field of torture. The retreat of the ten thousand after the death of Cyrus did not equal the glorious suicide of these ten thousand Janizaries about the body of their Sultan.As the shades of evening began to fall, Bajazet, his youngest son and a few faithful generals and a group of horsemen sought to escape into the woody recesses of the mountains. A troop of Tartar cavalry closely pursued the trail of the retreating Sultan. The day was about to break and they hoped to escape by swimming a swift stream, the horsemen they heard galloping behind them when a loose shoe caused the horse of the Sultan to stumble. None would save themselvesand leave their master, and as one of the Beys was presenting his own horse to him, a Tartar emir with a body of horsemen surrounded the small group of the Ottomans and they were prisoners.Before night had fallen the vanquished Sultan in chains, covered with dust and blood, was brought before Timour, who was seated in the shade of his tent playing chess with the son whom he called the hope of his race. The vanquisher showed neither pride nor insolence before the vanquished. He remembered the maxims and respected the finger of God even in the enemy overthrown at his feet. He remembered that he was of the same race, that they were fighting for the same faith and he almost begged his pardon for the victory. He ordered him to be released, begged him to take a seat with him at the front of his tent on the same rank with himself and promised him that his honor and his life would suffer no risk during his brief captivity. Three imperial tents were prepared for his use; and after the discovery of his attempt to escape, Bajazet was chained at night in one of those iron-barred litters wherein women in their journeys are carried between two mules. Hence the popular, but erroneous, tradition throughout the East about the iron cage wherein Timour had shut up the Sultan intending to exhibit him in his palace at Samarcand. Timour permitted Bajazet to send for his favorite wife, the Princess of Servia—exacting from her at a banquet, but only for a single time, that she should hand him a cup of Cyprus wine the sole vengeance he wished to take for the insulting letter wherein Bajazet had threatened him with taking off his harem.Bajazet died about nine months after his defeat atAntioch in Pisidia—his empire, lost in a single battle—having fallen into fragments before his eyes.Turning away from the possible conquest of Europe Tamerlane soon returned to Samarcand and in 1405 set out for the final and complete conquest of China. Neither age nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timour, he passed the Sihon on the ice, marched hundreds of miles, then pitching his last camp, died of fever and fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water April 1, 1405. The conqueror of Asia had reigned for thirty-five years and died at the age of seventy-one, having shed more blood and caused more misery than any other human being ever born on the earth.

The victorious Turcomans, determined by lot, it is said, the selection of their King; and it fell to Togrul Beg, grandson of Seljuk, whose surname was immortalized in the greatness of his posterity. At the age of forty-five Togrul was invested with the title of Sultan in the royal city of Nishabur, and the sceptre of Irak passed from the Persian to the Turkish nation, that now and everywhere embraced with fervor and sincerity the religion of Mohammed.

At the conquest of Mosul and Bagdad he received from the Caliph of the East the title of the lieutenant of the vicar of the prophet, his mystic veil was perfumedwith musk, two crowns were placed on his head; twoscimitarswere girded to his side as the symbol of a double reign over the East and the West.

Soon myriads of Turkish horse went forth to conquest, overspreading the frontier of six hundred miles from Tauris to Erzeroum: and the blood of hundreds of thousands of Christians were a grateful sacrifice to the Arabian prophet.

The first invasion of poor Armenia was with more than a hundred thousand men and twenty-four provinces were laid waste. The second was with two hundred thousand and they completed the utter ruin of those provinces, carrying into captivity all the inhabitants. In the year 1049 the armies of Togrul made a third invasion, besieging the city of Ardzan, which had a population of three hundred thousand souls, and contained eight hundred churches with schools and hospitals. Notwithstanding their utmost resistance it was taken and a hundred and forty thousand people were massacred, the remnant were carried into captivity and the city was burned. Many other cities were treated in the same way.

At the same time there were in Armenia sixty thousand Greek Christian troops from Constantinople, ostensibly for the protection of Armenia, yet they did not take a single step to repel the invaders, preferring to see the Armenians slaughtered. Verily history repeated itself as the great “Christian” powers of Europe stood by witnessing the “reform of Armenia.”

There is some small sense of satisfaction in the fact that before the Turks left Armenia they utterly defeated and dispersed these miserable “Defenders of the Faith.”

Again in the year 1053 Togrul appeared in Armenia, destroying many cities, among them the capital city of Kars and then marched to the city of Manazguerd and laid siege to it.

