their hordes were alike disposed for the reception of a foreign worship. After some hesitation between the Gospel and the Koran, they conformed to the religion of Mahomet; and while they adopted for their brethren the Arabs and Persians, they renounced all intercourse with the ancient Moguls, the idolaters of China.
[Footnote 31: The Map of D’Anville and the Chinese Itineraries (De Guignes, tom. i. part ii. p. 57) seem to mark the position of Holin, or Caracorum, about six hundred miles to the north-west of Pekin. The distance between Selinginsky and Pekin is near 2000 Russian versts, between 1300 and 1400 English miles, (Bell’s Travels, vol. ii. p. 67.)]
[Footnote 32: Rubruquis found at Caracorum his countryman Guillaume Boucher, orfevre de Paris, who had executed for the khan a silver tree supported by four lions, and ejecting four different liquors. Abulghazi (part iv. p. 366) mentions the painters of Kitay or China.]
[Footnote *: See the interesting sketch of the life of this minister (Yelin- Thsouthsai) in the second volume of the second series of Recherches Asiatiques, par A Remusat, p. 64. – M.]
[Footnote *: Compare Hist. des Mongols, p. 616. – M.]
[Footnote 33: The attachment of the khans, and the hatred of the mandarins, to the bonzes and lamas (Duhalde, Hist. de la Chine, tom. i. p. 502, 503) seems to represent them as the priests of the same god, of the Indian Fo, whose worship prevails among the sects of Hindostan Siam, Thibet, China, and Japan. But this mysterious subject is still lost in a cloud, which the researchers of our Asiatic Society may gradually dispel.]
Chapter LXIV: Moguls, Ottoman Turkds.
Part III.
In this shipwreck of nations, some surprise may be excited by the escape of the Roman empire, whose relics, at the time of the Mogul invasion, were dismembered by the Greeks and Latins. Less potent than Alexander, they were pressed, like the Macedonian, both in Europe and Asia, by the shepherds of Scythia; and had the Tartars undertaken the siege, Constantinople must have yielded to the fate of Pekin, Samarcand, and Bagdad. The glorious and voluntary retreat of Batou from the Danube was insulted by the vain triumph of the Franks and Greeks; ^34 and in a second expedition death surprised him in full march to attack the capital of the Caesars. His brother Borga carried the Tartar arms into Bulgaria and Thrace; but he was diverted from the Byzantine war by a visit to Novogorod, in the fifty-seventh degree of latitude, where he numbered the inhabitants and regulated the tributes of Russia. The Mogul khan formed an alliance with the Mamalukes against his brethren of Persia: three hundred thousand horse penetrated through the gates of Derbend; and the Greeks might rejoice in the first example of domestic war. After the recovery of Constantinople, Michael Palaeologus, ^35 at a distance from his court and army, was surprised and surrounded in a Thracian castle, by twenty thousand Tartars. But the object of their march was a private interest: they came to the deliverance of Azzadin, the Turkish sultan; and were content with his person and the treasure of the emperor. Their general Noga, whose name is perpetuated in the hordes of Astracan, raised a formidable rebellion against Mengo Timour, the third of the khaus of Kipzak; obtained in marriage Maria, the natural daughter of Palaeologus; and guarded the dominions of his friend and father. The subsequent invasions of a Scythian cast were those of outlaws and fugitives: and some thousands of Alani and Comans, who had been driven from their native zeats, were reclaimed from a vagrant life, and enlisted in the service of the empire. Such was the influence in Europe of the invasion of the Moguls. The first terror of their arms secured, rather than disturbed, the peace of the Roman Asia. The sultan of Iconium solicited a personal interview with John Vataces; and his artful policy encouraged the Turks to defend their barrier against the common enemy. ^36 That barrier indeed was soon overthrown; and the servitude and ruin of the Seljukians exposed the nakedness of the Greeks. The formidable Holagou threatened to march to Constantinople at the head of four hundred thousand men; and the groundless panic of the citizens of Nice will present an image of the terror which he had inspired. The accident of a procession, and the sound of a doleful litany, “From the fury of the Tartars, good Lord, deliver us,” had scattered the hasty report of an assault and massacre. In the blind credulity of fear, the streets of Nice were crowded with thousands of both sexes, who knew not from what or to whom they fled; and some hours elapsed before the firmness of the military officers could relieve the city from this imaginary foe. But the ambition of Holagou and his successors was fortunately diverted by the conquest of Bagdad, and a long vicissitude of Syrian wars; their hostility to the Moslems inclined them to unite with the Greeks and Franks; ^37 and their generosity or contempt had offered the kingdom of Anatolia as the reward of an Armenian vassal. The fragments of the Seljukian monarchy were disputed by the emirs who had occupied the cities or the mountains; but they all confessed the supremacy of the khans of Persia; and he often interposed his authority, and sometimes his arms, to check their depredations, and to preserve the peace and balance of his Turkish frontier. The death of Cazan, ^38 one of the greatest and most accomplished princes of the house of Zingis, removed this salutary control; and the decline of the Moguls gave a free scope to the rise and progress of the Ottoman Empire. ^39 [Footnote 34: Some repulse of the Moguls in Hungary (Matthew Paris, p. 545, 546) might propagate and color the report of the union and victory of the kings of the Franks on the confines of Bulgaria. Abulpharagius (Dynast. p. 310) after forty years, beyond the Tigris, might be easily deceived.] [Footnote 35: See Pachymer, l. iii. c. 25, and l. ix. c. 26, 27; and the false alarm at Nice, l. iii. c. 27. Nicephorus Gregoras, l. iv. c. 6.] [Footnote 36: G. Acropolita, p. 36, 37. Nic. Greg. l. ii. c. 6, l. iv. c. 5.] [Footnote 37: Abulpharagius, who wrote in the year 1284, declares that the Moguls, since the fabulous defeat of Batou, had not attacked either the Franks or Greeks; and of this he is a competent witness. Hayton likewise, the Armenian prince, celebrates their friendship for himself and his nation.] [Footnote 38: Pachymer gives a splendid character of Cazan Khan, the rival of Cyrus and Alexander, (l. xii. c. 1.) In the conclusion of his history (l. xiii. c. 36) he hopes much from the arrival of 30,000 Tochars, or Tartars, who were ordered by the successor of Cazan to restrain the Turks of Bithynia, A.D. 1308.]
[Footnote 39: The origin of the Ottoman dynasty is illustrated by the critical learning of Mm. De Guignes (Hist. des Huns, tom. iv. p. 329 – 337) and D’Anville, (Empire Turc, p. 14 – 22,) two inhabitants of Paris, from whom the Orientals may learn the history and geography of their own country. Note: They may be still more enlightened by the Geschichte des Osman Reiches, by M. von Hammer Purgstall of Vienna. – M.]
After the retreat of Zingis, the sultan Gelaleddin of Carizme had returned from India to the possession and defence of his Persian kingdoms. In the space of eleven years, than hero fought in person fourteen battles; and such was his activity, that he led his cavalry in seventeen days from Teflia to Kerman, a march of a thousand miles. Yet he was oppressed by the jealousy of the Moslem princes, and the innumerable armies of the Moguls; and after his last defeat, Gelaleddin perished ignobly in the mountains of Curdistan. His death dissolved a veteran and adventurous army, which included under the name of Carizmians or Corasmins many Turkman hordes, that had attached themselves to the sultan’s fortune. The bolder and more powerful chiefs invaded Syria, and violated the holy sepulchre of Jerusalem: the more humble engaged in the service of Aladin, sultan of Iconium; and among these were the obscure fathers of the Ottoman line. They had formerly pitched their tents near the southern banks of the Oxus, in the plains of Mahan and Nesa; and it is somewhat remarkable, that the same spot should have produced the first authors of the Parthian and Turkish empires. At the head, or in the rear, of a Carizmian army, Soliman Shah was drowned in the passage of the Euphrates: his son Orthogrul became the soldier and subject of Aladin, and established at Surgut, on the banks of the Sangar, a camp of four hundred families or tents, whom he governed fifty-two years both in peace and war. He was the father of Thaman, or Athman, whose Turkish name has been melted into the appellation of the caliph Othman; and if we describe that pastoral chief as a shepherd and a robber, we must separate from those characters all idea of ignominy and baseness. Othman possessed, and perhaps surpassed, the ordinary virtues of a soldier; and the circumstances of time and place were propitious to his independence and success. The Seljukian dynasty was no more; and the distance and decline of the Mogul khans soon enfranchised him from the control of a superior. He was situate on the verge of the Greek empire: the Koran sanctified his gazi, or holy war, against the infidels; and their political errors unlocked the passes of Mount Olympus, and invited him to descend into the plains of Bithynia. Till the reign of Palaeologus, these passes had been vigilantly guarded by the militia of the country, who were repaid by their own safety and an exemption from taxes. The emperor abolished their privilege and assumed their office; but the tribute was rigorously collected, the custody of the passes was neglected, and the hardy mountaineers degenerated into a trembling crowd of peasants without spirit or discipline. It was on the twenty-seventh of July, in the year twelve hundred and ninety-nine of the Christian aera, that Othman first invaded the territory of Nicomedia; ^40 and the singular accuracy of the date seems to disclose some foresight of the rapid and destructive growth of the monster. The annals of the twenty-seven years of his reign would exhibit a repetition of the same inroads; and his hereditary troops were multiplied in each campaign by the accession of captives and volunteers. Instead of retreating to the hills, he maintained the most useful and defensive posts; fortified the towns and castles which he had first pillaged; and renounced the pastoral life for the baths and palaces of his infant capitals. But it was not till Othman was oppressed by age and infirmities, that he received the welcome news of the conquest of Prusa, which had been surrendered by famine or treachery to the arms of his son Orchan. The glory of Othman is chiefly founded on that of his descendants; but the Turks have transcribed or composed a royal testament of his last counsels of justice and moderation. ^41
[Footnote 40: See Pachymer, l. x. c. 25, 26, l. xiii. c. 33, 34, 36; and concerning the guard of the mountains, l. i. c. 3 – 6: Nicephorus Gregoras, l. vii. c. l., and the first book of Laonicus Chalcondyles, the Athenian.] [Footnote 41: I am ignorant whether the Turks have any writers older than Mahomet II., nor can I reach beyond a meagre chronicle (Annales Turcici ad Annum 1550) translated by John Gaudier, and published by Leunclavius, (ad calcem Laonic. Chalcond. p. 311 – 350,) with copious pandects, or commentaries. The history of the Growth and Decay (A.D. 1300 – 1683) of the Othman empire was translated into English from the Latin Ms. of Demetrius Cantemir, prince of Moldavia, (London, 1734, in folio.) The author is guilty of strange blunders in Oriental history; but he was conversant with the language, the annals, and institutions of the Turks. Cantemir partly draws his materials from the Synopsis of Saadi Effendi of Larissa, dedicated in the year 1696 to Sultan Mustapha, and a valuable abridgment of the original historians. In one of the Ramblers, Dr Johnson praises Knolles (a General History of the Turks to the present Year. London, 1603) as the first of historians, unhappy only in the choice of his subject. Yet I much doubt whether a partial and verbose compilation from Latin writers, thirteen hundred folio pages of speeches and battles, can either instruct or amuse an enlightened age, which requires from the historian some tincture of philosophy and criticism.
Note: We could have wished that M. von Hammer had given a more clear and distinct reply to this question of Gibbon. In a note, vol. i. p. 630. M. von Hammer shows that they had not only sheiks (religious writers) and learned lawyers, but poets and authors on medicine. But the inquiry of Gibbon obviously refers to historians. The oldest of their historical works, of which V. Hammer makes use, is the “Tarichi Aaschik Paschasade,” i. e. the History of the Great Grandson of Aaschik Pasha, who was a dervis and celebrated ascetic poet in the reign of Murad (Amurath) I. Ahmed, the author of the work, lived during the reign of Bajazet II., but, he says, derived much information from the book of Scheik Jachshi, the son of Elias, who was Imaum to Sultan Orchan, (the second Ottoman king) and who related, from the lips of his father, the circumstances of the earliest Ottoman history. This book (having searched for it in vain for five-and-twenty years) our author found at length in the Vatican. All the other Turkish histories on his list, as indeed this, were written during the reign of Mahomet II. It does not appear whether any of the rest cite earlier authorities of equal value with that claimed by the “Tarichi Aaschik Paschasade.” – M. (in Quarterly Review, vol. xlix. p. 292.)]
