Part 21

Mang-tse, “Master Mang,” whom we know as Mencius, followed “Master Kung” by one hundred years, applying, as a practical reformer, to the society of the day, the maxims of his enlightened philosophy, rebuking princes and giving to the Chinese world the last of its classics.

In the glories of the Chu Dynasty, China, the earliest offshoot of the Mongol race, reached its literary and philosophic climax.

In Turan, now called Turkestan, and in Mesopotamia, a western division of the Mongols appears about 640 B.C. It is making an incursion into the declining Empire of Assyria, over which Nebuchadnezzar is soon to rule. Nothing of detail remains, only the record of the devastating inroad over the mountain; but it locates at this date the southwestern frontier of Mongol dominion.

Scythia, north of the Black Sea, reveals them next. The sketch is drawn by the master-pen of the Greek father of history in his description of the expedition of Darius, 506 B.C. “Having neither cities nor forts, they carry their dwellings with them wherever they go,” Herodotus writes, describing the nomad foes of the Great King. He relates that they are “accustomed, moreover, one and all of them, to shoot from horseback and to live not by husbandry, but on their cattle.”

This was the enemy against whom Darius planned a campaign, whose object was to free from the menace of the Scythians north of the line of advance his prospective expedition for the conquest of Greece. From the bridge of boats over the Hellespont, beside which Miltiades watched, the great Persian marched to the Don River, the nomads always retreating. Darius finally challenged the Scythian king to stand and fight, or to accept him as suzerain. To this message Idonthyrsus replied: “This is my way, Persian. I never fear men or fly from them, nor do I now fly from thee. I only follow my common mode of life in peaceful years. We Scythians have neither towns nor cultivated lands, which might induce us, through fear of being taken or ravaged, to be in any hurry to fight with you. In return for thy calling thyself my lord, I say to thee, ‘Go weep!’”

All the Asian steppes were open to the ever-retreating nomads: Darius was obliged to halt. Hereupon, the Scythian prince, understanding how matters stood, dispatched a herald to the Persian camp with presents for the king. They were “a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows.”

Darius was at liberty to deduce whatever explanation he chose. He retreated, the Scythians hounding his army on. He found his bridge over the Bosphorus safe, and returned to Persia to prepare the Athenian expedition that ended at Marathon. The Scythians remained: they were left leading their flocks as of old over the unconquerable steppes.

By these echoes of clashings with other nations, the first-known streams of Mongol outflow are dimly followed to the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea on the south and west, bounding Scythia; to the Hoang-ho Valley, in which were living the metamorphosed Chinese.

But the rolling hills south of Lake Baikal, the source of the race-stream, still poured out fresh hordes, which periodically overflowed in roving nomad bands, harrying the plainsmen. While the feudal states of China struggled and fought among themselves, now coalescing under the “Wu-pa,” the five dictators, now uniting under a Prince Hwan of Shan-tung into a temporary Chinese Shogunate, there came down upon the fertile lands and populous cities wild horsemen, sparing none, burning, looting, riding away. “The Hiung-nu descended on us,” appears again and again in the history.

At length, about 246 B.C., arose the short but glorious dynasty of Ts’in, under China’s king, Shi-hwang-ti. He was a man of action. He compacted a centralized monarchy from the many princedoms, drove back the nomad Hiung-nu beyond the Yellow River, built the Great Wall, and by his glorious exploits blazoned into Europe’s vocabulary, the word China--Ts’in.

In Sz-ma Ts’ien’s history, a striking incident, revealing the Great Emperor’s limitations, is graphically told.

“Li-se, the councillor, said, ‘Of old, the Empire was divided and troubled. There was nobody who could unite it. Therefore did many lords reign at a time. For this, the readers of books speak of old times to cry down these. They encourage the people to forge calumnies. Your subject proposes that all the official histories be burned. The books not proscribed shall be those of medicine, of divination, of agriculture. If any want to study laws, let them take the office-holders as masters.’”

The decree was “approved.” The old books of annals, the Confucian Commentaries, the Odes and the Rituals, to the suppressed execration of the learned, fed the flames. The literati who protested were warmed, themselves, over the same fires.