Basilius, the Chief of the city, was a man of great bravery and military skill. He was assisted in the defence of the city by a skillful Armenian priest who, by his inventions rendered the machines raised by the Persians against the walls entirely useless. Then they planned to undermine the fortifications; but this new design was revealed by a soldier who, smarting under somegrievousand unjust punishment, shot an arrow into the city to which was fastened a letter making known their plans. A countermine was dug, and the Persian miners being captured they were taken into the city and beheaded on the battlements.

In his rage Togrul caused a huge wooden ballista to be erected,—so large that it required four hundred men to drag it before the walls. Basilius offered a great reward to the man who should succeed in burning it. There was a very ingenious Gaul in the city who, having composed an inflammable mixture, mounted a swift horse and proceeded to the Persian camp holding a letter in his outstretched hand. He went directly to the spot where the ballista stood and while the guards fancied him a messenger sent to the King he hurled the bottles filled with the combustible material into the machine and in the confusion that attended the burning of the ballista escaped back to the city.

The siege was soon raised but other cities felt the fury of his baffled rage as leaving a trail of fire and blood behind him, Togrul returned to Persia. The native historian whom we are consulting, in simplestyet most telling pathos, writes: “Armenia, after this, enjoyed no repose.”

“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.

“The Turks are Upon Us”—The Panic in Stamboul.

Upon the death of Togrul, (A. D. 1062) he was succeeded by his nephew, Alp Arslan who, in the following year came to wreak vengeance on unhappy Armenia. Everywhere he committed the most horrid devastation. Marching to the province of Ararat he laid siege to Ani the Magnificent, with its thousand and one churches.

The city was lost by the cowardice of the Governor. A breach had been made in an unprotected part of the wall, but being narrow the citizens so valiantly defended it that they compelled the Sultan to retire; but the Governor, fancying that the Persians had succeeded in forcing an entrance, retired into the citadel. Thinking themselves deserted, a panic seized the Armenians and about fifty thousand of them fled into the country from the gates on the opposite side of the city.

The retreat of the Persians was countermanded, the city was taken, orders being given to put every man to the sword. Human blood flowed in torrents. So great was the carnage that the streets were literally choked up with dead bodies, and the waters of the river Akhurian flowed in crimson tides. After his first fury was somewhat abated, Alp Arslan gave orders to seize the most wealthy citizens still alive and torture them to make them reveal places where their treasures were hidden. Then he pillaged the thousand and one churches, murdered all the priests found therein,—some were drowned, some he flayed alive, others died under tortures as excruciating as most fiendish imagination could conceive or invent. Finally, gathering his captives—men, women and children and his plunder, Alp Arslan returned to Persia.

We must leave for awhile the bleeding Armenians whose kingdom had been annihilated, to the tender mercies of the wicked, to follow the path of rapine and horror as the torrents of unspeakable Turks flowed westward.

They captured cities, put the inhabitants of Asia Minor to the sword and devastated the interior provinces to convert them into pasture lands for their nomad followers.

Romanus, husband of the Greek Empress Eudocia took the field against them, and driving them back to the Euphrates, laid siege to the fortress of Manzikert or Malasgerd in Armenia midway between modern Erzeroum and Van. It was on the plain of Manzikert in 1071 after the capture of the fortress, that the East gained one of its greatest triumphs over the West. The Seljuk Sultan and the Roman Emperor met face to face. Romanus rejected in haughty pride the overtures of the Sultan that might have secured his retreat, perhaps peace—and prepared for battle. The Sultan with his own hands tied up the flowing tail of his horse, exchanged his bow and arrows for a mace andscimitar, clothed himself in a white garment, perfumed his body with musk, and declared that if he were vanquished, that spot should be the place of his burial. The Sultan himself had cast away his missile weapons, but his hopes of victory were in the arrows of his cavalry whose squadrons were loosely placed in the form of a crescent. Romanus led his army in a single and solid phalanx and pressed with vigor the artful and yielding resistance of the barbarians. Thusthe greater part of a hot summer’s day was spent in fruitless combat until fatigue compelled him to sound a return to camp. This was the fatal moment. The Turkish squadrons poured a cloud of arrows on the retreating army throwing them into confusion. The horns of the crescent closed in upon the rear of the Greeks.

