SALADIN.ByEDWARD GIBBON.

[Born in 1119, died by assassination in the Cathedral Church of Canterbury in 1170. For a long time the Chancellor of England and favorite adviser of the king, Henry II, he became on his installation as archbishop the resolute advocate of papal aggression against the rights and claims of the English kings to the supreme control of national affairs.]

Thomas à Becket, the first man of English descent who, since the Norman conquest, had, during the course ofa whole century, risen to any considerable station, was born of reputable parents in the city of London; and being endowed both with industry and capacity, he early insinuated himself into the favor of Archbishop Theobald, and obtained from that prelate some preferments and offices. By their means he was enabled to travel for improvement to Italy, where he studied the civil and canon law at Bologna; and on his return, he appeared to have made such proficiency in knowledge that he was promoted by his patron to the Archdeaconry of Canterbury, an office of considerable trust and profit. He was afterward employed with success by Theobald in transacting business at Rome; and, on Henry’s accession, he was recommended to that monarch as worthy of further preferment. Henry, who knew that Becket had been instrumental in supporting that resolution of the archbishop which had tended so much to facilitate his own advancement to the throne, was already prepossessed in his favor; and finding, on further acquaintance, that his spirit and abilities entitled him to any trust, he soon promoted him to the dignity of chancellor, one of the first civil offices in the kingdom. The chancellor, in that age, beside the custody of the great seal, had possession of all vacant prelacies and abbeys; he was the guardian of all such minors and pupils as were the king’s tenants; all baronies which escheated to the crown were under his administration; he was entitled to a place in council, even though he were not particularly summoned; and as he exercised also the office of secretary of state, and it belonged to him to countersign all commissions, writs, and letters patent, he was a kind of prime minister, and was concerned in the dispatch of every business of importance. Besides exercising this high office, Becket, by the favor of the king or archbishop, was made Provost of Beverley, Dean of Hastings, and Constable of the Tower; he was put in possession of the honors of Eye and Berkham, large baronies that had escheated to the crown; and, to complete his grandeur, hewas intrusted with the education of Prince Henry, the king’s eldest son and heir of the monarchy.

The pomp of his retinue, the sumptuousness of his furniture, the luxury of his table, the munificence of his presents, corresponded to these great preferments; or rather exceeded anything that England had ever before seen in any subject. His historian and secretary, Fitz-Stephens, mentions, among other particulars, that his apartments were every day in winter covered with clean straw or hay, and in summer with green rushes or boughs, lest the gentlemen who paid court to him, and who could not, by reason of their great number, find a place at table, should soil their fine clothes by sitting on a dirty floor. A great number of knights were retained in his service; the greatest barons were proud of being received at his table; his house was a place of education for the sons of the chief nobility; and the king himself frequently vouchsafed to partake of his entertainments. As his way of life was splendid and opulent, his amusements and occupations were gay, and partook of the cavalier spirit, which, as he had only taken deacon’s orders, he did not think unbefitting his character. He employed himself at leisure hours in hunting, hawking, gaming, and horsemanship; he exposed his person in several military actions; he carried over, at his own charge, seven hundred knights to attend the king in his wars at Toulouse; in the subsequent wars on the frontiers of Normandy he maintained, during forty days, twelve hundred knights, and four thousand of their train; and in an embassy to France with which he was intrusted he astonished that court with the number and magnificence of his retinue.

Becket, who, by his complaisance and good humor, had rendered himself agreeable, and by his industry and abilities useful, to his master, appeared to him the fittest person for supplying the vacancy made by the death of Theobald. As he was well acquainted with the king’s intentions of retrenching, or rather confining within the ancient bounds,all ecclesiastical privileges, and always showed a ready disposition to comply with them, Henry, who never expected any resistance from that quarter, immediately issued orders for electing him Archbishop of Canterbury. But this resolution, which was taken contrary to the opinion of Matilda and many of the ministers, drew after it very unhappy consequences; and never prince of so great penetration appeared, in the issue, to have so little understood the genius and character of his minister.

No sooner was Becket installed in this high dignity, which rendered him for life the second person in the kingdom, with some pretentions of aspiring to be the first, than he totally altered his demeanor and conduct, and endeavored to acquire the character of sanctity, of which his former busy and ostentatious course of life might, in the eyes of the people, have naturally bereaved him. Without consulting the king, he immediately returned into his hands the commission of chancellor, pretending that he must thenceforth detach himself from secular affairs and be solely employed in the exercise of his spiritual function, but in reality, that he might break off all connections with Henry, and apprise him that Becket, as Primate of England, was now become entirely a new personage. He maintained in his retinue and attendants alone his ancient pomp and luster, which was useful to strike the vulgar; in his own person he affected the greatest austerity and most rigid mortification, which, he was sensible, would have an equal or a greater tendency to the same end. He wore sackcloth next his skin, which, by his affected care to conceal it, was necessarily the more remarked by all the world; he changed it so seldom, that it was filled with dirt and vermin; his usual diet was bread, his drink water, which he even rendered further unpalatable by the mixture of unsavory herbs; he tore his back with the frequent discipline which he inflicted on it; he daily on his knees washed, in imitation of Christ, the feet of thirteen beggars, whom he afterward dismissedwith presents; he gained the affection of the monks by his frequent charities to the convents and hospitals; every one who made profession of sanctity was admitted to his conversation, and returned full of panegyrics on the humility as well as on the piety and mortification of the holy primate; he seemed to be perpetually employed in reciting prayers and pious lectures, or in perusing religious discourses; his aspect wore the appearance of seriousness and mental recollection and secret devotion; and all men of penetration plainly saw that he was meditating some great design, and that the ambition and ostentation of his character had turned itself toward a new and more dangerous object.