But despite Shi-hwang-ti’s signal defeat of the five coalescing tribes, and the eighty-two thousand severed heads; despite the victories in 214 B.C., the Hiung-nu Empire grew in power, until it extended from Corea to Tibet.

The Chinese “Han” Dynasty, even under the peasant-founder, Lin-pang, who had proven himself a thorough soldier, was constantly harried. The loss of the old literature continued to be mourned, which argues some plane of general appreciation. The Minister urged the recall of the Ts’in philosophers and the reproduction of the burned books.

“Why have books?” said the Emperor. “I won the Empire on horseback.”

“Can you keep it on horseback?” the Minister asked.

The literati were eventually recalled. Their support was secured for the throne, and the Hiung-nu were kept back by art as well as by arms.

At the Emperor’s death, his widow, the Dowager Empress Lu, of Borgian repute, was still harder pressed by the nomads. Meteh, the khan of the invading hordes outside the Wall, ventured to send to her a proposal of marriage and tariff-treaty couched in Rabelaisian poetry. “I wish to change what I have for what I have not.” He followed the verses with gifts of camels and carts and steppe ponies. In return his messengers insisted on a tribute of wadded and silk clothes, precious metals and embroidery, grain and yeast, as well as the intoxicating _samshu_. These royal presents and tribute were really a trading of goods, a barter, and citizens of lower rank, in the fairs beside the Wall, were carrying on an equivalent.

More and more oppressive became the demands of the Mongols. A band of beautiful maidens, a very toll of the Minotaur, was exacted yearly. In one of the ancient Chinese poems a princess laments the fate that condemns her to a barbarian husband, a desolate land where raw flesh is to be her food, sour milk her drink, and the felt hut her palace.

In 200 B.C., Sin, King of Han, marched against the Hiung-nu, only to retreat after heavy losses, with a third of his soldiers fingerless from the cold. Again, in 177 B.C., the Hiung-nu broke a treaty and raided across the Wall. A speech of the Emperor, in 162 B.C., is quoted in the Chinese chronicles: “These later times for several years the Hiung-nu have come in a crowd to exercise their ravages on our frontiers.”

In 141 B.C., Nu-ti, the fifth of the House of Han, assembled a great army of one hundred and forty thousand Chinese, and marched against the Confederacy. This army, like that of Darius, penetrated far up into the nomad’s territory. Scarcely a quarter of them returned. But the invasion was not fruitless: the Hiung-nu gave allegiance to China. Later, in 138 B.C., largely to turn the left flank of the Horde, the Chinese advanced into Corea. In 119 B.C. another march to the district north of Tibet turned the nomads’ right flank. At length, in 100 A.D., a more northerly Tatar clan, the Sien-pi, came down on the broken remnants of the Hiung-nu. After thirteen hundred years of power this tribe was destroyed. Of the scattered nomads some remained to unite with their victorious conquerors; some went south to Turkestan; a third group trekked north, and went over the great steppe. Subsequent to 100 A.D., they are found on the east bank of the Volga, where during two centuries they temporarily disappear from history.

The great Empire of China now existed unmolested by the Hordes, and after a few hard fights ruled Asia as far as the borders of Persia. Its outposts almost met those of the Empire of Rome. Both realms were, about this date, in peace and prosperity. There is even a record of trade between them, the Chinese annals telling of an expedition of King An-tun, or Antoninus, in 166 A.D., to Burmah, from which his factors reached the Middle Kingdom; and of glass, drugs, metals, and game obtained overland by way of Parthia from Ta-ts’in, the Great Empire. Pliny writes of silk, iron, furs, and skins, caravan-brought from China. So moved the two empires until 376 A.D., when Valens the Irresolute reigned in Byzantium. To him came messengers bringing word of great alarm from the Danube. The whole nation of Goths were on the bank, begging a refuge in Roman territory.

“Wild enemies, from where we know not, are upon us!” they cried.

The Goths, who were to subvert the declining empire, were escaping from before the western division of the old Hiung-nu. Valens had the Goths ferried over the Danube, and the Huns established themselves in the vacated places of what is now Austria.