The destruction of the army was complete, the booty immense. Nobly did the Emperor with desperate courage maintain the fight till the close of the day. The imperial station was left naked on all sides to the victorious Turks. His body guard fell about him—his horse was slain and he himself was wounded, yet he stood as a lion at bay. He was captured, despoiled of his jewelled robes, bound and guarded all night on the field of the dead.

In the morning the successor of Constantine in plebian habit was led into the presence of the Sultan and commanded to kiss the ground at the feet of the Lord of Asia. Reluctantly he obeyed, and Alp Arslan, starting from his throne, is said to have planted his foot on the neck of the Roman Emperor. No captive was ever more nobly treated than Romanus Diogenes; but no captivity ever wrought more lasting woe. Three years later the Seljuk was the recognized Lord of Asia Minor, and as such ventured to call himself the Lord of Rome. Following the defeat of the Romans the Turks marched into Syria and reduced Damascus by famine and the sword. Other cities in Palestine yielded until the victorious army passing southward stood on the banks of the Nile. The city of Cairo in desperate battle drove back the armies of the Sultan from the confines of Egypt; but in their retreat Jerusalem wasconquered and the house of Seljuk held the city for some twenty years.

When Jerusalem fell before the arms of the Crusaders in 1099, the event was applauded as a deliverance in Europe, and was deplored as a calamity in Asia. The Syrian fugitives diffused everywhere their sorrow and consternation: Bagdad mourned in the dust; the Cadi of Damascus tore his beard in the Caliph’s presence; the Commanders of the faithful could only weep and vow vengeance on the head of the infidels who had defiled the Holy City.

It is not our purpose to pursue the story of the crusades through all the years that made Jerusalem the prize of battle equally to Christian and Mohammedan. The life and exploits of Saladin and Richard, the lion-hearted are more thrilling than any romance. In a fanatic age, himself a fanatic, the genuine virtues of Saladin commanded the esteem of the Christians; the Emperor of Germany gloried in his friendship; the Greek Emperor solicited his alliance. Egypt, Syria, and Arabia were adorned by the royal foundations of hospitals, colleges and mosques; Cairo was fortified with a wall and citadel; but his works were consecrated to public use: nor did the Sultan indulge himself in a garden or palace of private luxury. The son of Job, a simple Kurd, Saladin was after the follies of a hot youth, a rigid Mussulman, his garment of coarse woolen, and water his only drink.

But already had he won for himself the name of “The Scourge of God.” He had united all the forces and riches of Egypt and Asia under his sword and now (1187 A. D.) hastened with eighty thousand horse to the deliverance of Palestine.

Three months after the battle of Tiberias (July 4 and 5, 1187) he appeared in arms before Jerusalem. When Saladin had partially completed its investment, he invited its principal inhabitants to meet him in council. When they were assembled he said: “I acknowledge that Jerusalem is the House of God. I do not wish to profane its sanctity by the shedding of blood. Abandon its walls and I will bestow on you a part of my treasures, and I will bestow on you as much land as you will be able to cultivate.” To which the Christians replied: “We cannot yield the city in which our God died: still less can we give it up to you.”

This refusal enraged Saladin, and he swore to destroy the towers and ramparts of Jerusalem, and avenge the death of the Mussulmen slaughtered by the soldiers of Godfrey of Bouillon.

The siege went on. Many and fierce the sorties from the gates of the city: but fight as they would the operations of the infidels could not be stayed. Despair set in, mingled with wailing, tears and prayers. Jerusalem was filled with sobs and groans.

Deputies were sent out to propose a capitulation on the terms which he had first proposed. He sent them back without one word of hope. But one day as the deputies were pleading with unusual earnestness, Saladin pointed to his standards just placed upon the walls saying: “How can you ask me to grant conditions to a city which is already taken?” But he spoke too confidently, for at that moment they were stricken down again.

As they went down Baleau the leader of the Christian forces spoke up: “You see Jerusalem is notwithout defenders. If we can obtain no mercy from you we will form a terrible resolution which will fill you with horror. These temples and palaces you are so anxious to conquer shall be destroyed. The riches which excite your cupidity shall be burned. We will destroy the mosque of Omar. We will pound into dust the stone of Jacob which is an object of your worship. We will stay our women and our children with our own hands that they shall never be your slaves. When the Holy City shall become a ruin—a vast tomb—we will march out of it armed with fire and sword and no one of us will ascend to Paradise without first consigning ten Mussulmen to hell. We shall thus obtain a glorious death and in dying shall call down on your head the maledictions of the God of Jerusalem.”