From the conquest of Prusa, we may date the true aera of the Ottoman empire. The lives and possessions of the Christian subjects were redeemed by a tribute or ransom of thirty thousand crowns of gold; and the city, by the labors of Orchan, assumed the aspect of a Mahometan capital; Prusa was decorated with a mosque, a college, and a hospital, of royal foundation; the Seljukian coin was changed for the name and impression of the new dynasty: and the most skilful professors, of human and divine knowledge, attracted the Persian and Arabian students from the ancient schools of Oriental learning. The office of vizier was instituted for Aladin, the brother of Orchan; ^* and a different habit distinguished the citizens from the peasants, the Moslems from the infidels. All the troops of Othman had consisted of loose squadrons of Turkman cavalry; who served without pay and fought without discipline: but a regular body of infantry was first established and trained by the prudence of his son. A great number of volunteers was enrolled with a small stipend, but with the permission of living at home, unless they were summoned to the field: their rude manners, and seditious temper, disposed Orchan to educate his young captives as his soldiers and those of the prophet; but the Turkish peasants were still allowed to mount on horseback, and follow his standard, with the appellation and the hopes of freebooters. ^! By these arts he formed an army of twenty-five thousand Moslems: a train of battering engines was framed for the use of sieges; and the first successful experiment was made on the cities of Nice and Nicomedia. Orchan granted a safe-conduct to all who were desirous of departing with their families and effects; but the widows of the slain were given in marriage to the conquerors; and the sacrilegious plunder, the books, the vases, and the images, were sold or ransomed at Constantinople. The emperor Andronicus the Younger was vanquished and wounded by the son of Othman: ^42 ^!! he subdued the whole province or kingdom of Bithynia, as far as the shores of the Bosphorus and Hellespont; and the Christians confessed the justice and clemency of a reign which claimed the voluntary attachment of the Turks of Asia. Yet Orchan was content with the modest title of emir; and in the list of his compeers, the princes of Roum or Anatolia, ^43 his military forces were surpassed by the emirs of Ghermian and Caramania, each of whom could bring into the field an army of forty thousand men. Their domains were situate in the heart of the Seljukian kingdom; but the holy warriors, though of inferior note, who formed new principalities on the Greek empire, are more conspicuous in the light of history. The maritime country from the Propontis to the Maeander and the Isle of Rhodes, so long threatened and so often pillaged, was finally lost about the thirteenth year of Andronicus the Elder. ^44 Two Turkish chieftains, Sarukhan and Aidin, left their names to their conquests, and their conquests to their posterity. The captivity or ruin of the seven churches of Asia was consummated; and the barbarous lords of Ionia and Lydia still trample on the monuments of classic and Christian antiquity. In the loss of Ephesus, the Christians deplored the fall of the first angel, the extinction of the first candlestick, of the Revelations; ^45 the desolation is complete; and the temple of Diana, or the church of Mary, will equally elude the search of the curious traveller. The circus and three stately theatres of Laodicea are now peopled with wolves and foxes; Sardes is reduced to a miserable village; the God of Mahomet, without a rival or a son, is invoked in the mosques of Thyatira and Pergamus; and the populousness of Smyrna is supported by the foreign trade of the Franks and Armenians. Philadelphia alone has been saved by prophecy, or courage. At a distance from the sea, forgotten by the emperors, encompassed on all sides by the Turks, her valiant citizens defended their religion and freedom above fourscore years; and at length capitulated with the proudest of the Ottomans. Among the Greek colonies and churches of Asia, Philadelphia is still erect; a column in a scene of ruins; a pleasing example, that the paths of honor and safety may sometimes be the same. The servitude of Rhodes was delayed about two centuries by the establishment of the knights of St. John of Jerusalem: ^46 under the discipline of the order, that island emerged into fame and opulence; the noble and warlike monks were renowned by land and sea: and the bulwark of Christendom provoked, and repelled, the arms of the Turks and Saracens.
[Footnote *: Von Hammer, Osm. Geschichte, vol. i. p. 82. – M.] [Footnote !: Ibid. p. 91. – M.]
[Footnote 42: Cantacuzene, though he relates the battle and heroic flight of the younger Androcinus, (l. ii. c. 6, 7, 8,) dissembles by his silence the loss of Prusa, Nice, and Nicomedia, which are fairly confessed by Nicephorus Gregoras, (l. viii. 15, ix. 9, 13, xi. 6.) It appears that Nice was taken by Orchan in 1330, and Nicomedia in 1339, which are somewhat different from the Turkish dates.]
[Footnote !!: For the conquests of Orchan over the ten pachaliks, or kingdoms of the Seljukians, in Asia Minor. see V. Hammer, vol. i. p. 112. – M.] [Footnote 43: The partition of the Turkish emirs is extracted from two contemporaries, the Greek Nicephorus Gregoras (l. vii. 1) and the Arabian Marakeschi, (De Guignes, tom. ii. P. ii. p. 76, 77.) See likewise the first book of Laonicus Chalcondyles.]
[Footnote 44: Pachymer, l. xiii. c. 13.]
[Footnote 45: See the Travels of Wheeler and Spon, of Pocock and Chandler, and more particularly Smith’s Survey of the Seven Churches of Asia, p. 205 – 276. The more pious antiquaries labor to reconcile the promises and threats of the author of the Revelations with the present state of the seven cities. Perhaps it would be more prudent to confine his predictions to the characters and events of his own times.]
[Footnote 46: Consult the ivth book of the Histoire de ‘Ordre de Malthe, par l’Abbe de Vertot. That pleasing writer betrays his ignorance, in supposing that Othman, a freebooter of the Bithynian hills, could besiege Rhodes by sea and land.]
The Greeks, by their intestine divisions, were the authors of their final ruin. During the civil wars of the elder and younger Andronicus, the son of Othman achieved, almost without resistance, the conquest of Bithynia; and the same disorders encouraged the Turkish emirs of Lydia and Ionia to build a fleet, and to pillage the adjacent islands and the sea-coast of Europe. In the defence of his life and honor, Cantacuzene was tempted to prevent, or imitate, his adversaries, by calling to his aid the public enemies of his religion and country. Amir, the son of Aidin, concealed under a Turkish garb the humanity and politeness of a Greek; he was united with the great domestic by mutual esteem and reciprocal services; and their friendship is compared, in the vain rhetoric of the times, to the perfect union of Orestes and Pylades. ^47 On the report of the danger of his friend, who was persecuted by an ungrateful court, the prince of Ionia assembled at Smyrna a fleet of three hundred vessels, with an army of twenty-nine thousand men; sailed in the depth of winter, and cast anchor at the mouth of the Hebrus. From thence, with a chosen band of two thousand Turks, he marched along the banks of the river, and rescued the empress, who was besieged in Demotica by the wild Bulgarians. At that disastrous moment, the life or death of his beloved Cantacuzene was concealed by his flight into Servia: but the grateful Irene, impatient to behold her deliverer, invited him to enter the city, and accompanied her message with a present of rich apparel and a hundred horses. By a peculiar strain of delicacy, the Gentle Barbarian refused, in the absence of an unfortunate friend, to visit his wife, or to taste the luxuries of the palace; sustained in his tent the rigor of the winter; and rejected the hospitable gift, that he might share the hardships of two thousand companions, all as deserving as himself of that honor and distinction. Necessity and revenge might justify his predatory excursions by sea and land: he left nine thousand five hundred men for the guard of his fleet; and persevered in the fruitless search of Cantacuzene, till his embarkation was hastened by a fictitious letter, the severity of the season, the clamors of his independent troops, and the weight of his spoil and captives. In the prosecution of the civil war, the prince of Ionia twice returned to Europe; joined his arms with those of the emperor; besieged Thessalonica, and threatened Constantinople. Calumny might affix some reproach on his imperfect aid, his hasty departure, and a bribe of ten thousand crowns, which he accepted from the Byzantine court; but his friend was satisfied; and the conduct of Amir is excused by the more sacred duty of defending against the Latins his hereditary dominions. The maritime power of the Turks had united the pope, the king of Cyprus, the republic of Venice, and the order of St. John, in a laudable crusade; their galleys invaded the coast of Ionia; and Amir was slain with an arrow, in the attempt to wrest from the Rhodian knights the citadel of Smyrna. ^48 Before his death, he generously recommended another ally of his own nation; not more sincere or zealous than himself, but more able to afford a prompt and powerful succor, by his situation along the Propontis and in the front of Constantinople. By the prospect of a more advantageous treaty, the Turkish prince of Bithynia was detached from his engagements with Anne of Savoy; and the pride of Orchan dictated the most solemn protestations, that if he could obtain the daughter of Cantacuzene, he would invariably fulfil the duties of a subject and a son. Parental tenderness was silenced by the voice of ambition: the Greek clergy connived at the marriage of a Christian princess with a sectary of Mahomet; and the father of Theodora describes, with shameful satisfaction, the dishonor of the purple. ^49 A body of Turkish cavalry attended the ambassadors, who disembarked from thirty vessels, before his camp of Selybria. A stately pavilion was erected, in which the empress Irene passed the night with her daughters. In the morning, Theodora ascended a throne, which was surrounded with curtains of silk and gold: the troops were under arms; but the emperor alone was on horseback. At a signal the curtains were suddenly withdrawn to disclose the bride, or the victim, encircled by kneeling eunuchs and hymeneal torches: the sound of flutes and trumpets proclaimed the joyful event; and her pretended happiness was the theme of the nuptial song, which was chanted by such poets as the age could produce. Without the rites of the church, Theodora was delivered to her barbarous lord: but it had been stipulated, that she should preserve her religion in the harem of Bursa; and her father celebrates her charity and devotion in this ambiguous situation. After his peaceful establishment on the throne of Constantinople, the Greek emperor visited his Turkish ally, who with four sons, by various wives, expected him at Scutari, on the Asiatic shore. The two princes partook, with seeming cordiality, of the pleasures of the banquet and the chase; and Theodora was permitted to repass the Bosphorus, and to enjoy some days in the society of her mother. But the friendship of Orchan was subservient to his religion and interest; and in the Genoese war he joined without a blush the enemies of Cantacuzene.
[Footnote 47: Nicephorus Gregoras has expatiated with pleasure on this amiable character, (l. xii. 7, xiii. 4, 10, xiv. 1, 9, xvi. 6.) Cantacuzene speaks with honor and esteem of his ally, (l. iii. c. 56, 57, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 86, 89, 95, 96;) but he seems ignorant of his own sentimental passion for the Turks, and indirectly denies the possibility of such unnatural friendship, (l. iv. c. 40.)]
[Footnote 48: After the conquest of Smyrna by the Latins, the defence of this fortress was imposed by Pope Gregory XI. on the knights of Rhodes, (see Vertot, l. v.)]
[Footnote 49: See Cantacuzenus, l. iii. c. 95. Nicephorus Gregoras, who, for the light of Mount Thabor, brands the emperor with the names of tyrant and Herod, excuses, rather than blames, this Turkish marriage, and alleges the passion and power of Orchan, Turkish, (l. xv. 5.) He afterwards celebrates his kingdom and armies. See his reign in Cantemir, p. 24 – 30.] In the treaty with the empress Anne, the Ottoman prince had inserted a singular condition, that it should be lawful for him to sell his prisoners at Constantinople, or transport them into Asia. A naked crowd of Christians of both sexes and every age, of priests and monks, of matrons and virgins, was exposed in the public market; the whip was frequently used to quicken the charity of redemption; and the indigent Greeks deplored the fate of their brethren, who were led away to the worst evils of temporal and spiritual bondage ^50 Cantacuzene was reduced to subscribe the same terms; and their execution must have been still more pernicious to the empire: a body of ten thousand Turks had been detached to the assistance of the empress Anne; but the entire forces of Orchan were exerted in the service of his father. Yet these calamities were of a transient nature; as soon as the storm had passed away, the fugitives might return to their habitations; and at the conclusion of the civil and foreign wars, Europe was completely evacuated by the Moslems of Asia. It was in his last quarrel with his pupil that Cantacuzene inflicted the deep and deadly wound, which could never be healed by his successors, and which is poorly expiated by his theological dialogues against the prophet Mahomet. Ignorant of their own history, the modern Turks confound their first and their final passage of the Hellespont, ^51 and describe the son of Orchan as a nocturnal robber, who, with eighty companions, explores by stratagem a hostile and unknown shore. Soliman, at the head of ten thousand horse, was transported in the vessels, and entertained as the friend, of the Greek emperor. In the civil wars of Romania, he performed some service and perpetrated more mischief; but the Chersonesus was insensibly filled with a Turkish colony; and the Byzantine court solicited in vain the restitution of the fortresses of Thrace. After some artful delays between the Ottoman prince and his son, their ransom was valued at sixty thousand crowns, and the first payment had been made when an earthquake shook the walls and cities of the provinces; the dismantled places were occupied by the Turks; and Gallipoli, the key of the Hellespont, was rebuilt and repeopled by the policy of Soliman. The abdication of Cantacuzene dissolved the feeble bands of domestic alliance; and his last advice admonished his countrymen to decline a rash contest, and to compare their own weakness with the numbers and valor, the discipline and enthusiasm, of the Moslems. His prudent counsels were despised by the headstrong vanity of youth, and soon justified by the victories of the Ottomans. But as he practised in the field the exercise of the jerid, Soliman was killed by a fall from his horse; and the aged Orchan wept and expired on the tomb of his valiant son. ^*
[Footnote 50: The most lively and concise picture of this captivity may be found in the history of Ducas, (c. 8,) who fairly describes what Cantacuzene confesses with a guilty blush!]