[Illustration: THE MIRACLE OF ATTILA’S REPULSE (From a painting by Raphael in Vatican)]

Amid those hordes arose a leader destined to leave a memory in the sagas of the Scandinavian bards, in the Niebelungenlied of the Teutons, and a lurid trail in the annals of the Cæsars. He called himself a descendant of the great Nimrod, “nurtured in Engaddi, by the grace of God, King of the Huns, the Goths, the Danes, the Medes; the Dread of the World,”--Attila.

A profound politician, he alternately cajoled and threatened the peoples whose conquest he undertook; a true barbarian, no food save flesh and milk passed his lips. He and his men worshiped the mysteriously discovered scimitar of Mars, and from Persia to Gaul, from Finland to the walls of Constantinople, his armies ranged. Ambassadors went from his Court to China. The great battle of Chalons, in which, aided by the Goths, the dwindling forces of Rome’s Western Empire won their last victory, alone preserved Europe from his yoke. His descendants, mixing with succeeding conquerors, have remained until this day in the land that is called, after their dreaded name, Hungary.

Back to the history of Sz-ma Ts’ien one must return for the next harvest of Mongolia’s dragon-teeth. The Tung-hu, whose descendants are now the skin-clad Tunguses that live far to the north, even up to the Arctic Ocean, came down between 309 and 439 A.D. upon Manchuria. This occupation separated China from Corea, which, thus isolated, preserved for centuries the old Han dialect. The Tung-hu conquerors established a great kingdom extending from the Japan Sea to Turkestan. From 380 to 580 they ruled the northern kingdom of China proper. The leading place among those who composed their empire was held by the tribe of Juju, or Geougen, whose descendants are now the Finns. Subject to the Juju was a Mongol clan descended from the old southern Hiung-nu, who lived hard-by Mount Altai. They were blacksmiths and armorers for the Tung-hu army, and were called Turks. Their crescent power gradually supplanted that of their masters.

In 480 this people appeared on the border of China. By 560 the Turkish Empire had become supreme in Central Asia. They pressed upon the nation of Avars on the Altai borderland of the steppe, until twenty thousand of these, refusing to submit, moved westward. Justinian received the envoys of the fugitives in 558. They offered to serve him, and threatened, if unaccepted, to attack his Eastern Empire. Anxious only to keep them away from his own domains, and indifferent as to which should survive, he sent them to attack his German enemies. The Avars, conquering a place in Europe, established a powerful nation between the Danube and the Elbe, biding their time till with the other barbarians they could descend to the spoil of Rome.

After their rebellious vassals came the Turkish envoys, with richer presents to the Eastern Emperor Justin II, and more alarming menaces. The military alliance of the Turks was accepted and that of the Avars renounced. Kemarchus carried the ratification of Rome’s treaty to Mount Altai in Central Asia. For many years there was friendship between Mongol and Byzantine, mutual alliance and trade.

In 618 the great T’ang Dynasty arose in China, whose fame is suggested in the fact that the only Cantonese word for a Chinese nationality is “Man of T’ang.” The energetic Li-shi-min subdued the Manchurian Tunguses, and in 630 a great battle broke the Turkish power. China once again was supreme from Corea to the borderland of Persia. During the T’ang Dynasty, Kashmir in India, and Anam were captured by the Chinese.

There followed now a period of centuries when the breeding-place of the Mongol’s wolf-born hordes ran barren. In unchronicled obscurity the skin-clad herdsmen lived out their generation. To the feeble Ouighour confederacy fell the sceptre of the steppes. The old territory of the Hiung-nu khans and the Turkish Supreme King was split into little chief-governed principalities. Manchus and Tung-hus, rallying again, alternately ruled and harried China. Avars and Huns occupied their distant conquests. But in the vast stretch between, the tribes were in a bewitched sleep. The people and the qualities that made the old armies were there; the breed of shaggy ponies which they rode was there; iron reddened the hill-slopes, waiting to be hammered into spears in the Altai forges; China and Europe were as ripe for the spoiling. All that the Mongols needed was a leader.