Saladin was awed by this terrible speech: told the deputies to return the next day, when the terms of capitulation were signed in the tent of the great sultan, and Jerusalem passed again into the hands of the infidels, after having remained for eighty-eight years in thepossessionof the Christians. The Saracens boast that they retook the Holy City on Friday, the anniversary of the day on which Mohammed ascended from it into heaven: but the complete conquest of the Holy Land by the Turks was to be delayed yet an hundred years.

Finally, however, before Mamelukes of Egypt, Jerusalem, and all the cities of the coast fell, and Acre became the last stronghold of the crusaders. Against it marched the Sultan Khali at the head of sixty thousand horse and one hundred and forty thousand foot.

After a siege of thirty-three days the double wall was forced, the towers yielded to their engines, the Moslems stormed the city May 18, (A. D., 1291) carried it by the sword; and death or slavery was the lot of sixty thousand Christians. By the command of the Sultan the churches and the fortifications of the Latin cities were demolished, anda mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with theWorld’s Debate; and hundreds of thousands of warriors had found the “Paradise that lies under the shade of swords.”

Again must we go to the “roof of the world” to behold the great eruption of Moguls and Tartars whose fierce and rapid and cruel conquests can only be compared with the destructive forces of nature in her wildest moods when she lets loose upon the earth fire and flood, earthquake, avalanche and volcano. From these spacious highlands the tides of emigration and the floods of war have repeatedly been poured. In the twelfth century the various tribes akin to Hun and Turk were united and led to conquest by the formidable Jenghiz Khan,i. e.the most great Khan or Emperor of the Moguls and Tartars.

The code of laws which Jenghiz Khan dictated to his subjects was adapted to the preservation of domestic peace and the exercise of foreign hostility. These fiercest of men were mild and just in their intercourse with each other. Their primitive religion consisted in belief in the existence of one God, the author of all good, who fills by His presence the heavens and the earth which He has created by His power. The Tartars and Moguls were addicted to the idols of their various tribes yet there were among them convertsto the religions of Moses, Mohammed and of Christ.

Soon all the kindred tribes from the great wall of China to the Volga owned his sway. He was the Khan of many millions of shepherds and warriors. The court of Pekin was astonished at receiving an embassy from a former vassal demanding the same tribute and obedience which he himself had but lately paid. On receiving a haughty answer innumerable squadrons soon pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall and ninety cities were laid low. On his second invasion he laid siege to Pekin. The famine was terrible. Men were chosen by lot to be slain for food. The Moguls mined under the capital and the conflagration of the city lasted for thirty days. China was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction and the five northern provinces were added to the empire of Jenghiz. On the west he touched the dominions of Mohammed, sultan of Carizme, who reigned from the Persian gulf to the borders of India and Turkestan.

A caravan of three ambassadors and one hundred and fifty merchants having been put to death by the orders of Mohammed, after he had fasted and prayed for three nights on a mountain, Jenghiz appealed to the judgment of God and his own sword. Seven hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the banners of Jenghiz and his four sons. On the vast plains stretching north of the river Jaxartes (now Jihon) they encountered four hundred thousand soldiers of the Sultan. In the first battle it is said that one hundred and sixty thousand Carizmians were slain. The whole country then lay open to his fierce warriors and from the Caspian to the Indus, a tract of manyhundreds of miles, adorned with the habitations and labors of the most highly civilized races of Asia, was desolated so completely that five centuries have not repaired the ravages of four years. In all this Jenghiz Khan indulged and encouraged the fury of his army. He now yielded with reluctance to the murmurs of his weary but wealthy troops who sighed for the rest of their native lands.

The return of Jenghiz was signalized by the overthrow of the few remaining independent kingdoms in Tartary: and he died in the fulness of years and glory, with his last breath exhorting his sons to achieve the conquest of the Chinese Empire. In the sixty-eight years of his first four successors the Mogul had subdued almost all Asia and a large portion of Europe.

To the East China was subdued; to the South the conquest of Hindustan was reserved for the house of Timour or Tamerlane. While the hosts that went forth to conquer Russia, Poland, Hungary, etc., (1235–1245) inscribed on the military roll numbered fifteen hundred thousand men. Holagon the grandson of Jenghiz Khan had but to thrust at the phantom of power which the Caliphs of Bagdad enjoyed when it vanished like the mist. Bagdad after a siege of two brief months, was stormed and sacked and the savage Tartar pronounced the death of the Caliph Mostasem the last of the temporal successors of Mohammed whose noble kinsmen of the race of Abbas had reigned in Asia above five hundred years.