[Footnote 51: In this passage, and the first conquests in Europe, Cantemir (p. 27, &c.) gives a miserable idea of his Turkish guides; nor am I much better satisfied with Chalcondyles, (l. i. p. 12, &c.) They forget to consult the most authentic record, the ivth book of Cantacuzene. I likewise regret the last books, which are still manuscript, of Nicephorus Gregoras. Note: Von Hammer excuses the silence with which the Turkish historians pass over the earlier intercourse of the Ottomans with the European continent, of which he enumerates sixteen different occasions, as if they disdained those peaceful incursions by which they gained no conquest, and established no permanent footing on the Byzantine territory. Of the romantic account of Soliman’s first expedition, he says, “As yet the prose of history had not asserted its right over the poetry of tradition.” This defence would scarcely be accepted as satisfactory by the historian of the Decline and Fall. – M. (in Quarterly Review, vol. xlix. p. 293.)
Note: In the 75th year of his age, the 35th of his reign. V. Hammer. M.]
Chapter LXIV: Moguls, Ottoman Turkds.
Part IV.
But the Greeks had not time to rejoice in the death of their enemies; and the Turkish cimeter was wielded with the same spirit by Amurath the First, the son of Orchan, and the brother of Soliman. By the pale and fainting light of the Byzantine annals, ^52 we can discern, that he subdued without resistance the whole province of Romania or Thrace, from the Hellespont to Mount Haemus, and the verge of the capital; and that Adrianople was chosen for the royal seat of his government and religion in Europe. Constantinople, whose decline is almost coeval with her foundation, had often, in the lapse of a thousand years, been assaulted by the Barbarians of the East and West; but never till this fatal hour had the Greeks been surrounded, both in Asia and Europe, by the arms of the same hostile monarchy. Yet the prudence or generosity of Amurath postponed for a while this easy conquest; and his pride was satisfied with the frequent and humble attendance of the emperor John Palaeologus and his four sons, who followed at his summons the court and camp of the Ottoman prince. He marched against the Sclavonian nations between the Danube and the Adriatic, the Bulgarians, Servians, Bosnians, and Albanians; and these warlike tribes, who had so often insulted the majesty of the empire, were repeatedly broken by his destructive inroads. Their countries did not abound either in gold or silver; nor were their rustic hamlets and townships enriched by commerce or decorated by the arts of luxury. But the natives of the soil have been distinguished in every age by their hardiness of mind and body; and they were converted by a prudent institution into the firmest and most faithful supporters of the Ottoman greatness. ^53 The vizier of Amurath reminded his sovereign that, according to the Mahometan law, he was entitled to a fifth part of the spoil and captives; and that the duty might easily be levied, if vigilant officers were stationed in Gallipoli, to watch the passage, and to select for his use the stoutest and most beautiful of the Christian youth. The advice was followed: the edict was proclaimed; many thousands of the European captives were educated in religion and arms; and the new militia was consecrated and named by a celebrated dervis. Standing in the front of their ranks, he stretched the sleeve of his gown over the head of the foremost soldier, and his blessing was delivered in these words: “Let them be called Janizaries, (Yengi cheri, or new soldiers;) may their countenance be ever bright! their hand victorious! their sword keen! may their spear always hang over the heads of their enemies! and wheresoever they go, may they return with a white face!” ^54 ^* Such was the origin of these haughty troops, the terror of the nations, and sometimes of the sultans themselves. Their valor has declined, their discipline is relaxed, and their tumultuary array is incapable of contending with the order and weapons of modern tactics; but at the time of their institution, they possessed a decisive superiority in war; since a regular body of infantry, in constant exercise and pay, was not maintained by any of the princes of Christendom. The Janizaries fought with the zeal of proselytes against their idolatrous countrymen; and in the battle of Cossova, the league and independence of the Sclavonian tribes was finally crushed. As the conqueror walked over the field, he observed that the greatest part of the slain consisted of beardless youths; and listened to the flattering reply of his vizier, that age and wisdom would have taught them not to oppose his irresistible arms. But the sword of his Janizaries could not defend him from the dagger of despair; a Servian soldier started from the crowd of dead bodies, and Amurath was pierced in the belly with a mortal wound. ^* The grandson of Othman was mild in his temper, modest in his apparel, and a lover of learning and virtue; but the Moslems were scandalized at his absence from public worship; and he was corrected by the firmness of the mufti, who dared to reject his testimony in a civil cause: a mixture of servitude and freedom not unfrequent in Oriental history. ^55 [Footnote 52: After the conclusion of Cantacuzene and Gregoras, there follows a dark interval of a hundred years. George Phranza, Michael Ducas, and Laonicus Chalcondyles, all three wrote after the taking of Constantinople.] [Footnote 53: See Cantemir, p. 37 – 41, with his own large and curious annotations.]
[Footnote 54: White and black face are common and proverbial expressions of praise and reproach in the Turkish language. Hic niger est, hunc tu Romane caveto, was likewise a Latin sentence.]
[Footnote *: According to Von Hammer. vol. i. p. 90, Gibbon and the European writers assign too late a date to this enrolment of the Janizaries. It took place not in the reign of Amurath, but in that of his predecessor Orchan. – M.]
[Footnote *: Ducas has related this as a deliberate act of self-devotion on the part of a Servian noble who pretended to desert, and stabbed Amurath during a conference which he had requested. The Italian translator of Ducas, published by Bekker in the new edition of the Byzantines, has still further heightened the romance. See likewise in Von Hammer (Osmanische Geschichte, vol. i. p. 138) the popular Servian account, which resembles that of Ducas, and may have been the source of that of his Italian translator. The Turkish account agrees more nearly with Gibbon; but the Servian, (Milosch Kohilovisch) while he lay among the heap of the dead, pretended to have some secret to impart to Amurath, and stabbed him while he leaned over to listen. – M.] [Footnote 55: See the life and death of Morad, or Amurath I., in Cantemir, (p 33 – 45,) the first book of Chalcondyles, and the Annales Turcici of Leunclavius. According to another story, the sultan was stabbed by a Croat in his tent; and this accident was alleged to Busbequius (Epist i. p. 98) as an excuse for the unworthy precaution of pinioning, as if were, between two attendants, an ambassador’s arms, when he is introduced to the royal presence.]
The character of Bajazet, the son and successor of Amurath, is strongly expressed in his surname of Ilderim, or the lightning; and he might glory in an epithet, which was drawn from the fiery energy of his soul and the rapidity of his destructive march. In the fourteen years of his reign, ^56 he incessantly moved at the head of his armies, from Boursa to Adrianople, from the Danube to the Euphrates; and, though he strenuously labored for the propagation of the law, he invaded, with impartial ambition, the Christian and Mahometan princes of Europe and Asia.
From Angora to Amasia and Erzeroum, the northern regions of Anatolia were reduced to his obedience: he stripped of their hereditary possessions his brother emirs of Ghermian and Caramania, of Aidin and Sarukhan; and after the conquest of Iconium the ancient kingdom of the Seljukians again revived in the Ottoman dynasty. Nor were the conquests of Bajazet less rapid or important in Europe. No sooner had he imposed a regular form of servitude on the Servians and Bulgarians, than he passed the Danube to seek new enemies and new subjects in the heart of Moldavia. ^57 Whatever yet adhered to the Greek empire in Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly, acknowledged a Turkish master: an obsequious bishop led him through the gates of Thermopylae into Greece; and we may observe, as a singular fact, that the widow of a Spanish chief, who possessed the ancient seat of the oracle of Delphi, deserved his favor by the sacrifice of a beauteous daughter. The Turkish communication between Europe and Asia had been dangerous and doubtful, till he stationed at Gallipoli a fleet of galleys, to command the Hellespont and intercept the Latin succors of Constantinople. While the monarch indulged his passions in a boundless range of injustice and cruelty, he imposed on his soldiers the most rigid laws of modesty and abstinence; and the harvest was peaceably reaped and sold within the precincts of his camp. Provoked by the loose and corrupt administration of justice, he collected in a house the judges and lawyers of his dominions, who expected that in a few moments the fire would be kindled to reduce them to ashes. His ministers trembled in silence: but an Aethiopian buffoon presumed to insinuate the true cause of the evil; and future venality was left without excuse, by annexing an adequate salary to the office of cadhi. ^58 The humble title of emir was no longer suitable to the Ottoman greatness; and Bajazet condescended to accept a patent of sultan from the caliphs who served in Egypt under the yoke of the Mamalukes: ^59 a last and frivolous homage that was yielded by force to opinion; by the Turkish conquerors to the house of Abbas and the successors of the Arabian prophet. The ambition of the sultan was inflamed by the obligation of deserving this august title; and he turned his arms against the kingdom of Hungary, the perpetual theatre of the Turkish victories and defeats. Sigismond, the Hungarian king, was the son and brother of the emperors of the West: his cause was that of Europe and the church; and, on the report of his danger, the bravest knights of France and Germany were eager to march under his standard and that of the cross. In the battle of Nicopolis, Bajazet defeated a confederate army of a hundred thousand Christians, who had proudly boasted, that if the sky should fall, they could uphold it on their lances. The far greater part were slain or driven into the Danube; and Sigismond, escaping to Constantinople by the river and the Black Sea, returned after a long circuit to his exhausted kingdom. ^60 In the pride of victory, Bajazet threatened that he would besiege Buda; that he would subdue the adjacent countries of Germany and Italy, and that he would feed his horse with a bushel of oats on the altar of St. Peter at Rome. His progress was checked, not by the miraculous interposition of the apostle, not by a crusade of the Christian powers, but by a long and painful fit of the gout. The disorders of the moral, are sometimes corrected by those of the physical, world; and an acrimonious humor falling on a single fibre of one man, may prevent or suspend the misery of nations.
[Footnote 56: The reign of Bajazet I., or Ilderim Bayazid, is contained in Cantemir, (p. 46,) the iid book of Chalcondyles, and the Annales Turcici. The surname of Ilderim, or lightning, is an example, that the conquerors and poets of every age have felt the truth of a system which derives the sublime from the principle of terror.]
[Footnote 57: Cantemir, who celebrates the victories of the great Stephen over the Turks, (p. 47,) had composed the ancient and modern state of his principality of Moldavia, which has been long promised, and is still unpublished.]
[Footnote 58: Leunclav. Annal. Turcici, p. 318, 319. The venality of the cadhis has long been an object of scandal and satire; and if we distrust the observations of our travellers, we may consult the feeling of the Turks themselves, (D’Herbelot, Bibliot. Orientale, p. 216, 217, 229, 230.)] [Footnote 59: The fact, which is attested by the Arabic history of Ben Schounah, a contemporary Syrian, (De Guignes Hist. des Huns. tom. iv. p. 336.) destroys the testimony of Saad Effendi and Cantemir, (p. 14, 15,) of the election of Othman to the dignity of sultan.]
[Footnote 60: See the Decades Rerum Hungaricarum (Dec. iii. l. ii. p. 379) of Bonfinius, an Italian, who, in the xvth century, was invited into Hungary to compose an eloquent history of that kingdom. Yet, if it be extant and accessible, I should give the preference to some homely chronicle of the time and country.]