Four gentlemen of the king’s household, Reginald Fitz-Urse, William de Traci, Hugh de Moreville, and Richard Brito, taking certain passionate expressions to be a hint for Becket’s death, immediately communicated their thoughts to each other, and, swearing to avenge their prince’s quarrel, secretly withdrew from court. Some menacing expressions which they had dropped gave a suspicion of their design, and the king dispatched a messenger after them, charging them to attempt nothing against the person of the primate; but these orders arrived too late to prevent their fatal purpose. The four assassins, though they took different roads to England, arrived nearly about the same time at Saltwoode, near Canterbury, and being there joined by some assistants they proceeded in great haste to the archiepiscopal palace. They found the primate, who trusted entirely to the sacredness of his character, very slenderly attended; and, though they threw out many menaces and reproaches against him, he was so incapable of fear that, without using any precautions against their violence, he immediately went to St. Benedict’s Church to hear vespers. They followed him thither, attacked him before the altar, and having cloven his head with many blows retired without meeting any opposition. This was the tragical end of Thomas à Becket, a prelate of the most lofty, intrepid, and inflexible spirit, whowas able to cover to the world, and probably to himself, the enterprises of pride and ambition under the disguise of sanctity and of zeal for the interests of religion: an extraordinary personage, surely, had he been allowed to remain in his first station, and had directed the vehemence of his character to the support of law and justice, instead of being engaged, by the prejudices of the times, to sacrifice all private duties and public connections to ties which he imagined or represented as superior to every civil and political consideration. But no man who enters into the genius of that age can reasonably doubt of this prelate’s sincerity.

[Malek al-Nasir Salah ed-Din Abu Modhafer Yusuf, Sultan of Egypt and Syria, born 1137, died 1193. Of Kurdish descent he finally rose from a subordinate rank to royal power. His name stands embalmed in history and tradition as the most noble and chivalrous of those Saracen rulers whom the Christian powers fought against during the Crusades.]

Thehilly country beyond the Tigris is occupied by the pastoral tribes of the Kurds, a people hardy, strong, savage, impatient of the yoke, addicted to rapine, and tenacious of the government of their national chiefs. The resemblance of name, situation, and manners, seems to identify them with the Carduchians of the Greeks; and they still defend against the Ottoman Porte the antique freedom which they asserted against the successors of Cyrus. Poverty and ambition prompted them to embrace the profession of mercenary soldiers; the service of his father and uncle prepared the reign of the great Saladin, and the son of Job or Ayub, a simple Kurd, magnanimously smiled at his pedigree, which flattery deduced from the Arabian caliphs. So unconscious wasNoureddin of the impending ruin of his house that he constrained the reluctant youth to follow his Uncle Shiracouh into Egypt; his military character was established by the defense of Alexandria, and, if we may believe the Latins, he solicited and obtained from the Christian general theprofanehonors of knighthood. On the death of Shiracouh, the office of grand vizier was bestowed on Saladin, as the youngest and least powerful of the emirs; but with the advice of his father, whom he invited to Cairo, his genius obtained the ascendant over his equals, and attached the army to his person and interest. While Noureddin lived, these ambitious Kurds were the most humble of his slaves; and the indiscreet murmurs of the divan were silenced by the prudent Ayub, who loudly protested that at the command of the sultan he himself would lead his son in chains to the foot of the throne. “Such language,” he added in private, “was prudent and proper in an assembly of your rivals; but we are now above fear and obedience, and the threats of Noureddin shall not extort the tribute of a sugar-cane.” His seasonable death relieved them from the odious and doubtful conflict; his son, a minor of eleven years of age, was left for a while to the emirs of Damascus, and the new lord of Egypt was decorated by the caliph with every title that could sanctify his usurpation in the eyes of the people.

Nor was Saladin long content with the possession of Egypt; he despoiled the Christians of Jerusalem, and the Atabeks of Damascus, Aleppo, and Diarbekir; Mecca and Medina acknowledged him for their temporal protector; his brother subdued the distant regions of Yemen, or the happy Arabia; and at the hour of his death, his empire was spread from the African Tripoli to the Tigris, and from the Indian Ocean to the mountains of Armenia. In the judgment of his character, the reproaches of treason and ingratitude strike forcibly onourminds, impressed, as they are, with the principle and experience of law and loyalty. But his ambition may in some measure be excused by the revolutions of Asia,which had erased every notion of legitimate succession; by the recent example of the Atabeks themselves; by his reverence to the son of his benefactor, his humane and generous behavior to the collateral branches; bytheirincapacity andhismerit; by the approbation of the caliph, the sole source of all legitimate power; and, above all, by the wishes and interest of the people, whose happiness is the first object of government. Inhisvirtues, and in those of his patron, they admired the singular union of the hero and the saint; for both Noureddin and Saladin are ranked among the Mahometan saints; and the constant meditation of the holy war appears to have shed a serious and sober color over their lives and actions.