Once more the torrents of woe flow in upon Armenia lying in the track of the Tartar armies westward. Ani is again besieged and soon a famine broke out within the walls and many of the citizens rushed outand gave themselves up to the mercy of their enemies. They were kindly received and a sufficient supply of food was given to them. Induced by this kindness more than half of the inhabitants were soon found in the camp of the Tartars. All at once the poor wretches were divided into small parties under the pretext of receiving better protection when the soldiers fell upon them and massacred every individual. Then the city was easily taken, destroyed by fire and the entire population put to the sword.

Many cities suffered the desolations and horrors of Ani till the Khan ordered his chiefs on to other conquests. Then followed the infliction of a heavy capitation tax on all the remaining provinces—sixty pieces of money being demanded of every Armenian from the age of ten upwards. Those who were unable to pay this sum suffered intolerable tortures. Those who were possessed of lands lost them, their wives and children being seized and sold into slavery. Nothing ever equalled the horrors that now overspread this unhappy country, most of the inhabitants having no money to pay the tax and having no place to which to flee from their oppressors. Finally an embassy to Mangon Khan, a grandson of Jenghiz secured some little alleviation of their misery.

Meantime there was growing up in Cilicia a subordinate kingdom of Armenia with Tarsus for its capital—and receiving favor from the Sultan of Egypt and the Khan of the Tartars. Leo III. resumed the kingly reins of his kingdom comprising all of Modern Anatolia. He repaired his cities; he erected public schools. He caused all the literary productions of the Armenians from the earliest ages to be recopied and distributedamong the convents of the kingdom. He reigned for twenty years ardently devoted to the service of God and died in the year 1289.

His son, Hethum, was a prince who despised all worldly pomp and grandeur, seldom arrayed himself in royal apparel. He was greatly attached to the priests of his capital engaging daily with them in prayers and other religious exercises. He was particularly fond of the literary productions of the Fathers of the Church. His Bible was his daily companion. He caused a copy of it to be prepared expressly for himself, and at the end of it wrote some lines expressive of the high satisfaction and comfort he had derived from its frequent perusal.

These paragraphs may show what has ever been the character of these people who are still being harried to death in the same provinces where they have lived and suffered for centuries.

The decline of the spirit of conquest in the Mogul princes of Persia gave a free scope to the rise and progress of the Ottoman Empire which was soon to strike fear into the heart of the Emperor of Constantinople, and finally establish itself in Europe where it remains to this day a blot on Western civilization and a curse to all the people over which it rules.

In 1360 we find the throne of the Ottoman Turks established at Adrianople almost within sight of Constantinople which after resisting for a thousand years the assaults of barbarians of the East and the West, now saw herself hemmed in, both in Europe and Asia, by the same hostile power and her Emperor following at his summons the court and camp of an Ottoman Prince.

Bajazet surnamed Ilderim, or “The Lightning” whocame to the throne in 1389, and reigned fourteen years, fills a brilliant page in Ottoman history. He forced Constantinople to pay tribute and enjoyed the glory of being the first to found a royal Mosque in the glorious metropolis of the Eastern Church. He would speedily have forced its absolute surrender but that he was doomed to meet and be overthrown by a savage still more savage than himself—the name that caused all Europe and Asia to tremble with fear—the great, the terrible, the blood-thirsty Timour or Tamerlane. The family of Tamerlane was another branch of the imperial stem of Jenghiz Khan. He was born 1335 A. D., in a village that lies forty miles to the south of Samarcand, in a tribe of which his fathers were the hereditary chiefs. His birth was cast in a time of anarchy of bitter domestic feuds; when the Khans of Kashgar with an army of Calmucks harassed the Trans-oxian Kingdom. At the age of twenty-five he stood forth as the deliverer of his people: and in ten years he was invested with imperial command of the Zagatai. The rule over a fertile and populous land five hundred miles in extent either way, might have satisfied an ordinary man: but Timour aspired to the dominion of the world and before his death the crown of Zagatai was but one of twenty-seven which he had placed upon his head. He first swept Persia to the sea. The city of Ormuz bought its safety for an annual tribute of six hundred thousand pieces of gold. Bagdad was laid in ruins: and from the gulf to the mountains of Ararat the whole course of the Tigris and Euphrates was reduced to his obedience.