Such is the general idea of the Hungarian war; but the disastrous adventure of the French has procured us some memorials which illustrate the victory and character of Bajazet. ^61 The duke of Burgundy, sovereign of Flanders, and uncle of Charles the Sixth, yielded to the ardor of his son, John count of Nevers; and the fearless youth was accompanied by four princes, his cousins, and those of the French monarch. Their inexperience was guided by the Sire de Coucy, one of the best and oldest captain of Christendom; ^62 but the constable, admiral, and marshal of France ^63 commanded an army which did not exceed the number of a thousand knights and squires. ^* These splendid names were the source of presumption and the bane of discipline. So many might aspire to command, that none were willing to obey; their national spirit despised both their enemies and their allies; and in the persuasion that Bajazet would fly, or must fall, they began to compute how soon they should visit Constantinople and deliver the holy sepulchre. When their scouts announced the approach of the Turks, the gay and thoughtless youths were at table, already heated with wine; they instantly clasped their armor, mounted their horses, rode full speed to the vanguard, and resented as an affront the advice of Sigismond, which would have deprived them of the right and honor of the foremost attack. The battle of Nicopolis would not have been lost, if the French would have obeyed the prudence of the Hungarians; but it might have been gloriously won, had the Hungarians imitated the valor of the French. They dispersed the first line, consisting of the troops of Asia; forced a rampart of stakes, which had been planted against the cavalry; broke, after a bloody conflict, the Janizaries themselves; and were at length overwhelmed by the numerous squadrons that issued from the woods, and charged on all sides this handful of intrepid warriors. In the speed and secrecy of his march, in the order and evolutions of the battle, his enemies felt and admired the military talents of Bajazet. They accuse his cruelty in the use of victory. After reserving the count of Nevers, and four-and-twenty lords, ^* whose birth and riches were attested by his Latin interpreters, the remainder of the French captives, who had survived the slaughter of the day, were led before his throne; and, as they refused to abjure their faith, were successively beheaded in his presence. The sultan was exasperated by the loss of his bravest Janizaries; and if it be true, that, on the eve of the engagement, the French had massacred their Turkish prisoners, ^64 they might impute to themselves the consequences of a just retaliation. ^! A knight, whose life had been spared, was permitted to return to Paris, that he might relate the deplorable tale, and solicit the ransom of the noble captives. In the mean while, the count of Nevers, with the princes and barons of France, were dragged along in the marches of the Turkish camp, exposed as a grateful trophy to the Moslems of Europe and Asia, and strictly confined at Boursa, as often as Bajazet resided in his capital. The sultan was pressed each day to expiate with their blood the blood of his martyrs; but he had pronounced that they should live, and either for mercy or destruction his word was irrevocable. He was assured of their value and importance by the return of the messenger, and the gifts and intercessions of the kings of France and of Cyprus. Lusignan presented him with a gold saltcellar of curious workmanship, and of the price of ten thousand ducats; and Charles the Sixth despatched by the way of Hungary a cast of Norwegian hawks, and six horse-loads of scarlet cloth, of fine linen of Rheims, and of Arras tapestry, representing the battles of the great Alexander. After much delay, the effect of distance rather than of art, Bajazet agreed to accept a ransom of two hundred thousand ducats for the count of Nevers and the surviving princes and barons: the marshal Boucicault, a famous warrior, was of the number of the fortunate; but the admiral of France had been slain in battle; and the constable, with the Sire de Coucy, died in the prison of Boursa. This heavy demand, which was doubled by incidental costs, fell chiefly on the duke of Burgundy, or rather on his Flemish subjects, who were bound by the feudal laws to contribute for the knighthood and captivity of the eldest son of their lord. For the faithful discharge of the debt, some merchants of Genoa gave security to the amount of five times the sum; a lesson to those warlike times, that commerce and credit are the links of the society of nations. It had been stipulated in the treaty, that the French captives should swear never to bear arms against the person of their conqueror; but the ungenerous restraint was abolished by Bajazet himself. “I despise,” said he to the heir of Burgundy, “thy oaths and thy arms. Thou art young, and mayest be ambitious of effacing the disgrace or misfortune of thy first chivalry. Assemble thy powers, proclaim thy design, and be assured that Bajazet will rejoice to meet thee a second time in a field of battle.” Before their departure, they were indulged in the freedom and hospitality of the court of Boursa. The French princes admired the magnificence of the Ottoman, whose hunting and hawking equipage was composed of seven thousand huntsmen and seven thousand falconers. ^65 In their presence, and at his command, the belly of one of his chamberlains was cut open, on a complaint against him for drinking the goat’s milk of a poor woman. The strangers were astonished by this act of justice; but it was the justice of a sultan who disdains to balance the weight of evidence, or to measure the degrees of guilt.
[Footnote 61: I should not complain of the labor of this work, if my materials were always derived from such books as the chronicle of honest Froissard, (vol. iv. c. 67, 72, 74, 79-83, 85, 87, 89,) who read little, inquired much, and believed all. The original Memoires of the Marechal de Boucicault (Partie i. c. 22-28) add some facts, but they are dry and deficient, if compared with the pleasant garrulity of Froissard.]
[Footnote 62: An accurate Memoir on the Life of Enguerrand VII., Sire de Coucy, has been given by the Baron de Zurlauben, (Hist. de l’Academie des Inscriptions, tom. xxv.) His rank and possessions were equally considerable in France and England; and, in 1375, he led an army of adventurers into Switzerland, to recover a large patrimony which he claimed in right of his grandmother, the daughter of the emperor Albert I. of Austria, (Sinner, Voyage dans la Suisse Occidentale, tom. i. p. 118-124.)]
[Footnote 63: That military office, so respectable at present, was still more conspicuous when it was divided between two persons, (Daniel, Hist. de la Milice Francoise, tom. ii. p. 5.) One of these, the marshal of the crusade, was the famous Boucicault, who afterwards defended Constantinople, governed Genoa, invaded the coast of Asia, and died in the field of Azincour.] [Footnote *: Daru, Hist. de Venice, vol. ii. p. 104, makes the whole French army amount to 10,000 men, of whom 1000 were knights. The curious volume of Schiltberger, a German of Munich, who was taken prisoner in the battle, (edit. Munich, 1813,) and which V. Hammer receives as authentic, gives the whole number at 6000. See Schiltberger. Reise in dem Orient. and V. Hammer, note, p. 610. – M.]
[Footnote *: According to Shiltberger there were only twelve French lords granted to the prayer of the “duke of Burgundy,” and “Herr Stephan Synther, and Johann von Bodem.” Schiltberger, p. 13. – M.]
[Footnote 64: For this odious fact, the Abbe de Vertot quotes the Hist. Anonyme de St. Denys, l. xvi. c. 10, 11. (Ordre de Malthe, tom. ii. p. 310.] [Footnote !: See Schiltberger’s very graphic account of the massacre. He was led out to be slaughtered in cold blood with the rest f the Christian prisoners, amounting to 10,000. He was spared at the intercession of the son of Bajazet, with a few others, on account of their extreme youth. No one under 20 years of age was put to death. The “duke of Burgundy” was obliged to be a spectator of this butchery which lasted from early in the morning till four o’clock, P. M. It ceased only at the supplication of the leaders of Bajazet’s army. Schiltberger, p. 14. – M.]
[Footnote 65: Sherefeddin Ali (Hist. de Timour Bec, l. v. c. 13) allows Bajazet a round number of 12,000 officers and servants of the chase. A part of his spoils was afterwards displayed in a hunting-match of Timour, l. hounds with satin housings; 2. leopards with collars set with jewels; 3. Grecian greyhounds; and 4, dogs from Europe, as strong as African lions, (idem, l. vi. c. 15.) Bajazet was particularly fond of flying his hawks at cranes, (Chalcondyles, l. ii. p. 85.)]
After his enfranchisement from an oppressive guardian, John Palaeologus remained thirty-six years, the helpless, and, as it should seem, the careless spectator of the public ruin. ^66 Love, or rather lust, was his only vigorous passion; and in the embraces of the wives and virgins of the city, the Turkish slave forgot the dishonor of the emperor of the Romans Andronicus, his eldest son, had formed, at Adrianople, an intimate and guilty friendship with Sauzes, the son of Amurath; and the two youths conspired against the authority and lives of their parents. The presence of Amurath in Europe soon discovered and dissipated their rash counsels; and, after depriving Sauzes of his sight, the Ottoman threatened his vassal with the treatment of an accomplice and an enemy, unless he inflicted a similar punishment on his own son. Palaeologus trembled and obeyed; and a cruel precaution involved in the same sentence the childhood and innocence of John, the son of the criminal. But the operation was so mildly, or so unskilfully, performed, that the one retained the sight of an eye, and the other was afflicted only with the infirmity of squinting. Thus excluded from the succession, the two princes were confined in the tower of Anema; and the piety of Manuel, the second son of the reigning monarch, was rewarded with the gift of the Imperial crown. But at the end of two years, the turbulence of the Latins and the levity of the Greeks, produced a revolution; ^* and the two emperors were buried in the tower from whence the two prisoners were exalted to the throne. Another period of two years afforded Palaeologus and Manuel the means of escape: it was contrived by the magic or subtlety of a monk, who was alternately named the angel or the devil: they fled to Scutari; their adherents armed in their cause; and the two Byzantine factions displayed the ambition and animosity with which Caesar and Pompey had disputed the empire of the world. The Roman world was now contracted to a corner of Thrace, between the Propontis and the Black Sea, about fifty miles in length and thirty in breadth; a space of ground not more extensive than the lesser principalities of Germany or Italy, if the remains of Constantinople had not still represented the wealth and populousness of a kingdom. To restore the public peace, it was found necessary to divide this fragment of the empire; and while Palaeologus and Manuel were left in possession of the capital, almost all that lay without the walls was ceded to the blind princes, who fixed their residence at Rhodosto and Selybria. In the tranquil slumber of royalty, the passions of John Palaeologus survived his reason and his strength: he deprived his favorite and heir of a blooming princess of Trebizond; and while the feeble emperor labored to consummate his nuptials, Manuel, with a hundred of the noblest Greeks, was sent on a peremptory summons to the Ottoman porte. They served with honor in the wars of Bajazet; but a plan of fortifying Constantinople excited his jealousy: he threatened their lives; the new works were instantly demolished; and we shall bestow a praise, perhaps above the merit of Palaeologus, if we impute this last humiliation as the cause of his death.
[Footnote 66: For the reigns of John Palaeologus and his son Manuel, from 1354 to 1402, see Ducas, c. 9 – 15, Phranza, l. i. c. 16 – 21, and the ist and iid books of Chalcondyles, whose proper subject is drowned in a sea of episode.] [Footnote *: According to Von Hammer it was the power of Bajazet, vol. i. p. 218.]
The earliest intelligence of that event was communicated to Manuel, who escaped with speed and secrecy from the palace of Boursa to the Byzantine throne. Bajazet affected a proud indifference at the loss of this valuable pledge; and while he pursued his conquests in Europe and Asia, he left the emperor to struggle with his blind cousin John of Selybria, who, in eight years of civil war, asserted his right of primogeniture. At length, the ambition of the victorious sultan pointed to the conquest of Constantinople; but he listened to the advice of his vizier, who represented that such an enterprise might unite the powers of Christendom in a second and more formidable crusade. His epistle to the emperor was conceived in these words: “By the divine clemency, our invincible cimeter has reduced to our obedience almost all Asia, with many and large countries in Europe, excepting only the city of Constantinople; for beyond the walls thou hast nothing left. Resign that city; stipulate thy reward; or tremble, for thyself and thy unhappy people, at the consequences of a rash refusal.” But his ambassadors were instructed to soften their tone, and to propose a treaty, which was subscribed with submission and gratitude. A truce of ten years was purchased by an annual tribute of thirty thousand crowns of gold; the Greeks deplored the public toleration of the law of Mahomet, and Bajazet enjoyed the glory of establishing a Turkish cadhi, and founding a royal mosque in the metropolis of the Eastern church. ^67 Yet this truce was soon violated by the restless sultan: in the cause of the prince of Selybria, the lawful emperor, an army of Ottomans again threatened Constantinople; and the distress of Manuel implored the protection of the king of France. His plaintive embassy obtained much pity and some relief; and the conduct of the succor was intrusted to the marshal Boucicault, ^68 whose religious chivalry was inflamed by the desire of revenging his captivity on the infidels. He sailed with four ships of war, from Aiguesmortes to the Hellespont; forced the passage, which was guarded by seventeen Turkish galleys; landed at Constantinople a supply of six hundred men-at-arms and sixteen hundred archers; and reviewed them in the adjacent plain, without condescending to number or array the multitude of Greeks. By his presence, the blockade was raised both by sea and land; the flying squadrons of Bajazet were driven to a more respectful distance; and several castles in Europe and Asia were stormed by the emperor and the marshal, who fought with equal valor by each other’s side. But the Ottomans soon returned with an increase of numbers; and the intrepid Boucicault, after a year’s struggle, resolved to evacuate a country which could no longer afford either pay or provisions for his soldiers. The marshal offered to conduct Manuel to the French court, where he might solicit in person a supply of men and money; and advised, in the mean while, that, to extinguish all domestic discord, he should leave his blind competitor on the throne. The proposal was embraced: the prince of Selybria was introduced to the capital; and such was the public misery, that the lot of the exile seemed more fortunate than that of the sovereign. Instead of applauding the success of his vassal, the Turkish sultan claimed the city as his own; and on the refusal of the emperor John, Constantinople was more closely pressed by the calamities of war and famine. Against such an enemy prayers and resistance were alike unavailing; and the savage would have devoured his prey, if, in the fatal moment, he had not been overthrown by another savage stronger than himself. By the victory of Timour or Tamerlane, the fall of Constantinople was delayed about fifty years; and this important, though accidental, service may justly introduce the life and character of the Mogul conqueror.
