Part 22

Syrian archives reveal the Mongols’ next appearance. In 1243 Hatthon, King of Armenia, sought Mangu Khan at Cambaluc (Peking), praying him to fight the Saracens and recover Jerusalem. Mangu sent his general, who speedily took Antioch, spoiled Aleppo, and sacked the city of Bagdad.

When the latter was stormed, Haloon, the Mongol general, ordered that the Caliph be brought alive into his presence. There had been found in the city a quite surprising booty in treasure and riches. Haloon asked why the Caliph had not used his wealth to levy mercenaries and defend his country. The Caliph replied that he had deemed his own people sufficient to withstand the Mongols. Then the Khan announced that the precious things which had been so cherished would be alone left to the miserable man, who was shut into a chamber with his pearls and gold for sustenance and perished in torments. There was no Caliph of Bagdad after him.

Thus, almost simultaneously, there were conquered by the Mongols, northern China, Syria, Russia, Hungary, and Poland. The stream of human blood that it cost is immeasurable.

Of the first conqueror, Genghis Khan, an Arab poem says:--

On every course he spurred his steed He raised the blood-dyed dust.

The lives of four and a half million people are reckoned as his toll on humanity. He had proposed to raze every city and destroy every farm of the five northern Chinese provinces, to make pasture for his nomads, and was only dissuaded by a minister, who ventured death in opposing him. It was he who ordered the million souls of Herat to slaughter. Batui, subduer of Russia, called “Sein Khan” (the Good King), is said after the Moscow massacre to have received 270,000 right ears. Following his fight with the Teutonic knights, near the Baltic, nine sacks of right ears were laid at his feet. “Vanquished, they ask no favor, and vanquishing, they show no compassion.” “The Mongols came, destroyed, burnt, slaughtered, plundered, and departed,” summarizes an Arab; and the unimaginative chronicles of the Chinese tell without comment of city after city taken, and their inhabitants put to the sword.

Utter ineradicable barbarity would, on the face of things, seem to have been the inmost nature of this people. Yet only a few years later, when Mangu Khan was ruling at Caracorum, the Court had become civilized. Forty-one years after Genghis Khan’s death, when the great Venetian traveler Marco Polo arrived at Kublai’s Court, the palaces and the organized statecraft at Peking had become a model of efficiency. The Mongols, not as a race, but in the sphere of their leaders, had become a real nation, not unworthy of its success.

It is interesting to reconstruct the Tatar capital and note its development in half a century. The Minorite monk, sent to beg aid from the supposedly Christian Mangu Khan for the delivery of Jerusalem, wrote a detailed description of the city, Caracorum. It had a circuit of three miles and in dearth of stone was rampiered strongly with earth. It had two main streets: one of the Saracens, where the fairs were held and where many merchants assembled, attracted by the traffic with the Court, and with the continuous procession