The youth of the latter was addicted to wine and women, but his aspiring spirit soon renounced the temptations of pleasure for the graver follies of fame and dominion. The garment of Saladin was of coarse woolen, water was his only drink, and while he emulated the temperance, he surpassed the chastity of his Arabian prophet. Both in faith and practice he was a rigid Mussulman; he ever deplored that the defense of religion had not allowed him to accomplish the pilgrimage of Mecca; but at the stated hours, five times each day, the sultan devoutly prayed with his brethren; the involuntary omission of fasting was scrupulously repaid, and his perusal of the Koran on horseback between the approaching armies may be quoted as a proof, however ostentatious, of piety and courage. The superstitious doctrine of the sect of Shafei was the only study that he deigned to encourage. The poets were safe in his contempt, but all profane science was the object of his aversion, and a philosopher who had vented some speculative novelties was seized and strangled by the command of the royal saint. The justice of his divan was accessible to the meanest suppliant against himself and his ministers; and it was only for a kingdom that Saladin would deviate from the rule of equity. While the descendants of Seljuk and Zenghi held his stirrup andsmoothed his garments, he was affable and patient with the meanest of his servants. So boundless was his liberality that he distributed twelve thousand horses at the siege of Acre; and, at the time of his death, no more than forty-seven drachms of silver and one piece of gold coin were found in the treasury; yet in a martial reign, the tributes were diminished, and the wealthy citizens enjoyed without fear or danger the fruits of their industry. Egypt, Syria, and Arabia, were adorned by the royal foundations of hospitals, colleges, and mosques, and 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. 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, and the conquest of Jerusalem diffused, and perhaps magnified, his fame both in the East and West.

[Born 1113, died 1189. Henry was the grandson of Henry I, the great-grandson of William the Conqueror by the distaff side, and son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Duke of Anjou. He was first of the Plantagenet dynasty of English kings. His reign was brilliantly distinguished by the further establishment of legal institutions and a rigid regard for justice to all classes of his subjects.]

Thusdied, in the fifty-eighth year of his age, and thirty-fifth of his reign, the greatest prince of his time, for wisdom, virtue, and abilities, and the most powerful in extent of dominion of all those that had ever filled the throne of England. His character, in private as well as in public life, is almost without a blemish, and he seems to have possessedevery accomplishment, both of body and mind, which makes a man either estimable or amiable. He was of a middle stature, strong and well proportioned; his countenance was lively and engaging; his conversation affable and entertaining; his elocution easy, persuasive, and ever at command. He loved peace, but possessed both bravery and conduct in war, was provident without timidity, severe in the execution of justice without rigor, and temperate without austerity. He preserved health, and kept himself from corpulency, to which he was somewhat inclined, by an abstemious diet and by frequent exercise, particularly hunting. When he could enjoy leisure, he recreated himself either in learned conversation or in reading, and he cultivated his natural talents by study above any prince of his time. His affections, as well as his enmities, were warm and durable, and his long experience of the ingratitude and infidelity of men never destroyed the natural sensibility of his temper, which disposed him to friendship and society. His character has been transmitted to us by several writers who were his contemporaries, and it extremely resembles, in its most remarkable features, that of his maternal grandfather, Henry I, excepting only that ambition, which was a ruling passion in both, found not in the first Henry such unexceptionable means of exerting itself, and pushed that prince into measures which were both criminal in themselves and were the cause of further crimes, from which his grandson’s conduct was happily exempted.

This prince, like most of his predecessors of the Norman line, except Stephen, passed more of his time on the Continent than in this island; he was surrounded with the English gentry and nobility when abroad; the French gentry and nobility attended him when he resided in England; both nations acted in the government as if they were the same people; and, on many occasions, the legislatures seem not to have been distinguished. As the king and all the English barons were of French extraction, the manners ofthat people acquired the ascendant, and were regarded as the models of imitation. All foreign improvements, therefore, such as they were, in literature and politeness, in laws and arts, seem now to have been, in a good measure, transplanted into England, and that kingdom was become little inferior, in all the fashionable accomplishments, to any of its neighbors on the Continent. The more homely but more sensible manners and principles of the Saxons were exchanged for the affectations of chivalry and the subtleties of school philosophy; the feudal ideas of civil government, the Romish sentiments in religion, had taken entire possession of the people; by the former, the sense of submission toward princes was somewhat diminished in the barons; by the latter, the devoted attachment to papal authority was much augmented among the clergy. The Norman and other foreign families established in England had now struck deep root, and being entirely incorporated with the people, whom at first they oppressed and despised, they no longer thought that they needed the protection of the crown for the enjoyment of their possessions, or considered their tenure as precarious. They aspired to the same liberty and independence which they saw enjoyed by their brethren on the Continent, and desired to restrain those exorbitant prerogatives and arbitrary practices which the necessities of war and the violence of conquest had at first obliged them to indulge in their monarch. That memory also of a more equal government under the Saxon princes, which remained with the English, diffused still further the spirit of liberty, and made the barons both desirous of more independence to themselves, and willing to indulge it to the people. And it was not long ere this secret revolution in the sentiments of men produced, first violent convulsions in the state, then an evident alteration in the maxims of government.