[Footnote 67: Cantemir, p. 50 – 53. Of the Greeks, Ducas alone (c. 13, 15) acknowledges the Turkish cadhi at Constantinople. Yet even Ducas dissembles the mosque.]
[Footnote 68: Memoires du bon Messire Jean le Maingre, dit Boucicault, Marechal de France, partie c. 30, 35.]
Chapter LXV: Elevation Of Timour Or Tamerlane, And His Death
Part I.
Elevation Of Timour Or Tamerlane To The Throne Of Samarcand. – His Conquests In Persia, Georgia, Tartary Russia, India, Syria, And Anatolia. – His Turkish War. – Defeat And Captivity Of Bajazet. – Death Of Timour. – Civil War Of The Sons Of Bajazet. – Restoration Of The Turkish Monarchy By Mahomet The First. – Siege Of Constantinople By Amurath The Second.
The conquest and monarchy of the world was the first object of the ambition of Timour. To live in the memory and esteem of future ages was the second wish of his magnanimous spirit. All the civil and military transactions of his reign were diligently recorded in the journals of his secretaries: ^1 the authentic narrative was revised by the persons best informed of each particular transaction; and it is believed in the empire and family of Timour, that the monarch himself composed the commentaries ^2 of his life, and the institutions ^3 of his government. ^4 But these cares were ineffectual for the preservation of his fame, and these precious memorials in the Mogul or Persian language were concealed from the world, or, at least, from the knowledge of Europe. The nations which he vanquished exercised a base and impotent revenge; and ignorance has long repeated the tale of calumny, ^5 which had disfigured the birth and character, the person, and even the name, of Tamerlane. ^6 Yet his real merit would be enhanced, rather than debased, by the elevation of a peasant to the throne of Asia; nor can his lameness be a theme of reproach, unless he had the weakness to blush at a natural, or perhaps an honorable, infirmity. ^*
[Footnote 1: These journals were communicated to Sherefeddin, or Cherefeddin Ali, a native of Yezd, who composed in the Persian language a history of Timour Beg, which has been translated into French by M. Petit de la Croix, (Paris, 1722, in 4 vols. 12 mo.,) and has always been my faithful guide. His geography and chronology are wonderfully accurate; and he may be trusted for public facts, though he servilely praises the virtue and fortune of the hero. Timour’s attention to procure intelligence from his own and foreign countries may be seen in the Institutions, p. 215, 217, 349, 351.]
[Footnote 2: These Commentaries are yet unknown in Europe: but Mr. White gives some hope that they may be imported and translated by his friend Major Davy, who had read in the East this “minute and faithful narrative of an interesting and eventful period.”
Note: The manuscript of Major Davy has been translated by Major Stewart, and published by the Oriental Translation Committee of London. It contains the life of Timour, from his birth to his forty-first year; but the last thirty years of western war and conquest are wanting. Major Stewart intimates that two manuscripts exist in this country containing the whole work, but excuses himself, on account of his age, from undertaking the laborious task of completing the translation. It is to be hoped that the European public will be soon enabled to judge of the value and authenticity of the Commentaries of the Caesar of the East. Major Stewart’s work commences with the Book of Dreams and Omens – a wild, but characteristic, chronicle of Visions and Sortes Koranicae. Strange that a life of Timour should awaken a reminiscence of the diary of Archbishop Laud! The early dawn and the gradual expression of his not less splendid but more real visions of ambition are touched with the simplicity of truth and nature. But we long to escape from the petty feuds of the pastoral chieftain, to the triumphs and the legislation of the conqueror of the world – M.]
[Footnote 3: I am ignorant whether the original institution, in the Turki or Mogul language, be still extant. The Persic version, with an English translation, and most valuable index, was published (Oxford, 1783, in 4to.) by the joint labors of Major Davy and Mr. White, the Arabic professor. This work has been since translated from the Persic into French, (Paris, 1787,) by M. Langles, a learned Orientalist, who has added the life of Timour, and many curious notes.]
[Footnote 4: Shaw Allum, the present Mogul, reads, values, but cannot imitate, the institutions of his great ancestor. The English translator relies on their internal evidence; but if any suspicions should arise of fraud and fiction, they will not be dispelled by Major Davy’s letter. The Orientals have never cultivated the art of criticism; the patronage of a prince, less honorable, perhaps, is not less lucrative than that of a bookseller; nor can it be deemed incredible that a Persian, the real author, should renounce the credit, to raise the value and price, of the work.]
[Footnote 5: The original of the tale is found in the following work, which is much esteemed for its florid elegance of style: Ahmedis Arabsiadae (Ahmed Ebn Arabshah) Vitae et Rerum gestarum Timuri. Arabice et Latine. Edidit Samuel Henricus Manger. Franequerae, 1767, 2 tom. in 4to. This Syrian author is ever a malicious, and often an ignorant enemy: the very titles of his chapters are injurious; as how the wicked, as how the impious, as how the viper, &c. The copious article of Timur, in Bibliotheque Orientale, is of a mixed nature, as D’Herbelot indifferently draws his materials (p. 877 – 888) from Khondemir Ebn Schounah, and the Lebtarikh.]
[Footnote 6: Demir or Timour signifies in the Turkish language, Iron; and it is the appellation of a lord or prince. By the change of a letter or accent, it is changed into Lenc, or Lame; and a European corruption confounds the two words in the name of Tamerlane.
Note: According to the memoirs he was so called by a Shaikh, who, when visited by his mother on his birth, was reading the verse of the Koran, ‘Are you sure that he who dwelleth in heaven will not cause the earth to swallow you up, and behold it shall shake, Tamurn.” The Shaikh then stopped and said, “We have named your son Timur,” p. 21. – M.]
[Footnote : He was lamed by a wound at the siege of the capital of Sistan. Sherefeddin, lib. iii. c. 17. p. 136. See Von Hammer, vol. i. p. 260. – M.] In the eyes of the Moguls, who held the indefeasible succession of the house of Zingis, he was doubtless a rebel subject; yet he sprang from the noble tribe of Berlass: his fifth ancestor, Carashar Nevian, had been the vizier ^! of Zagatai, in his new realm of Transoxiana; and in the ascent of some generations, the branch of Timour is confounded, at least by the females, ^7 with the Imperial stem. ^8 He was born forty miles to the south of Samarcand in the village of Sebzar, in the fruitful territory of Cash, of which his fathers were the hereditary chiefs, as well as of a toman of ten thousand horse. ^9 His birth ^10 was cast on one of those periods of anarchy, which announce the fall of the Asiatic dynasties, and open a new field to adventurous ambition. The khans of Zagatai were extinct; the emirs aspired to independence; and their domestic feuds could only be suspended by the conquest and tyranny of the khans of Kashgar, who, with an army of Getes or Calmucks, ^11 invaded the Transoxian kingdom. From the twelfth year of his age, Timour had entered the field of action; in the twenty-fifth ^!! he stood forth as the deliverer of his country; and the eyes and wishes of the people were turned towards a hero who suffered in their cause. The chiefs of the law and of the army had pledged their salvation to support him with their lives and fortunes; but in the hour of danger they were silent and afraid; and, after waiting seven days on the hills of Samarcand, he retreated to the desert with only sixty horsemen. The fugitives were overtaken by a thousand Getes, whom he repulsed with incredible slaughter, and his enemies were forced to exclaim, “Timour is a wonderful man: fortune and the divine favor are with him.” But in this bloody action his own followers were reduced to ten, a number which was soon diminished by the desertion of three Carizmians. ^!!! He wandered in the desert with his wife, seven companions, and four horses; and sixty-two days was he plunged in a loathsome dungeon, from whence he escaped by his own courage and the remorse of the oppressor. After swimming the broad and rapid steam of the Jihoon, or Oxus, he led, during some months, the life of a vagrant and outlaw, on the borders of the adjacent states. But his fame shone brighter in adversity; he learned to distinguish the friends of his person, the associates of his fortune, and to apply the various characters of men for their advantage, and, above all, for his own. On his return to his native country, Timour was successively joined by the parties of his confederates, who anxiously sought him in the desert; nor can I refuse to describe, in his pathetic simplicity, one of their fortunate encounters. He presented himself as a guide to three chiefs, who were at the head of seventy horse. “When their eyes fell upon me,” says Timour, “they were overwhelmed with joy; and they alighted from their horses; and they came and kneeled; and they kissed my stirrup. I also came down from my horse, and took each of them in my arms. And I put my turban on the head of the first chief; and my girdle, rich in jewels and wrought with gold, I bound on the loins of the second; and the third I clothed in my own coat. And they wept, and I wept also; and the hour of prayer was arrived, and we prayed. And we mounted our horses, and came to my dwelling; and I collected my people, and made a feast.” His trusty bands were soon increased by the bravest of the tribes; he led them against a superior foe; and, after some vicissitudes of war the Getes were finally driven from the kingdom of Transoxiana. He had done much for his own glory; but much remained to be done, much art to be exerted, and some blood to be spilt, before he could teach his equals to obey him as their master. The birth and power of emir Houssein compelled him to accept a vicious and unworthy colleague, whose sister was the best beloved of his wives. Their union was short and jealous; but the policy of Timour, in their frequent quarrels, exposed his rival to the reproach of injustice and perfidy; and, after a final defeat, Houssein was slain by some sagacious friends, who presumed, for the last time, to disobey the commands of their lord. ^ At the age of thirty-four, ^12 and in a general diet or couroultai, he was invested with Imperial command, but he affected to revere the house of Zingis; and while the emir Timour reigned over Zagatai and the East, a nominal khan served as a private officer in the armies of his servant. A fertile kingdom, five hundred miles in length and in breadth, might have satisfied the ambition of a subject; but Timour aspired to the dominion of the world; and before his death, the crown of Zagatai was one of the twenty- seven crowns which he had placed on his head. Without expatiating on the victories of thirty-five campaigns; without describing the lines of march, which he repeatedly traced over the continent of Asia; I shall briefly represent his conquests in, I. Persia, II. Tartary, and, III. India, ^13 and from thence proceed to the more interesting narrative of his Ottoman war.
[Footnote !: In the memoirs, the title Gurgan is in one place (p. 23) interpreted the son-in-law; in another (p. 28) as Kurkan, great prince, generalissimo, and prime minister of Jagtai. – M.]
[Footnote 7: After relating some false and foolish tales of Timour Lenc, Arabshah is compelled to speak truth, and to own him for a kinsman of Zingis, per mulieres, (as he peevishly adds,) laqueos Satanae, (pars i. c. i. p. 25.) The testimony of Abulghazi Khan (P. ii. c. 5, P. v. c. 4) is clear, unquestionable, and decisive.]
[Footnote 8: According to one of the pedigrees, the fourth ancestor of Zingis, and the ninth of timour, were brothers; and they agreed, that the posterity of the elder should succeed to the dignity of khan, and that the descendants of the younger should fill the office of their minister and general. This tradition was at least convenient to justify the first steps of Timour’s ambition, (Institutions, p. 24, 25, from the MS. fragments of Timour’s History.)]
[Footnote 9: See the preface of Sherefeddin, and Abulfeda’s Geography, (Chorasmiae, &c., Descriptio, p. 60, 61,) in the iiid volume of Hudson’s Minor Greek Geographers.]