In a quaint chronicle of the Middle Ages we read of how he came. When the French took Antioch from the Turks, one Can Can ruled over the northern region out of which the Turks had originally come. To the old kindred in this hour of need they sent for aid. Can Can was of the Cathayans, a people dwelling among the mountains. In one of the valley stretches lived the Tayman tribe, who were Nestorians. After Can Can’s death a shepherd, who had risen to power among the Taymans, made himself ruler as King John. King John had a brother named Vut. Beyond his pastures some ten or fifteen days’ journey was Mongol; the latter described as a poor and beggarly nation, without governor or law save their soothsayings so detestable to the minds of the Nestorians. Adjoining the Mongols were other poor people called Tatars. When King John died without an heir, Vut became greatly enriched. This aroused naturally the cupidity of his needy neighbors. Among the Mongols was a blacksmith named Cyngis. Ingratiating himself with the Tatars, he pointed out that the lack of a governor left both peoples subject to the oppression of the surrounding tribes. He got himself raised to the double chieftainship, secretly collected an army, and broke suddenly upon Vut. Cyngis sent the Tatars ahead now to open his way, and the people everywhere cried in dismay, “Lo, the Tatars come! the Tatars come!”

While the Turks sought aid of their kinsmen for the defense, the French King sent to King John’s reputedly Christian kingdom for help to his crusade. But Cyngis “Temugin,” the Man, had come. As Genghis Khan he was to open up the vastest empire the world has ever seen.

In 1200 the young Temugin, in a great battle near Urga, defeated Wang Khan, whom modern research, vindicating the basis of truth in the old Friar William de Rubruquis tales, has shown to have been a Tatar prince of the Nestorian Christian faith, King of the Kitai or Cathayans, in all probability the ruler known to the princes of Europe, through his letters to the Roman Pope, as the Christian potentate of the Orient, Prester John.

Wang Khan’s skull, encased in silver, graced the conqueror’s tent as a first trophy. In 1206, summoning all the Mongol chiefs, Temugin took the title of Genghis Khan, “The Greatest King.”

His armies were turned next to the reduction of his own people, the nomad tribes of the Central Asian plains. As one after another was defeated, its warriors were incorporated into his growing army. When all these myriad shepherds and soldiers were gathered in, he directed his march towards China.

The Great Wall was as paper to his host. Ninety cities were taken by storm, never one surrendering. For while to the kindred races which he had conquered, and which furnished further recruits for his armies, Genghis was most merciful and humane, to a foreign foe he was indeed the Wrath of God. Once he was bought off from the invasion; but again he returned to the prey. A way into Peking was opened by means of a mine dug under the walls to the centre of the city; through it a picked body of Mongols entered, marched to the gates, and opened them. The savage host rushed in to sack and slay. For sixty days Peking burned, and five desolated provinces of North China were added to the Mongol Empire.

Mohammed, Sultan of Carizme, who reigned from India to the Persian Gulf, was the next objective for the Mongols. In the field, by valor and numbers, the Khan’s troops defeated all the Sultan’s armies. The walled towns were besieged and taken, largely through the skill of Chinese engineers. The whole great Persian district was harried after the custom of the Mongols through four years; for hundreds of miles the country was so ruined that to this day the old populousness and prosperity have never been recovered.

The army of one of the Khan’s generals marched north into Turkestan, and subduing many Turkish peoples, entered beyond the Caucasus the territory of the Polovtisni, themselves Mongols of an earlier invasion. The conquest of Russia had begun. A Muscovite chronicle of those days illustrates the utter consternation and surprise of the inhabitants at this formidable and sudden incursion: “In those times there came upon us, for our sins, unknown nations. No one could tell their origin, whence they came, or what religion they professed. God alone knew who they were.” The people generally believed that the time had come foretold in Revelation when Satan should be let loose with the hosts of “Gog and Magog to gather them together in battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.” Indeed, in the old map of Tatary, by Hondius, the territories of these two fabled worthies are carefully outlined in what is now Manchuria.

Despite the Tatarean theory of the Mongols’ army, the Russian chivalry gathered to the aid of the Polovtisni, and collected an army by the lower Dnieper. Defiantly they killed the ambassadors whom the Mongols sent. The wrathful nomads advanced into the Crimea near the Sea of Azov. The two hosts met in the fatal battle of Kalka. It was the Crécy of Russian chivalry. Hardly a tenth of the army escaped. Ten thousand of the men of Kiev fell; of the princes, six, of the boyars, seventy, died on the field of battle. Matislaf the Bold alone made front, and he was treacherously betrayed and slain.