The history of all the preceding kings of England since the Conquest gives evident proofs of the disorders attending the feudal institutions—the licentiousness of the barons,their spirit of rebellion against the prince and laws, and of animosity against each other; the conduct of the barons in the transmarine dominions of those monarchs afforded, perhaps, still more flagrant instances of these convulsions, and the history of France during several ages consists almost entirely of narrations of this nature. The cities, during the continuance of this violent government, could neither be very numerous nor populous, and there occur instances which seem to evince that, though these are always the first seat of law and liberty, their police was in general loose and irregular, and exposed to the same disorders with those by which the country was generally infested. It was a custom in London for great numbers, to the amount of a hundred or more, the sons and relations of considerable citizens, to form themselves into a licentious confederacy, to break into rich houses and plunder them, to rob and murder the passengers, and to commit with impunity all sorts of disorder. By these crimes it had become so dangerous to walk the streets by night that the citizens durst no more venture abroad after sunset than if they had been exposed to the incursions of a public enemy. The brother of the Earl of Ferrars had been murdered by some of those nocturnal rioters, and the death of so eminent a person, which was much more regarded than that of many thousands of an inferior station, so provoked the king that he swore vengeance against the criminals, and became thenceforth more rigorous in the execution of the laws.

Henry’s care in administering justice had gained him so great a reputation that even foreign and distant princes made him arbiter, and submitted their differences to his judgment. Sanchez, King of Navarre, having some controversies with Alphonso, King of Castile, was contented, though Alphonso had married the daughter of Henry, to choose this prince for a referee; and they agreed, each of them to consign three castles into neutral hands as a pledge of their not departing from his award. Henry made thecause be examined before his great council, and gave a sentence which was submitted to by both parties. These two Spanish kings sent each a stout champion to the court of England, in order to defend his cause by arms in case the way of duel had been chosen by Henry.

[An Asiatic conqueror, born about 1160, died 1227. His conquests extended over the greater part of Asia, and touched Eastern Europe. He belonged to that type exemplified by Alexander the Great, Attila, Timour, and Napoleon, who made war for the mere passion and glory of conquest, although he seems to have been by no means destitute of generous and magnanimous qualities.]

Fromthe spacious highlands between China, Siberia, and the Caspian Sea, the tide of emigration and war has repeatedly been poured. These ancient seats of the Huns and Turks were occupied in the twelfth century by many pastoral tribes, of the same descent and similar manners, which were united and (A.D.1206-1227) led to conquest by the formidable Zingis. In his ascent to greatness, that barbarian (whose private appellation was Temugin) had trampled on the necks of his equals. His birth was noble, but it was in the pride of victory that the prince or people deduced his seventh ancestor from the immaculate conception of a virgin. His father had reigned over thirteen hordes, which composed about thirty or forty thousand families, above two thirds refused to pay tithes or obedience to his infant son, and at the age of thirteen, Temugin fought a battle against his rebellious subjects. The future conqueror of Asia was reduced to fly and to obey, but he rose superior to his fortune, and in his fortieth year he had established his fame and dominion over the circumjacenttribes. In a state of society in which policy is rude and valor is universal the ascendant of one man must be founded on his power and resolution to punish his enemies and recompense his friends. His first military league was ratified by the simple rites of sacrificing a horse and tasting of a running stream; Temugin pledged himself to divide with his followers the sweets and the bitters of life, and, when he had shared among them his horses and apparel, he was rich in their gratitude and his own hopes. After his first victory, he placed seventy caldrons on the fire, and seventy of the most guilty rebels were cast headlong into the boiling water. The sphere of his attraction was continually enlarged by the ruin of the proud and the submission of the prudent; and the boldest chieftains might tremble when they beheld, enchased in silver, the skull of the khan of the Keraites, who, under the name of Prester John, had corresponded with the Roman pontiff and the princes of Europe. The ambition of Temugin condescended to employ the arts of superstition, and it was from a naked prophet who could ascend to heaven on a white horse that he accepted the title of Zingis, themost great, and a divine right to the conquest and dominion of the earth. In a generalcouroultai, or diet, he was seated on a felt, which was long afterward revered as a relic, and solemnly proclaimed great khan, or emperor, of the Moguls and Tartars. Of these kindred, though rival names, the former had given birth to the imperial race, and the latter has been extended, by accident or error, over the spacious wilderness of the north.