[Footnote 10: See his nativity in Dr. Hyde, (Syntagma Dissertat. tom. ii. p. 466,) as it was cast by the astrologers of his grandson Ulugh Beg. He was born, A.D. 1336, April 9, 11 degrees 57 minutes. P. M., lat. 36. I know not whether they can prove the great conjunction of the planets from whence, like other conquerors and prophets, Timour derived the surname of Saheb Keran, or master of the conjunctions, (Bibliot. Orient. p. 878.)]
[Footnote 11: In the Institutions of Timour, these subjects of the khan of Kashgar are most improperly styled Ouzbegs, or Usbeks, a name which belongs to another branch and country of Tartars, (Abulghazi, P. v. c. v. P. vii. c. 5.) Could I be sure that this word is in the Turkish original, I would boldly pronounce, that the Institutions were framed a century after the death of Timour, since the establishment of the Usbeks in Transoxiana. Note: Col. Stewart observes, that the Persian translator has sometimes made use of the name Uzbek by anticipation. He observes, likewise, that these Jits (Getes) are not to be confounded with the ancient Getae: they were unconverted Turks. Col. Tod (History of Rajasthan, vol. i. p. 166) would identify the Jits with the ancient race. – M.]
[Footnote !!: He was twenty-seven before he served his first wars under the emir Houssein, who ruled over Khorasan and Mawerainnehr. Von Hammer, vol. i. p. 262. Neither of these statements agrees with the Memoirs. At twelve he was a boy. “I fancied that I perceived in myself all the signs of greatness and wisdom, and whoever came to visit me, I received with great hauteur and dignity.” At seventeen he undertook the management of the flocks and herds of the family, (p. 24.) At nineteen he became religious, and “left off playing chess,” made a kind of Budhist vow never to injure living thing and felt his foot paralyzed from having accidentally trod upon an ant, (p. 30.) At twenty, thoughts of rebellion and greatness rose in his mind; at twenty-one, he seems to have performed his first feat of arms. He was a practised warrior when he served, in his twenty-seventh year, under Emir Houssein.]
[Footnote !!!: Compare Memoirs, page 61. The imprisonment is there stated at fifty-three days. “At this time I made a vow to God that I would never keep any person, whether guilty or innocent, for any length of time, in prison or in chains.” p. 63. – M.]
[Footnote *: Timour, on one occasion, sent him this message: “He who wishes to embrace the bride of royalty must kiss her across the edge of the sharp sword,” p. 83. The scene of the trial of Houssein, the resistance of Timour gradually becoming more feeble, the vengeance of the chiefs becoming proportionably more determined, is strikingly portrayed. Mem. p 130 – M.] [Footnote 12: The ist book of Sherefeddin is employed on the private life of the hero: and he himself, or his secretary, (Institutions, p. 3 – 77,) enlarges with pleasure on the thirteen designs and enterprises which most truly constitute his personal merit. It even shines through the dark coloring of Arabshah, (P. i. c. 1 – 12.)]
[Footnote 13: The conquests of Persia, Tartary, and India, are represented in the iid and iiid books of Sherefeddin, and by Arabshah, (c. 13 – 55.) Consult the excellent Indexes to the Institutions.
Note: Compare the seventh book of Von Hammer, Geschichte des Osman ischen Reiches. – M.]
I. For every war, a motive of safety or revenge, of honor or zeal, of right or convenience, may be readily found in the jurisprudence of conquerors. No sooner had Timour reunited to the patrimony of Zagatai the dependent countries of Carizme and Candahar, than he turned his eyes towards the kingdoms of Iran or Persia. From the Oxus to the Tigris, that extensive country was left without a lawful sovereign since the death of Abousaid, the last of the descendants of the great Holacou. Peace and justice had been banished from the land above forty years; and the Mogul invader might seem to listen to the cries of an oppressed people.
Their petty tyrants might have opposed him with confederate arms: they separately stood, and successively fell; and the difference of their fate was only marked by the promptitude of submission or the obstinacy of resistance. Ibrahim, prince of Shirwan, or Albania, kissed the footstool of the Imperial throne. His peace-offerings of silks, horses, and jewels, were composed, according to the Tartar fashion, each article of nine pieces; but a critical spectator observed, that there were only eight slaves.
“I myself am the ninth,” replied Ibrahim, who was prepared for the remark; and his flattery was rewarded by the smile of Timour. ^14 Shah Mansour, prince of Fars, or the proper Persia, was one of the least powerful, but most dangerous, of his enemies. In a battle under the walls of Shiraz, he broke, with three or four thousand soldiers, the coul or main body of thirty thousand horse, where the emperor fought in person. No more than fourteen or fifteen guards remained near the standard of Timour: he stood firm as a rock, and received on his helmet two weighty strokes of a cimeter: ^15 the Moguls rallied; the head of Mansour was thrown at his feet; and he declared his esteem of the valor of a foe, by extirpating all the males of so intrepid a race. From Shiraz, his troops advanced to the Persian Gulf; and the richness and weakness of Ormuz ^16 were displayed in an annual tribute of six hundred thousand dinars of gold. Bagdad was no longer the city of peace, the seat of the caliphs; but the noblest conquest of Holacou could not be overlooked by his ambitious successor. The whole course of the Tigris and Euphrates, from the mouth to the sources of those rivers, was reduced to his obedience: he entered Edessa; and the Turkmans of the black sheep were chastised for the sacrilegious pillage of a caravan of Mecca. In the mountains of Georgia, the native Christians still braved the law and the sword of Mahomet, by three expeditions he obtained the merit of the gazie, or holy war; and the prince of Teflis became his proselyte and friend. [Footnote 14: The reverence of the Tartars for the mysterious number of nine is declared by Abulghazi Khan, who, for that reason, divides his Genealogical History into nine parts.]
[Footnote 15: According to Arabshah, (P. i. c. 28, p. 183,) the coward Timour ran away to his tent, and hid himself from the pursuit of Shah Mansour under the women’s garments. Perhaps Sherefeddin (l. iii. c. 25) has magnified his courage.]
[Footnote 16: The history of Ormuz is not unlike that of Tyre. The old city, on the continent, was destroyed by the Tartars, and renewed in a neighboring island, without fresh water or vegetation. The kings of Ormuz, rich in the Indian trade and the pearl fishery, possessed large territories both in Persia and Arabia; but they were at first the tributaries of the sultans of Kerman, and at last were delivered (A.D. 1505) by the Portuguese tyrants from the tyranny of their own viziers, (Marco Polo, l. i. c. 15, 16, fol. 7, 8. Abulfeda, Geograph. tabul. xi. p. 261, 262, an original Chronicle of Ormuz, in Texeira, or Stevens’s History of Persia, p. 376 – 416, and the Itineraries inserted in the ist volume of Ramusio, of Ludovico Barthema, (1503,) fol. 167, of Andrea Corsali, (1517) fol. 202, 203, and of Odoardo Barbessa, (in 1516,) fol 313 – 318.)]
II. A just retaliation might be urged for the invasion of Turkestan, or the Eastern Tartary. The dignity of Timour could not endure the impunity of the Getes: he passed the Sihoon, subdued the kingdom of Kashgar, and marched seven times into the heart of their country. His most distant camp was two months’ journey, or four hundred and eighty leagues to the north-east of Samarcand; and his emirs, who traversed the River Irtish, engraved in the forests of Siberia a rude memorial of their exploits. The conquest of Kipzak, or the Western Tartary, ^17 was founded on the double motive of aiding the distressed, and chastising the ungrateful. Toctamish, a fugitive prince, was entertained and protected in his court: the ambassadors of Auruss Khan were dismissed with a haughty denial, and followed on the same day by the armies of Zagatai; and their success established Toctamish in the Mogul empire of the North. But, after a reign of ten years, the new khan forgot the merits and the strength of his benefactor; the base usurper, as he deemed him, of the sacred rights of the house of Zingis. Through the gates of Derbend, he entered Persia at the head of ninety thousand horse: with the innumerable forces of Kipzak, Bulgaria, Circassia, and Russia, he passed the Sihoon, burnt the palaces of Timour, and compelled him, amidst the winter snows, to contend for Samarcand and his life. After a mild expostulation, and a glorious victory, the emperor resolved on revenge; and by the east, and the west, of the Caspian, and the Volga, he twice invaded Kipzak with such mighty powers, that thirteen miles were measured from his right to his left wing. In a march of five months, they rarely beheld the footsteps of man; and their daily subsistence was often trusted to the fortune of the chase. At length the armies encountered each other; but the treachery of the standard-bearer, who, in the heat of action, reversed the Imperial standard of Kipzak, determined the victory of the Zagatais; and Toctamish (I peak the language of the Institutions) gave the tribe of Toushi to the wind of desolation. ^18 He fled to the Christian duke of Lithuania; again returned to the banks of the Volga; and, after fifteen battles with a domestic rival, at last perished in the wilds of Siberia. The pursuit of a flying enemy carried Timour into the tributary provinces of Russia: a duke of the reigning family was made prisoner amidst the ruins of his capital; and Yeletz, by the pride and ignorance of the Orientals, might easily be confounded with the genuine metropolis of the nation. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar, and the resistance would have been feeble, since the hopes of the Russians were placed in a miraculous image of the Virgin, to whose protection they ascribed the casual and voluntary retreat of the conqueror. Ambition and prudence recalled him to the South, the desolate country was exhausted, and the Mogul soldiers were enriched with an immense spoil of precious furs, of linen of Antioch, ^19 and of ingots of gold and silver. ^20 On the banks of the Don, or Tanais, he received an humble deputation from the consuls and merchants of Egypt, ^21 Venice, Genoa, Catalonia, and Biscay, who occupied the commerce and city of Tana, or Azoph, at the mouth of the river. They offered their gifts, admired his magnificence, and trusted his royal word. But the peaceful visit of an emir, who explored the state of the magazines and harbor, was speedily followed by the destructive presence of the Tartars. The city was reduced to ashes; the Moslems were pillaged and dismissed; but all the Christians, who had not fled to their ships, were condemned either to death or slavery. ^22 Revenge prompted him to burn the cities of Serai and Astrachan, the monuments of rising civilization; and his vanity proclaimed, that he had penetrated to the region of perpetual daylight, a strange phenomenon, which authorized his Mahometan doctors to dispense with the obligation of evening prayer. ^23 [Footnote 17: Arabshah had travelled into Kipzak, and acquired a singular knowledge of the geography, cities, and revolutions, of that northern region, (P. i. c. 45 – 49.)]
[Footnote 18: Institutions of Timour, p. 123, 125. Mr. White, the editor, bestows some animadversion on the superficial account of Sherefeddin, (l. iii. c. 12, 13, 14,) who was ignorant of the designs of Timour, and the true springs of action.]
[Footnote 19: The furs of Russia are more credible than the ingots. But the linen of Antioch has never been famous: and Antioch was in ruins. I suspect that it was some manufacture of Europe, which the Hanse merchants had imported by the way of Novogorod.]
[Footnote 20: M. Levesque (Hist. de Russie, tom. ii. p. 247. Vie de Timour, p. 64 – 67, before the French version of the Institutes) has corrected the error of Sherefeddin, and marked the true limit of Timour’s conquests. His arguments are superfluous; and a simple appeal to the Russian annals is sufficient to prove that Moscow, which six years before had been taken by Toctamish, escaped the arms of a more formidable invader.] [Footnote 21: An Egyptian consul from Grand Cairo is mentioned in Barbaro’s voyage to Tana in 1436, after the city had been rebuilt, (Ramusio, tom. ii. fol. 92.)]
[Footnote 22: The sack of Azoph is described by Sherefeddin, (l. iii. c. 55,) and much more particularly by the author of an Italian chronicle, (Andreas de Redusiis de Quero, in Chron. Tarvisiano, in Muratori, Script. Rerum Italicarum, tom. xix. p. 802 – 805.) He had conversed with the Mianis, two Venetian brothers, one of whom had been sent a deputy to the camp of Timour, and the other had lost at Azoph three sons and 12,000 ducats.] [Footnote 23: Sherefeddin only says (l. iii. c. 13) that the rays of the setting, and those of the rising sun, were scarcely separated by any interval; a problem which may be solved in the latitude of Moscow, (the 56th degree,) with the aid of the Aurora Borealis, and a long summer twilight. But a day of forty days (Khondemir apud D’Herbelot, p. 880) would rigorously confine us within the polar circle.]