The Khan of the Mogul Empire of the North swept down through the gates of Derbend entering Persia atthe head of ninety thousand horse, burned the palaces of Timour and compelled him amidst the snows of winter to contend for Samarcand and his life.

After a mild expostulation, and a glorious victory he resolved on revenge. He invaded Tartary with armies so vast that thirteen miles stretched between his left and right wing. In a march of five months they rarely beheld the footsteps of man. At length the armies met in most fearful conflict. In the heat of conflict the treachery of the bearer of the imperial standard of Kipzak turned the tide of victory to the Zagatai, and Timour gave up the mingled hosts to the “wind of desolation.” The pursuit of a flying enemy led him into the provinces of Russia. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar, but he turned his armies southward, and on the banks of the Don received a deputation of the merchants of Egypt, Venice, Genoa, and Spain, who had built up the great commerce and the city of Azoph. They offered him gifts, admired his magnificence, trusted his word. But the peaceful visit of an Emir who explored the state of the magazines and harbors was speedily followed by the destructive presence of the Tartars, who reduced the city to ashes, pillaged the Moslems, and put every Christian to the sword or sold them into slavery. Having laid waste all the cities in Southern Russia, he returned to his capital at Samarcand.

Samarcand, the center of his magnificence, the depot of all riches, arose and extended itself as by magic at each return of the world’s conqueror. It is said that Babylon, Bagdad, Persepolis, Palmyra, Baalbec and Damascus, were all cast into the shade by the mosques, palaces, gardens, and aqueducts which arose under thehands of most skillful artisans brought from every captured city to decorate the capital of a barbarian.

Here amid the delights of his gardens, the love of his women, the conversation of his men of letters, the eulogies of poets, did Tamerlane refresh himself after the exploits of a five years’ campaign. But his loves, and delights of ease, did not make him forget that dream of all conquerors—India, and at this invasion he overran it from the Indus to Delhi, and from the Ocean to Thibet.

As he proceeded on his march, his army became encumbered with the captives, and he ordered one hundred thousand of them slain in a single night. Remorse, pity, and indignation, seized even a Tartar army, but Tamerlane answered it only by the conquest and massacre of Delhi, that great and magnificent city which had flourished for three hundred years, under Mohammedan kings; the ruins of which are still seen for miles on every side of the modern city. The blood of the slain, crimsoned the waters of the Sacred Ganges for many, many miles on its course to the sea. The recital of his cruelties could not be believed, were they not recorded in the history of all the nations he conquered. The treasures were of incalculable value, and every soldier received one hundred slaves for his share and every Tartar camp follower, twenty.

It was while camping on the bank of the Ganges that Tamerlane received from his couriers the tidings of the disturbances on the confines of Anatolia and Georgia, of the revolt of the Christians and the ambitious designs of Bajazet. He returned to Samarcand having accomplished in a twelve month the ten years’ campaign of Alexander the Great.

After enjoying a few months tranquillity he proclaimed a seven years’ campaign against the countries of Western Asia. To the soldiers who had served in the Indian wars he granted their choice of home or camp, but the troops of all the kingdoms and provinces of Persia were commanded to assemble at Ispahan and await the imperial standard.

With an army of eight hundred thousand fighting men and a multitude of slaves so vast that it is said that they dried up the earth as they marched, he started westward. Words are lacking to describe the desolation and cruelty that attended his march and the sacking of cities.

Multitudes of Christians suffered untold horrors rather than deny their faith. The cities that attempted to resist behind their walls were effaced from the earth, and upon their sites towers were erected, the walls of which were composed of living men cemented in the lime.

Pursuing the people of Georgia into the gorges of the Caucasus Mountains he inflicted upon them great slaughter, and discovering many caverns into which men, women and children had fled for safety he walled up their entrances and left them to perish.

Ispahan in a moment of folly having rebelled and massacred three thousand Tartars he sent back one hundred thousand soldiers with orders that every man should bring him a head on penalty of losing his own. Ispahan in consternation and horror paid this price for its revolt, and on the site of a dismantled city, a mason-wrought pyramid of a hundred thousand heads told the awful story of their doom.

Proceeding westward Tamerlane laid siege to Siwas,or Sebaste, modern Siwas, a city having walls of prodigious thickness and a broad moat filled with running water.