The code of laws which Zingis dictated to his subjects was adapted to the preservation of domestic peace and the exercise of foreign hostility. The punishment of death was inflicted on the crimes of adultery, murder, perjury, and the capital thefts of a horse or an ox; and the fiercest of men were mild and just in their intercourse with each other. The future election of the great kahn was vested in the princes of his family and the heads of the tribes, and theregulations of the chase were essential to the pleasures and plenty of a Tartar camp. The victorious nation was held sacred from all servile labors, which were abandoned to slaves and strangers, and every labor was servile except the profession of arms. The service and discipline of the troops, who were armed with bows, cimeters, and iron maces, and divided by hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands, were the institutions of a veteran commander. Each officer and soldier was made responsible, under pain of death, for the safety and honor of his companions; and the spirit of conquest breathed in the law that peace should never be granted unless to a vanquished and suppliant enemy.

But it is the religion of Zingis that best deserves our wonder and applause. The Catholic inquisitors of Europe, who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of philosophy, and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration. His first and only article of faith was the existence of one God, the author of all good, who fills by his presence the heavens and earth, which he has created by his power. The Tartars and Moguls were addicted to the idols of their peculiar tribes, and many of them had been converted by the foreign missionaries to the religions of Moses, of Mahomet, and of Christ. These various systems in freedom and concord were taught and practiced within the precincts of the same camp, and the bonze, the imaum, the rabbi, the Nestorian and the Latin priest, enjoyed the same honorable exemption from service and tribute. In the mosque of Bokhara, the insolent victor might trample the Koran under his horse’s feet, but the calm legislator respected the prophets and pontiffs of the most hostile sects. The reason of Zingis was not informed by books—the khan could neither read nor write—and, except the tribe of the Igours, the greatest part of the Moguls and Tartars were as illiterate as their sovereign. The memory of their exploits was preserved by tradition; sixty-eight years after the death of Zingis, these traditions were collected and transcribed. The brevity of their domestic annals may be supplied by the Chinese, Persians, Armenians, Syrians, Arabians, Greeks, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, and Latins; and each nation will deserve credit in the relation of their own disasters and defeats.

The arms of Zingis and his lieutenants successively reduced the hordes of the desert, who pitched their tents between the wall of China and the Volga; and the Mogul emperor became the monarch of the pastoral world, the lord of many millions of shepherds and soldiers, who felt their united strength, and were impatient to rush on the mild and wealthy climates of the south. His ancestors had been the tributaries of the Chinese emperors, and Temugin himself had been disgraced by a title of honor and servitude. The court of Pekin was astonished by an embassy from its former vassal, who, in the tone of the king of nations, exacted the tribute and obedience which he had paid, and who affected to treat theson of heavenas the most contemptible of mankind. A haughty answer disguised their secret apprehensions, and their fears were soon justified by the march of innumerable squadrons, who pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall. Ninety cities were stormed, or starved, by the Moguls; ten only escaped; and Zingis, from a knowledge of the filial piety of the Chinese, covered his vanguard with their captive parents—an unworthy, and by degrees a fruitless, abuse of the virtue of his enemies. His invasion was supported by the revolt of one hundred thousand Khitans who guarded the frontier, yet he listened to a treaty, and a princess of China, three thousand horses, five hundred youths and as many virgins, and a tribute of gold and silk were the price of his retreat. In his second expedition, he compelled the Chinese emperor to retire beyond the Yellow River to amore southern residence. The siege of Pekin was long and laborious; the inhabitants were reduced by famine to decimate and devour their fellow-citizens; when their ammunition was spent, they discharged ingots of gold and silver from their engines; but the Moguls introduced a mine to the center of the capital, and the conflagration of the palace burned above thirty days. China was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction, and the five northern provinces were added to the empire of Zingis.

In the west he touched the dominions of Mohammed, sultan of Carizme, who reigned from the Persian Gulf to the borders of India and Turkestan; and who, in the proud imitation of Alexander the Great, forgot the servitude and ingratitude of his fathers to the house of Seljuk. It was the wish of Zingis to establish a friendly and commercial intercourse with the most powerful of the Moslem princes; nor could he be tempted by the secret solicitations of the caliph of Bagdad, who sacrificed to his personal wrongs the safety of the Church and state. A rash and inhuman deed provoked and justified the Tartar arms in the invasion of the southern Asia. A caravan of three ambassadors and one hundred and fifty merchants was arrested and murdered at Otrar, by the command of Mohammed; nor was it till after a demand and denial of justice, till he had prayed and fasted three nights on a mountain, that the Mogul emperor appealed to the judgment of God and his sword. Our European battles, says a philosophic writer, are petty skirmishes, if compared to the numbers that have fought and fallen in the fields of Asia. Seven hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the standard of Zingis and his four sons. In the vast plains that extend to the north of the Sihon or Jaxartes, they were encountered by four hundred thousand soldiers of the sultan; and in the first battle, which was suspended by the night, one hundred and sixty thousands Carizmians were slain.