III. When Timour first proposed to his princes and emirs the invasion of India or Hindostan, ^24 he was answered by a murmur of discontent: “The rivers! and the mountains and deserts! and the soldiers clad in armor! and the elephants, destroyers of men!” But the displeasure of the emperor was more dreadful than all these terrors; and his superior reason was convinced, that an enterprise of such tremendous aspect was safe and easy in the execution. He was informed by his spies of the weakness and anarchy of Hindostan: the soubahs of the provinces had erected the standard of rebellion; and the perpetual infancy of Sultan Mahmoud was despised even in the harem of Delhi. The Mogul army moved in three great divisions; and Timour observes with pleasure, that the ninety-two squadrons of a thousand horse most fortunately corresponded with the ninety-two names or epithets of the prophet Mahomet. ^* Between the Jihoon and the Indus they crossed one of the ridges of mountains, which are styled by the Arabian geographers The Stony Girdles of the Earth. The highland robbers were subdued or extirpated; but great numbers of men and horses perished in the snow; the emperor himself was let down a precipice on a portable scaffold – the ropes were one hundred and fifty cubits in length; and before he could reach the bottom, this dangerous operation was five times repeated. Timour crossed the Indus at the ordinary passage of Attok; and successively traversed, in the footsteps of Alexander, the Punjab, or five rivers, ^25 that fall into the master stream. From Attok to Delhi, the high road measures no more than six hundred miles; but the two conquerors deviated to the south-east; and the motive of Timour was to join his grandson, who had achieved by his command the conquest of Moultan. On the eastern bank of the Hyphasis, on the edge of the desert, the Macedonian hero halted and wept: the Mogul entered the desert, reduced the fortress of Batmir, and stood in arms before the gates of Delhi, a great and flourishing city, which had subsisted three centuries under the dominion of the Mahometan kings. ^! The siege, more especially of the castle, might have been a work of time; but he tempted, by the appearance of weakness, the sultan Mahmoud and his vizier to descend into the plain, with ten thousand cuirassiers, forty thousand of his foot-guards, and one hundred and twenty elephants, whose tusks are said to have been armed with sharp and poisoned daggers. Against these monsters, or rather against the imagination of his troops, he condescended to use some extraordinary precautions of fire and a ditch, of iron spikes and a rampart of bucklers; but the event taught the Moguls to smile at their own fears; and as soon as these unwieldy animals were routed, the inferior species (the men of India) disappeared from the field. Timour made his triumphal entry into the capital of Hindostan; and admired, with a view to imitate, the architecture of the stately mosque; but the order or license of a general pillage and massacre polluted the festival of his victory. He resolved to purify his soldiers in the blood of the idolaters, or Gentoos, who still surpass, in the proportion of ten to one, the numbers of the Moslems. ^* In this pious design, he advanced one hundred miles to the north-east of Delhi, passed the Ganges, fought several battles by land and water, and penetrated to the famous rock of Coupele, the statue of the cow, ^!! that seems to discharge the mighty river, whose source is far distant among the mountains of Thibet. ^26 His return was along the skirts of the northern hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would degenerate into a race of Hindoos.
[Footnote 24: For the Indian war, see the Institutions, (p. 129 – 139,) the fourth book of Sherefeddin, and the history of Ferishta, (in Dow, vol. ii. p. 1 – 20,) which throws a general light on the affairs of Hindostan.] [Footnote *: Gibbon (observes M. von Hammer) is mistaken in the correspondence of the ninety-two squadrons of his army with the ninety-two names of God: the names of God are ninety-nine. and Allah is the hundredth, p. 286, note. But Gibbon speaks of the names or epithets of Mahomet, not of God. – M] [Footnote 25: The rivers of the Punjab, the five eastern branches of the Indus, have been laid down for the first time with truth and accuracy in Major Rennel’s incomparable map of Hindostan. In this Critical Memoir he illustrates with judgment and learning the marches of Alexander and Timour. Note *: See vol. i. ch. ii. note 1. – M.]
[Footnote !: They took, on their march, 100,000 slaves, Guebers they were all murdered. V. Hammer, vol. i. p. 286. They are called idolaters. Briggs’s Ferishta, vol. i. p. 491. – M]
[Footnote *: See a curious passage on the destruction of the Hindoo idols, Memoirs, p. 15. – M.]
[Footnote !!: Consult the very striking description of the Cow’s Mouth by Captain Hodgson, Asiat. Res. vol. xiv. p. 117. “A most wonderful scene. The B’hagiratha or Ganges issues from under a very low arch at the foot of the grand snow bed. My guide, an illiterate mountaineer compared the pendent icicles to Mahodeva’s hair.” (Compare Poems, Quarterly Rev. vol. xiv. p. 37, and at the end of my translation of Nala.) “Hindoos of research may formerly have been here; and f so. I cannot think of any place to which they might more aptly give the name of a cow’s mouth than to this extraordinary debouche – M.] [Footnote 26: The two great rivers, the Ganges and Burrampooter, rise in Thibet, from the opposite ridges of the same hills, separate from each other to the distance of 1200 miles, and, after a winding course of 2000 miles, again meet in one point near the Gulf of Bengal. Yet so capricious is Fame, that the Burrampooter is a late discovery, while his brother Ganges has been the theme of ancient and modern story Coupele, the scene of Timour’s last victory, must be situate near Loldong, 1100 miles from Calcutta; and in 1774, a British camp! (Rennel’s Memoir, p. 7, 59, 90, 91, 99.)] It was on the banks of the Ganges that Timour was informed, by his speedy messengers, of the disturbances which had arisen on the confines of Georgia and Anatolia, of the revolt of the Christians, and the ambitious designs of the sultan Bajazet. His vigor of mind and body was not impaired by sixty-three years, and innumerable fatigues; and, after enjoying some tranquil months in the palace of Samarcand, he proclaimed a new expedition of seven years into the western countries of Asia. ^27 To the soldiers who had served in the Indian war he granted the choice of remaining at home, or following their prince; but the troops of all the provinces and kingdoms of Persia were commanded to assemble at Ispahan, and wait the arrival of the Imperial standard. It was first directed against the Christians of Georgia, who were strong only in their rocks, their castles, and the winter season; but these obstacles were overcome by the zeal and perseverance of Timour: the rebels submitted to the tribute or the Koran; and if both religions boasted of their martyrs, that name is more justly due to the Christian prisoners, who were offered the choice of abjuration or death. On his descent from the hills, the emperor gave audience to the first ambassadors of Bajazet, and opened the hostile correspondence of complaints and menaces, which fermented two years before the final explosion. Between two jealous and haughty neighbors, the motives of quarrel will seldom be wanting.
The Mogul and Ottoman conquests now touched each other in the neighborhood of Erzerum, and the Euphrates; nor had the doubtful limit been ascertained by time and treaty. Each of these ambitious monarchs might accuse his rival of violating his territory, of threatening his vassals, and protecting his rebels; and, by the name of rebels, each understood the fugitive princes, whose kingdoms he had usurped, and whose life or liberty he implacably pursued. The resemblance of character was still more dangerous than the opposition of interest; and in their victorious career, Timour was impatient of an equal, and Bajazet was ignorant of a superior. The first epistle ^28 of the Mogul emperor must have provoked, instead of reconciling, the Turkish sultan, whose family and nation he affected to despise. ^29 “Dost thou not know, that the greatest part of Asia is subject to our arms and our laws? that our invincible forces extend from one sea to the other? that the potentates of the earth form a line before our gate? and that we have compelled Fortune herself to watch over the prosperity of our empire. What is the foundation of thy insolence and folly? Thou hast fought some battles in the woods of Anatolia; contemptible trophies! Thou hast obtained some victories over the Christians of Europe; thy sword was blessed by the apostle of God; and thy obedience to the precept of the Koran, in waging war against the infidels, is the sole consideration that prevents us from destroying thy country, the frontier and bulwark of the Moslem world. Be wise in time; reflect; repent; and avert the thunder of our vengeance, which is yet suspended over thy head. Thou art no more than a pismire; why wilt thou seek to provoke the elephants? Alas! they will trample thee under their feet.” In his replies, Bajazet poured forth the indignation of a soul which was deeply stung by such unusual contempt. After retorting the basest reproaches on the thief and rebel of the desert, the Ottoman recapitulates his boasted victories in Iran, Touran, and the Indies; and labors to prove, that Timour had never triumphed unless by his own perfidy and the vices of his foes. “Thy armies are innumerable: be they so; but what are the arrows of the flying Tartar against the cimeters and battle-axes of my firm and invincible Janizaries? I will guard the princes who have implored my protection: seek them in my tents. The cities of Arzingan and Erzeroum are mine; and unless the tribute be duly paid, I will demand the arrears under the walls of Tauris and Sultania.” The ungovernable rage of the sultan at length betrayed him to an insult of a more domestic kind. “If I fly from thy arms,” said he, “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.” ^30 Any violation by word or deed of the secrecy of the harem is an unpardonable offence among the Turkish nations; ^31 and the political quarrel of the two monarchs was imbittered by private and personal resentment. Yet in his first expedition, Timour was satisfied with the siege and destruction of Siwas or Sebaste, a strong city on the borders of Anatolia; and he revenged the indiscretion of the Ottoman, on a garrison of four thousand Armenians, who were buried alive for the brave and faithful discharge of their duty. ^! As a Mussulman, he seemed to respect the pious occupation of Bajazet, who was still engaged in the blockade of Constantinople; and after this salutary lesson, the Mogul conqueror checked his pursuit, and turned aside to the invasion of Syria and Egypt. In these transactions, the Ottoman prince, by the Orientals, and even by Timour, is styled the Kaissar of Roum, the Caesar of the Romans; a title which, by a small anticipation, might be given to a monarch who possessed the provinces, and threatened the city, of the successors of Constantine. ^32 [Footnote 27: See the Institutions, p. 141, to the end of the 1st book, and Sherefeddin, (l. v. c. 1 – 16,) to the entrance of Timour into Syria.] [Footnote 28: We have three copies of these hostile epistles in the Institutions, (p. 147,) in Sherefeddin, (l. v. c. 14,) and in Arabshah, (tom. ii. c. 19 p. 183 – 201;) which agree with each other in the spirit and substance rather than in the style. It is probable, that they have been translated, with various latitude, from the Turkish original into the Arabic and Persian tongues.
Note: Von Hammer considers the letter which Gibbon inserted in the text to be spurious. On the various copies of these letters, see his note, p 11 – 16. – M.]
[Footnote 29: The Mogul emir distinguishes himself and his countrymen by the name of Turks, and stigmatizes the race and nation of Bajazet with the less honorable epithet of Turkmans. Yet I do not understand how the Ottomans could be descended from a Turkman sailor; those inland shepherds were so remote from the sea, and all maritime affairs.
Note: Price translated the word pilot or boatman. – M.] [Footnote 30: According to the Koran, (c. ii. p. 27, and Sale’s Discourses, p. 134,) Mussulman who had thrice divorced his wife, (who had thrice repeated the words of a divorce,) could not take her again, till after she had been married to, and repudiated by, another husband; an ignominious transaction, which it is needless to aggravate, by supposing that the first husband must see her enjoyed by a second before his face, (Rycaut’s State of the Ottoman Empire, l. ii. c. 21.)]
[Footnote 31: The common delicacy of the Orientals, in never speaking of their women, is ascribed in a much higher degree by Arabshah to the Turkish nations; and it is remarkable enough, that Chalcondyles (l. ii. p. 55) had some knowledge of the prejudice and the insult.
Note: See Von Hammer, p. 308, and note, p. 621. – M.] [Footnote !: Still worse barbarities were perpetrated on these brave men. Von Hammer, vol. i. p. 295. – M.]
[Footnote 32: For the style of the Moguls, see the Institutions, (p. 131, 147,) and for the Persians, the Bibliotheque Orientale, (p. 882;) but I do not find that the title of Caesar has been applied by the Arabians, or assumed by the Ottomans themselves.]
Chapter LXV: Elevation Of Timour Or Tamerlane, And His Death
Part II.