It contained one hundred and fifty thousand souls, was defended by intrepid Armenians and seemed able to defy every assault of a Tartar multitude without battering artillery to shake the walls.

But Tamerlane hesitated only a moment. Prodigal of men, he set thousands at work to undermine the rocks that formed the foundation of the walls. He emptied the moats by cutting deeper channels for the river. He cut down adjacent forests to prop up the mines dug under the towers of the walls; and then setting on fire this underground forest he saw the rocks give way engulfing walls, houses and defenders in the ruins. Twenty days and nights sufficed to open enormous breaches for his soldiers. The city naked and trembling before him awaited its fate. Timour promised to spare the lives of Mohammedans and Christians, and to be content with servitude. But scarcely had he entered it before he inundated it with the blood of its defenders. By his ferocity he made all the East and the West to shudder, and the world to stand aghast at its recital after more than four centuries have covered its horrors. Four thousand Ottomans were buried alive up to the neck and thus left to perish. Countless Christians were bound in couples and cast into trenches which were then covered with boards and earth, and over them the Tartars pitched their tents and took fiendish delight in their moanings. Women were bound by the hair of their heads to the tails of wild young horses and thus dragged to death. The young children were bound hand and foot and laid togetheron an open plain and trampled to death by his cavalry. With the exception of the male children fit for slavery, and the young girls reserved for the harem the entire population was destroyed.

The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.THE NEW GRAND VIZIER. TASHIN BEY. THE SHEIK-AL-ISLAM.

The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.

THE NEW GRAND VIZIER. TASHIN BEY. THE SHEIK-AL-ISLAM.

Do you shudder at even this cool recital? Far worse horrors are still being endured by the Christian people of Armenia this very day on ground that is dyed with the blood of a thousand years ofmartyrdom. And still Christian Europe is unmoved; and the Turk, drunk with the blood of his victims still is propped up on his throne by the arms that should drive him back to the deserts of Tartary: and Christian America contents itself with trying by their relief funds to keep alive the starving remnants of this harried race whose cry to Christendom is “either kill us or in God’s name redeem us.”

As Timour took up again his march from desolated Siwas he dragged with cords along the stones of the road at the heels of his horse the head of the governor of Siwas, one of the sons of Bajazet who was then besieging Constantinople. Aroused by the danger that threatened him yet with a deep sadness caused by the death of his son which settled upon him as if in presentiment of his own fate, Bajazet raised the siege, called all his forces together to meet the bloody Conqueror of the East. Aleppo and Damascus meanwhile fell with terrible slaughter, and now on the plains not far from Siwas, Timour awaited the coming of Bajazet.

Tamerlane hesitated to engage in this battle with a race of his own blood, the champions of the faith of the Prophet, who were fighting like himself for the triumph of Islam. His envoys were disgracefully treated and his messages were answered with most haughty and insultingletters. “Thy armies” said Bajazet “are innumerable; be they so: but what are the arrows of the flying Tartars against thescimitarsand battle-axes of my firm and invincible Janizaries?”

Then this deadly insult: “If I fly from thy arms, may my wives be thrice divorced from my bed; but, if thou hast not courage to meet me in the field mayest thou again receive thy wives after they have thrice endured the embraces of a stranger.”

On receiving this letter Timour exclaimed: “Decidedly the son of Mourad is mad.”

All day long Timour reviewed his troops of horse as the squadrons passed before him, then turning again to the envoy he made a last offer of peace, “Say to your master that he can still, in accepting my just and moderate conditions, spare the fatal dissension of two servants of the one God, and torrents of human blood to Asia.”

Bajazetwas both deaf and blind to the advice of his viziers, his generals and the last message of Tamerlane; and was determined to meet with his army of four hundred thousand men which he had seen gathering for two years, the well trained army of eight hundred thousand men who were formed in nine divisions under the four sons and five favored grandsons of the greatest warrior of the world.

Never had the sun of Asia shed its light upon so vast a multitude of warriors gathered for so deadly a conflict on July 28, 1402. Timour brought forward only five hundred thousand of his choicest troops, horse and foot, yet they covered the amphitheater of the hills which arose behind the river in the basin to the north of Angora. He had most carefully chosen his field ofbattle and his position, and facing him was the vast army of Bajazet. All historians, Arabian, Greek and Ottoman agree that over one million men faced each other on this listed field. The situation added to the tragic majesty of the spectacle. The plain, the gradation of the hills and the rugged mountains of Angora made a circus worthy of these imperial gladiators of the two Asias.