The way into southern Russia was now open; yet, after their victory in 1224, the Mongols disappeared as suddenly as they had come. The hordes had been diverted to complete the conquest of China. For thirteen years they were swallowed up by the steppe. The son of Genghis, “Oktai,” had succeeded the dead conqueror, and had appointed Batui General of the West.

Again there was heralded an invasion, this time by one of the outlying tribes of Khirgiz on the eastern border. The blow was aimed at the very heart of Russia. The old Slav ballads, or “_bilinî_,” tell how Oleg the Handsome fell at Riszan. The Tatars entered and burned Moscow in 1237. Onward into the north rolled their conquest, town after town falling. At the Cross of Ignatius, fifty miles from Novgorod, the torrent turned, and, sparing for the time being the ancient republic, swept to the south.

Against the cradle of the Russian race, the white-walled many-towered city of Kiev, Mangu, the grandson of Genghis, now marched. By multitudes the Tatars carried the walls. Fighting to the end, the last defenders went down in a ring around the tomb of the great Yaroslav.

Russia was prostrate at the feet of the nomads. Her princes became vassals, some to journey as far as the Amur to pay their homage to the Great Khan. Without the Tatar Emperor’s letters-patent, no prince could assume his inheritance. When the envoy presented the documents, the nobles had to prostrate themselves and accept them kneeling. Each Russian city gave its tribute, even the still uninvaded Novgorod. Every peasant in Muscovy paid his poll-tax. Indeed, the supremacy of the czars of Moscow, when the Tatar yoke was at length thrown off, was largely due to the wealth which the Romanov family had managed to acquire and to hold during their term as tax-farmers of the Great Khan. Russian troops, supplied as part of the tribute, engaged in the Tatar wars, getting in one instance of record their share of the booty--after the sack of Daghestan. They were drafted on account of their great size and valor into a body-guard for the Mongol Emperor in Peking, corresponding to the Swiss Guard of Louis XVI.

While the conquest of Russia was being consolidated into a permanent Mongol dominion destined to endure for nearly two hundred and fifty years, Batui led his army on into Poland and Bohemia. He took Buda-Pest and devastated the country far and wide. The most alarming accounts preceded him, which are still to be read in the monkish annals of the time. “Anno Domini, 1240, the detestable people of Satan, to wit, an infinite number of Tatars, broke forth like grasshoppers covering the face of the earth, spoiling the eastern confines with fire and sword, ruining cities, cutting up woods, rooting up vineyards, killing the people both of city and country. They are rather monsters than men; clothed with ox-hides, armed with iron plates, in stature thick and short, well-set, strong in body, in war invincible, in labor indefatigable, drinking the blood of their beasts for dainties.”

The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who undertook to gather the powers of Europe to meet the danger, wrote to Henry III of England:--

“A barbarous nation hath lately come called Tatars. We know not of what place or originall. A public destruction hath therefore followed the common desolation of Kingdomes and spoil of the fertile land which that wicked people hath passed through, not sparing sex, age or dignity, and hoping to extinguish the rest of mankind. The general destruction of the world and specially of Christendom calls for speedy help and succour.

“The men are of short stature but square and well-set, rough and courageous, have broad faces, frowning lookes, horrible cries agreeing to their hearts. They are incomparable archers.

“Heartily we adjure your majestie in behalfe of the common necessitie, that with instant care and prudent deliberation, you diligently prepare speedy aide of strong knights and other armed Men-at-arms.”

Throughout Europe the dread was universal. In 1248 Pope Innocent IV sent to the Tatars an embassy with money, begging them to cease their ravages. Failing, he summoned Christendom. Louis IX of France prepared a crusade. The fishermen of England could not sell their herrings because their usual customers, the Swedes, had remained at home to defend Scandinavia. Fortunately, the tide of western Mongol invasion had spent itself. After wasting the Danube district, the death of the Great Khan recalled Batui in 1245.

[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO THE MING TOMBS]