The Persian historians will relate the sieges and reduction of Otrar, Cogende, Bochara, Samarcand, Carizme, Herat, Merou, Nisabour, Balch, and Candahar; and the conquest of the rich and populous countries of Transoxiana, Carizme, and Chorasan. The destructive hostilities of Attila and the Huns have long since been elucidated by the example of Zingis and the Moguls; and in this more proper place I shall be content to observe, that, from the Caspian to the Indus, they ruined a tract of many hundred miles, which was adorned with the habitations and labors of mankind, and that five centuries have not been sufficient to repair the ravages of four years. The Mogul conqueror yielded with reluctance to the murmurs of his weary and wealthy troops, who sighed for the enjoyment of their native land. Incumbered with the spoils of Asia, he slowly measured back his footsteps, betrayed some pity for the misery of the vanquished, and declared his intention of rebuilding the cities which had been swept away by the tempest of his arms. After he had repassed the Oxus and Jaxartes, he was joined by two generals, whom he had detached with thirty thousand horse to subdue the western provinces of Persia. They had trampled on the nations which opposed their passage, penetrated through the gates of Derbend, traversed the Volga and the Desert, and accomplished the circuit of the Caspian Sea, by an expedition which had never been attempted and has never been repeated. The return of Zingis was signalized by the overthrow of the rebellious or independent kingdoms of Tartary; and he died in the fulness of years and glory, with his last breath exhorting and instructing his sons to achieve the conquest of the Chinese Empire.

[A valiant soldier, astute politician, and public-spirited reformer of the thirteenth century, born about 1200, died 1265. The son of that De Montfort who led the cruel crusade against the Albigenses of southern France, Simon became in early life an English subject, received the highest honors from Henry III, and also secured the hand of his sister in marriage. He sympathized with and became a leader of the English barons in demanding the necessary concessions to complete and enforce that great charter wrung from King John at Runnymede; and finally took up arms to constrain Henry. In the civil war which ensued Simon of Montfort was for the most part victorious, but finally found himself forsaken by the fickle baronage whose cause he had espoused. He was obliged to throw himself on the support of the people. In the last Parliament he convoked, in the year of his death, he summoned knights and burgesses to sit by the side of the barons and bishops, thus creating a new force in the English constitution, which wrought a great change in the political system of the country. He was slain and his army defeated some months later at the battle of Evesham by Prince Edward.]

Whena thunderstorm once forced the king, as he was rowing on the Thames, to take refuge at the palace of the Bishop of Durham, Earl Simon of Montfort, who was a guest of the prelate, met the royal barge with assurances that the storm was drifting away, and that there was nothing to fear. Henry’s petulant wit broke out in his reply: “If I fear the thunder,” said the king, “I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the world.”

The man whom Henry dreaded as the champion of English freedom was himself a foreigner, the son of a Simon de Montfort whose name had become memorable for his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian heretics in southern Gaul. Though fourth son of this crusader, Simonbecame possessor of the English earldom of Leicester, which he inherited through his mother, and a secret match with Eleanor, the king’s sister and widow of the second William Marshal, linked him to the royal house. The baronage, indignant at this sudden alliance with a stranger, rose in a revolt which failed only through the desertion of their head, Earl Richard of Cornwall; while the censures of the Church on Eleanor’s breach of a vow of chastity, which she had made at her first husband’s death, were hardly averted by a journey to Rome. Simon returned to find the changeable king quickly alienated from him and to be driven by a burst of royal passion from the realm. He was, however, soon restored to favor, and before long took his stand in the front rank of the patriot leaders. In 1248 he was appointed governor of Gascony, where the stern justice of his rule and the heavy taxation which his enforcement of order made necessary earned the hatred of the disorderly nobles. The complaints of the Gascons brought about an open breach with the king. To Earl Simon’s offer of the surrender of his post if the money he had spent in the royal service were, as Henry had promised, repaid him, the king hotly retorted that he was bound by no promise to a false traitor. Simon at once gave Henry the lie; “and but that thou bearest the name of king it had been a bad hour for thee when thou utteredst such a word!” A formal reconciliation was brought about, and the earl once more returned to Gascony, but before winter had come he was forced to withdraw to France. The greatness of his reputation was shown in an offer which its nobles made him of the regency of their realm during the absence of King Lewis on the crusade. But the offer was refused, and Henry, who had himself undertaken the pacification of Gascony, was glad before the close of 1253 to recall its old ruler to do the work he had failed to do.

Simon’s character had now thoroughly developed. He had inherited the strict and severe piety of his father; he wasassiduous in his attendance on religious services, whether by night or day; he was the friend of Grosseteste and the patron of the Friars. In his correspondence with Adam Marsh we see him finding patience under his Gascon troubles in the perusal of the Book of Job. His life was pure and singularly temperate; he was noted for his scant indulgence in meat, drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheerful and pleasant in talk; but his natural temper was quick and ardent, his sense of honor keen, his speech rapid and trenchant. His impatience of contradiction, his fiery temper, were in fact the great stumbling-blocks in his after career. But the one characteristic which overmastered all was what men at that time called his “constancy,” the firm, immovable resolve which trampled even death under foot in its loyalty to the right. The motto which Edward I chose as his device, “Keep troth,” was far truer as the device of Earl Simon. We see in his correspondence with what a clear discernment of its difficulties both at home and abroad he “thought it unbecoming to decline the danger of so great an exploit” as the reduction of Gascony to peace and order; but once undertaken, he persevered in spite of the opposition he met with, the failure of all support or funds from England, and the king’s desertion of his cause, till the work was done. There is the same steadiness of will and purpose in his patriotism. The letters of Grosseteste show how early he had learned to sympathize with the bishop in his resistance to Rome, and at the crisis of the contest he offers him his own support and that of his associates. He sends to Adam Marsh a tract of Grosseteste’s on “the rule of a kingdom and of a tyranny,” sealed with his own seal. He listens patiently to the advice of his friends on the subject of his household or his temper. “Better is a patient man,” writes honest Friar Adam, “than a strong man, and he who can rule his own temper than he who storms a city.” “What use is it to provide for the peace of your fellow-citizens and not guard the peace of your own household?” It was to secure “the peace of his fellow-citizens” that the earl silently trained himself as the tide of misgovernment mounted higher and higher, and the fruit of his discipline was seen when the crisis came. While other men wavered and faltered and fell away, the enthusiastic love of the people gathered itself round the stern, grave soldier who “stood like a pillar,” unshaken by promise or threat or fear of death, by the oath he had sworn.