Timour was stationed on an elevated mound whence he could survey the whole field, while behind him and out of sight from the enemy were forty divisions of select cavalry ready at the critical moment to strengthen any wavering squadrons, or to be hurled on the field to consummate the victory.

The first dawn of day upon the mountains of Angora illuminated those two armies in order of battle but motionless. But when the sun had dispelled the shade from the foot of the hills, at the rolling of drums of the Turks with the cry of Allah Achbar the army of Bajazet was put in motion. Soon the battle was on. The first charge of one wing of Tartar cavalry was broken by the immobility of the Servian mountaineers.

Then in the rapid advance of his enemy’s troops Timour discovered that the Asiatic army of Bajazet had passed the level of the Ottoman lines in order to turn the hills he was occupying, and down he rushed with his reserve cavalry of forty divisions and cut in two the army of Europe and the army of Asia, throwing one of them back upon the hills and the other into the marshes on the left, slaughtering at the center some thousands of Ottomans and forcing Bajazet himself to fly with ten thousand of his Janizaries to a rising ground detached from the mountains whose steep declivities checked the impetuosity of the Tartar cavalry.

Timour watched with admiration the retreat of the Servian mountaineers, as in dense columns clad in splendid mail, unshaken by repeated charges of his cavalry they forced their way obliquely through that multitude until they gained the foothills in safety. “These miserable peasants are lions,” he exclaimed in admiration of their discipline and their courage.

Two sons of Bajazet were rescued by the bold daring of their devoted followers, but in vain did they urge the Emperor himself to seek refuge in flight. Satisfied that his sons were safe he continued to fight for glory or for death behind the rampart of his Janizaries who formed about him a circular wall with their dead bodies. Never was fidelity more desperate, more unswerving. Stolen from Christian homes at an early age and trained as warriors they knew no other home than the camp. They knew that their birth among the Christians and their name of renegades left them no other choice than that of death upon the field of battle or the field of torture. The retreat of the ten thousand after the death of Cyrus did not equal the glorious suicide of these ten thousand Janizaries about the body of their Sultan.

As the shades of evening began to fall, Bajazet, his youngest son and a few faithful generals and a group of horsemen sought to escape into the woody recesses of the mountains. A troop of Tartar cavalry closely pursued the trail of the retreating Sultan. The day was about to break and they hoped to escape by swimming a swift stream, the horsemen they heard galloping behind them when a loose shoe caused the horse of the Sultan to stumble. None would save themselvesand leave their master, and as one of the Beys was presenting his own horse to him, a Tartar emir with a body of horsemen surrounded the small group of the Ottomans and they were prisoners.

Before night had fallen the vanquished Sultan in chains, covered with dust and blood, was brought before Timour, who was seated in the shade of his tent playing chess with the son whom he called the hope of his race. The vanquisher showed neither pride nor insolence before the vanquished. He remembered the maxims and respected the finger of God even in the enemy overthrown at his feet. He remembered that he was of the same race, that they were fighting for the same faith and he almost begged his pardon for the victory. He ordered him to be released, begged him to take a seat with him at the front of his tent on the same rank with himself and promised him that his honor and his life would suffer no risk during his brief captivity. Three imperial tents were prepared for his use; and after the discovery of his attempt to escape, Bajazet was chained at night in one of those iron-barred litters wherein women in their journeys are carried between two mules. Hence the popular, but erroneous, tradition throughout the East about the iron cage wherein Timour had shut up the Sultan intending to exhibit him in his palace at Samarcand. Timour permitted Bajazet to send for his favorite wife, the Princess of Servia—exacting from her at a banquet, but only for a single time, that she should hand him a cup of Cyprus wine the sole vengeance he wished to take for the insulting letter wherein Bajazet had threatened him with taking off his harem.

Bajazet died about nine months after his defeat atAntioch in Pisidia—his empire, lost in a single battle—having fallen into fragments before his eyes.

Turning away from the possible conquest of Europe Tamerlane soon returned to Samarcand and in 1405 set out for the final and complete conquest of China. Neither age nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timour, he passed the Sihon on the ice, marched hundreds of miles, then pitching his last camp, died of fever and fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water April 1, 1405. The conqueror of Asia had reigned for thirty-five years and died at the age of seventy-one, having shed more blood and caused more misery than any other human being ever born on the earth.

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