In England affairs were going from bad to worse. The Pope still weighed heavily on the Church. Two solemn confirmations of the charter failed to bring about any compliance with its provisions. In 1248, in 1249, and again in 1255, the great council fruitlessly renewed its demand for a regular ministry, and the growing resolve of the nobles to enforce good government was seen in their offer of a grant on condition that the chief officers of the crown were appointed by the council. Henry indignantly refused the offer, and sold his plate to the citizens of London to find payment for his household. The barons were mutinous and defiant. “I will send reapers and reap your fields for you,” Henry had threatened Earl Bigod of Norfolk when he refused him aid. “And I will send you back the heads of your reapers,” retorted the earl. Hampered by the profusion of the court and by the refusal of supplies, the crown was penniless, yet new expenses were incurred by Henry’s acceptance of a papal offer of the kingdom of Sicily in favor of his second son, Edmund. Shame had fallen on the English arms, and the king’s eldest son, Edward, had been disastrously defeated on the Marches by Llewelyn of Wales. The tide of discontent, which was heightened by a grievous famine, burst its bounds in the irritation excited by the new demands from both Henry and Rome with which the year 1258 opened, and the barons repaired in arms to a great council summoned at London. The past half-century had shown both the strength and weakness of the charter—its strength as a rallying-point for the baronage, and a definiteassertion of rights which the king could be made to acknowledge; its weakness in providing no means for the enforcement of its own stipulations. Henry had sworn again and again to observe the charter, and his oath was no sooner taken than it was unscrupulously broken.

The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state. “Now England breathes in the hope of liberty,” sang a poet of the time; “the English were despised like dogs, but now they have lifted up their head and their foes are vanquished.” The song announces with almost legal precision the theory of the patriots. “He who would be in truth a king, he is a ‘free king’ indeed if he rightly rule himself and his realm. All things are lawful to him for the government of his kingdom, but nothing for its destruction. It is one thing to rule according to a king’s duty, another to destroy a kingdom by resisting the law.... Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be known what the generality, to whom their own laws are best known, think on the matter. They who are ruled by the laws know those laws best; they who make daily trial of them are best acquainted with them; and since it is their own affairs which are at stake, they will take more care, and will act with an eye to their own peace.... It concerns the community to see what sort of men ought justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm.” The constitutional restrictions on the royal authority, the right of the whole nation to deliberate and decide on its own affairs, and to have a voice in the selection of the administrators of government, had never been so clearly stated before.

It was impossible to make binding terms with an imprisoned king, yet to release Henry without terms was to renew the war. A new Parliament was summoned in January, 1265, to Westminster, but the weakness of the patriotic party among the baronage was shown in the fact that only twenty-three earls and barons could be found to sit beside the hundred and twenty ecclesiastics. But it was just thissense of his weakness that drove Earl Simon to a constitutional change of mighty issue in our history. As before, he summoned two knights from every county. But he created a new force in English politics when he summoned to sit beside them two citizens from every borough. The attendance of delegates from the towns had long been usual in the county courts when any matter respecting their interests was in question; but it was the writ issued by Earl Simon that first summoned the merchant and the trader to sit beside the knight of the shire, the baron, and the bishop in the Parliament of the realm.

[Surnamed Longshanks, born 1239, crowned 1274, died 1307. Son of Henry III, he defeated and slew Simon de Montfort in his father’s reign and took part in the fourth crusade. On his accession to the throne he completed the subjugation of Wales and in all ways approved himself an able and powerful monarch. The most signal events of his reign were those connected with the subjugation of Scotland. At first successful, it was only in the last months of his long reign that Robert Bruce’s coronation as King of the Scots opened the way for a final defeat of English claims and arms under Edward II.]

Inhis own time, and among his own subjects, Edward was the object of almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national king. At the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed away, when the descendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac blended for ever into an English people, England saw in her ruler no stranger, but an Englishman. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair or the English name which linked him to our earlier kings. Edward’s very temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands out as the typical representative of the race he ruled;like them willful and imperious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too, just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious. He inherited, indeed, from the Angevins their fierce and passionate wrath; his punishments, when he punished in anger, were without pity; and a priest who ventured at a moment of storm into his presence with a remonstrance dropped dead from sheer fright at his feet. But for the most part his impulses were generous, trustful, averse from cruelty, prone to forgiveness. “No man ever asked mercy of me,” he said, in his old age, “and was refused.” The rough soldierly nobleness of his nature breaks out at Falkirk, where he lay on the bare ground among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to drink of the one cask of wine which had been saved from marauders. “It is I who have brought you into this strait,” he said to his thirsty fellow-soldiers, “and I will have no advantage of you in meat or drink.” A strange tenderness and sensitiveness to affection lay, in fact, beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing. Every subject throughout his realm was drawn closer to the king who wept bitterly at the news of his father’s death, though it gave him a crown; whose fiercest burst of vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother; whose crosses rose as memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife’s bier rested. “I loved her tenderly in her lifetime,” wrote Edward to Eleanor’s friend the Abbot of Cluny; “I do not cease to love her now she is dead.” And as it was with mother and wife, so it was with his people at large. All the self-concentrated isolation of the earlier Angevins disappears in Edward. He was the first English king since the Conquest who loved his people with a personal love and craved for their love back again. To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand in the forefront of our laws. Even in his struggles with her England understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels between king and people during his reign are quarrels where, doggedly as they fought, neither disputant doubted for a moment the worth or affection of the other. Few scenes in our history are more touching than that which closes the long contest over the charter, when Edward stood face to face with his people in Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of tears owned himself frankly in the wrong.

But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer impressions and outer influences, that led to the strange contradictions which meet us in Edward’s career. Under the first king, whose temper was distinctly English, a foreign influence told most fatally on our manners, our literature, our national spirit. The rise of France into a compact and organized monarchy from the time of Philip Augustus was now making its influence dominant in Western Europe. The “chivalry” so familiar in Froissart, that picturesque mimicry of high sentiment, of heroism, love, and courtesy, before which all depth and reality of nobleness disappeared to make room for the coarsest profligacy, the narrowest caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human suffering, was specially of French creation. There was a nobleness in Edward’s nature from which the baser influences of this chivalry fell away. His life was pure, his piety, save when it stooped to the superstition of the time, manly and sincere, while his high sense of duty saved him from the frivolous self-indulgence of his successors. But he was far from being wholly free from the taint of his age. His passionate desire was to be a model of the fashionable chivalry of his day. He had been famous from his very youth as a consummate general; Earl Simon had admired the skill of his advance at Evesham, and in his Welsh campaign he had shown a tenacity and force of will which wrested victory out of the midst of defeat. He could head a furious charge of horse at Lewes, or organize a commissariat which enabled him to move army after army across the harried Lowlands. In his old age he was quick to discover the value of the English archery, and to employ it as a means of victory at Falkirk. But his fame as a general seemed a small thing to Edward when compared with his fame as a knight. He shared to the full his people’s love of hard fighting. His frame, indeed, was that of a born soldier—tall, deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endurance or action. When he encountered Adam Gurdon, a knight of gigantic size and renowned prowess, after Evesham, he forced him single-handed to beg for mercy. At the opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer fighting in a tournament at Challon. It was this love of adventure which lent itself to the frivolous unreality of the new chivalry. At his “Round Table of Kenilworth” a hundred lords and ladies, “clad all in silk,” renewed the faded glories of Arthur’s court. The false air of romance which was soon to turn the gravest political resolutions into outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his “Vow of the Swan,” when rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on Scotland the murder of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class, and in its exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. “Knight without reproach” as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace nothing but a common robber.

Hardly less powerful than the French notion of chivalry in its influence on Edward’s mind was the new French conception of kingship, feudality, and law. The rise of a lawyer class was everywhere hardening customary into written rights, allegiance into subjection, loose ties, such as commendation, into a definite vassalage. But it was specially through French influence, the influence of St. Lewis and his successors, that the imperial theories of the Roman law were brought to bear upon this natural tendency of thetime. When the “sacred majesty” of the Cæsars was transferred by a legal fiction to the royal head of a feudal baronage, every constitutional relation was changed. The “defiance” by which a vassal renounced service to his lord became treason, his after-resistance “sacrilege.” That Edward could appreciate what was sound and noble in the legal spirit around him was shown in his reforms of our judicature and our Parliament; but there was something as congenial to his mind in its definiteness, its rigidity, its narrow technicalities. He was never willfully unjust, but he was too often captious in his justice, fond of legal chicanery, prompt to take advantage of the letter of the law. The high conception of royalty which he had borrowed from St. Lewis united with this legal turn of mind in the worst acts of his reign. Of rights or liberties unregistered in charter or roll Edward would know nothing, while his own good sense was overpowered by the majesty of his crown. It was incredible to him that Scotland should revolt against a legal bargain which made her national independence conditional on the terms extorted from a claimant of her throne; nor could he view in any other light but as treason the resistance of his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation which their fathers had borne. It is in the very anomalies of such a character, in its strange union of justice and wrong-doing, of nobleness and meanness, that we must look for any fair explanation of much that has since been bitterly blamed in Edward’s conduct and policy.

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