The military republic of the Mamalukes still reigned in Egypt and Syria: but the dynasty of the Turks was overthrown by that of the Circassians; ^33 and their favorite Barkok, from a slave and a prisoner, was raised and restored to the throne. In the midst of rebellion and discord, he braved the menaces, corresponded with the enemies, and detained the ambassadors, of the Mogul, who patiently expected his decease, to revenge the crimes of the father on the feeble reign of his son Farage. The Syrian emirs ^34 were assembled at Aleppo to repel the invasion: they confided in the fame and discipline of the Mamalukes, in the temper of their swords and lances of the purest steel of Damascus, in the strength of their walled cities, and in the populousness of sixty thousand villages; and instead of sustaining a siege, they threw open their gates, and arrayed their forces in the plain. But these forces were not cemented by virtue and union; and some powerful emirs had been seduced to desert or betray their more loyal companions. Timour’s front was covered with a line of Indian elephants, whose turrets were filled with archers and Greek fire: the rapid evolutions of his cavalry completed the dismay and disorder; the Syrian crowds fell back on each other: many thousands were stifled or slaughtered in the entrance of the great street; the Moguls entered with the fugitives; and after a short defence, the citadel, the impregnable citadel of Aleppo, was surrendered by cowardice or treachery. Among the suppliants and captives, Timour distinguished the doctors of the law, whom he invited to the dangerous honor of a personal conference. ^35 The Mogul prince was a zealous Mussulman; but his Persian schools had taught him to revere the memory of Ali and Hosein; and he had imbibed a deep prejudice against the Syrians, as the enemies of the son of the daughter of the apostle of God. To these doctors he proposed a captious question, which the casuists of Bochara, Samarcand, and Herat, were incapable of resolving. “Who are the true martyrs, of those who are slain on my side, or on that of my enemies?” But he was silenced, or satisfied, by the dexterity of one of the cadhis of Aleppo, who replied in the words of Mahomet himself, that the motive, not the ensign, constitutes the martyr; and that the Moslems of either party, who fight only for the glory of God, may deserve that sacred appellation. The true succession of the caliphs was a controversy of a still more delicate nature; and the frankness of a doctor, too honest for his situation, provoked the emperor to exclaim, “Ye are as false as those of Damascus: Moawiyah was a usurper, Yezid a tyrant, and Ali alone is the lawful successor of the prophet.” A prudent explanation restored his tranquillity; and he passed to a more familiar topic of conversation. “What is your age?” said he to the cadhi. “Fifty years.” – “It would be the age of my eldest son: you see me here (continued Timour) a poor lame, decrepit mortal. Yet by my arm has the Almighty been pleased to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Touran, and the Indies. I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness, that in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always been the authors of their own calamity.” During this peaceful conversation the streets of Aleppo streamed with blood, and reechoed with the cries of mothers and children, with the shrieks of violated virgins. The rich plunder that was abandoned to his soldiers might stimulate their avarice; but their cruelty was enforced by the peremptory command of producing an adequate number of heads, which, according to his custom, were curiously piled in columns and pyramids: the Moguls celebrated the feast of victory, while the surviving Moslems passed the night in tears and in chains. I shall not dwell on the march of the destroyer from Aleppo to Damascus, where he was rudely encountered, and almost overthrown, by the armies of Egypt. A retrograde motion was imputed to his distress and despair: one of his nephews deserted to the enemy; and Syria rejoiced in the tale of his defeat, when the sultan was driven by the revolt of the Mamalukes to escape with precipitation and shame to his palace of Cairo. Abandoned by their prince, the inhabitants of Damascus still defended their walls; and Timour consented to raise the siege, if they would adorn his retreat with a gift or ransom; each article of nine pieces. But no sooner had he introduced himself into the city, under color of a truce, than he perfidiously violated the treaty; imposed a contribution of ten millions of gold; and animated his troops to chastise the posterity of those Syrians who had executed, or approved, the murder of the grandson of Mahomet. A family which had given honorable burial to the head of Hosein, and a colony of artificers, whom he sent to labor at Samarcand, were alone reserved in the general massacre, and after a period of seven centuries, Damascus was reduced to ashes, because a Tartar was moved by religious zeal to avenge the blood of an Arab. The losses and fatigues of the campaign obliged Timour to renounce the conquest of Palestine and Egypt; but in his return to the Euphrates he delivered Aleppo to the flames; and justified his pious motive by the pardon and reward of two thousand sectaries of Ali, who were desirous to visit the tomb of his son.
I have expatiated on the personal anecdotes which mark the character of the Mogul hero; but I shall briefly mention, ^36 that he erected on the ruins of Bagdad a pyramid of ninety thousand heads; again visited Georgia; encamped on the banks of Araxes; and proclaimed his resolution of marching against the Ottoman emperor. Conscious of the importance of the war, he collected his forces from every province: eight hundred thousand men were enrolled on his military list; ^37 but the splendid commands of five, and ten, thousand horse, may be rather expressive of the rank and pension of the chiefs, than of the genuine number of effective soldiers. ^38 In the pillage of Syria, the Moguls had acquired immense riches: but the delivery of their pay and arrears for seven years more firmly attached them to the Imperial standard.
[Footnote 33: See the reigns of Barkok and Pharadge, in M. De Guignes, (tom. iv. l. xxii.,) who, from the Arabic texts of Aboulmahasen, Ebn (Schounah, and Aintabi, has added some facts to our common stock of materials.] [Footnote 34: For these recent and domestic transactions, Arabshah, though a partial, is a credible, witness, (tom. i. c. 64 – 68, tom. ii. c. 1 – 14.) Timour must have been odious to a Syrian; but the notoriety of facts would have obliged him, in some measure, to respect his enemy and himself. His bitters may correct the luscious sweets of Sherefeddin, (l. v. c. 17 – 29)] [Footnote 35: These interesting conversations appear to have been copied by Arabshah (tom. i. c. 68, p. 625 – 645) from the cadhi and historian Ebn Schounah, a principal actor. Yet how could he be alive seventy-five years afterwards? (D’Herbelot, p. 792.)]
[Footnote 36: The marches and occupations of Timour between the Syrian and Ottoman wars are represented by Sherefeddin (l. v. c. 29 – 43) and Arabshah, (tom. ii. c. 15 – 18.)]
[Footnote 37: This number of 800,000 was extracted by Arabshah, or rather by Ebn Schounah, ex rationario Timuri, on the faith of a Carizmian officer, (tom. i. c. 68, p. 617;) and it is remarkable enough, that a Greek historian (Phranza, l. i. c. 29) adds no more than 20,000 men. Poggius reckons 1,000,000; another Latin contemporary (Chron. Tarvisianum, apud Muratori, tom. xix. p. 800) 1,100,000; and the enormous sum of 1,600,000 is attested by a German soldier, who was present at the battle of Angora, (Leunclay. ad Chalcondyl. l. iii. p. 82.) Timour, in his Institutions, has not deigned to calculate his troops, his subjects, or his revenues.]
[Footnote 38: A wide latitude of non-effectives was allowed by the Great Mogul for his own pride and the benefit of his officers. Bernier’s patron was Penge-Hazari, commander of 5000 horse; of which he maintained no more than 500, (Voyages, tom. i. p. 288, 289.)]
During this diversion of the Mogul arms, Bajazet had two years to collect his forces for a more serious encounter. They consisted of four hundred thousand horse and foot, ^39 whose merit and fidelity were of an unequal complexion. We may discriminate the Janizaries, who have been gradually raised to an establishment of forty thousand men; a national cavalry, the Spahis of modern times; twenty thousand cuirassiers of Europe, clad in black and impenetrable armor; the troops of Anatolia, whose princes had taken refuge in the camp of Timour, and a colony of Tartars, whom he had driven from Kipzak, and to whom Bajazet had assigned a settlement in the plains of Adrianople. The fearless confidence of the sultan urged him to meet his antagonist; and, as if he had chosen that spot for revenge, he displayed his banner near the ruins of the unfortunate Suvas. In the mean while, Timour moved from the Araxes through the countries of Armenia and Anatolia: his boldness was secured by the wisest precautions; his speed was guided by order and discipline; and the woods, the mountains, and the rivers, were diligently explored by the flying squadrons, who marked his road and preceded his standard. Firm in his plan of fighting in the heart of the Ottoman kingdom, he avoided their camp; dexterously inclined to the left; occupied Caesarea; traversed the salt desert and the River Halys; and invested Angora: while the sultan, immovable and ignorant in his post, compared the Tartar swiftness to the crawling of a snail; ^40 he returned on the wings of indignation to the relief of Angora: and as both generals were alike impatient for action, the plains round that city were the scene of a memorable battle, which has immortalized the glory of Timour and the shame of Bajazet. For this signal victory the Mogul emperor was indebted to himself, to the genius of the moment, and the discipline of thirty years. He had improved the tactics, without violating the manners, of his nation, ^41 whose force still consisted in the missile weapons, and rapid evolutions, of a numerous cavalry. From a single troop to a great army, the mode of attack was the same: a foremost line first advanced to the charge, and was supported in a just order by the squadrons of the great vanguard. The general’s eye watched over the field, and at his command the front and rear of the right and left wings successively moved forwards in their several divisions, and in a direct or oblique line: the enemy was pressed by eighteen or twenty attacks; and each attack afforded a chance of victory. If they all proved fruitless or unsuccessful, the occasion was worthy of the emperor himself, who gave the signal of advancing to the standard and main body, which he led in person. ^42 But in the battle of Angora, the main body itself was supported, on the flanks and in the rear, by the bravest squadrons of the reserve, commanded by the sons and grandsons of Timour. The conqueror of Hindostan ostentatiously showed a line of elephants, the trophies, rather than the instruments, of victory; the use of the Greek fire was familiar to the Moguls and Ottomans; but had they borrowed from Europe the recent invention of gunpowder and cannon, the artificial thunder, in the hands of either nation, must have turned the fortune of the day. ^43 In that day Bajazet displayed the qualities of a soldier and a chief: but his genius sunk under a stronger ascendant; and, from various motives, the greatest part of his troops failed him in the decisive moment. His rigor and avarice ^* had provoked a mutiny among the Turks; and even his son Soliman too hastily withdrew from the field. The forces of Anatolia, loyal in their revolt, were drawn away to the banners of their lawful princes. His Tartar allies had been tempted by the letters and emissaries of Timour; ^44 who reproached their ignoble servitude under the slaves of their fathers; and offered to their hopes the dominion of their new, or the liberty of their ancient, country. In the right wing of Bajazet the cuirassiers of Europe charged, with faithful hearts and irresistible arms: but these men of iron were soon broken by an artful flight and headlong pursuit; and the Janizaries, alone, without cavalry or missile weapons, were encompassed by the circle of the Mogul hunters. Their valor was at length oppressed by heat, thirst, and the weight of numbers; and the unfortunate sultan, afflicted with the gout in his hands and feet, was transported from the field on the fleetest of his horses. He was pursued and taken by the titular khan of Zagatai; and, after his capture, and the defeat of the Ottoman powers, the kingdom of Anatolia submitted to the conqueror, who planted his standard at Kiotahia, and dispersed on all sides the ministers of rapine and destruction. Mirza Mehemmed Sultan, the eldest and best beloved of his grandsons, was despatched to Boursa, with thirty thousand horse; and such was his youthful ardor, that he arrived with only four thousand at the gates of the capital, after performing in five days a march of two hundred and thirty miles. Yet fear is still more rapid in its course; and Soliman, the son of Bajazet, had already passed over to Europe with the royal treasure. The spoil, however, of the palace and city was immense: the inhabitants had escaped; but the buildings, for the most part of wood, were reduced to ashes From Boursa, the grandson of Timour advanced to Nice, ever yet a fair and flourishing city; and the Mogul squadrons were only stopped by the waves of the Propontis. The same success attended the other mirzas and emirs in their excursions; and Smyrna, defended by the zeal and courage of the Rhodian knights, alone deserved the presence of the emperor himself. After an obstinate defence, the place was taken by storm: all that breathed was put to the sword; and the heads of the Christian heroes were launched from the engines, on board of two carracks, or great ships of Europe, that rode at anchor in the harbor. The Moslems of Asia rejoiced in their deliverance from a dangerous and domestic foe; and a parallel was drawn between the two rivals, by observing that Timour, in fourteen days, had reduced a fortress which had sustained seven years the siege, or at least the blockade, of Bajazet. ^45
[Footnote 39: Timour himself fixes at 400,000 men the Ottoman army, (Institutions, p. 153,) which is reduced to 150,000 by Phranza, (l. i. c. 29,) and swelled by the German soldier to 1,400,000. It is evident that the Moguls were the more numerous.]
[Footnote 40: It may not be useless to mark the distances between Angora and the neighboring cities, by the journeys of the caravans, each of twenty or twenty-five miles; to Smyrna xx., to Kiotahia x., to Boursa x., to Caesarea, viii., to Sinope x., to Nicomed a ix., to Constantinople xii. or xiii., (see Tournefort, Voyage au Levant, tom. ii. lettre xxi.)]
[Footnote 41: See the Systems of Tactics in the Institutions, which the English editors have illustrated with elaborate plans, (p. 373 – 407.)] [Footnote 42: The sultan himself (says Timour) must then put the foot of courage into the stirrup of patience. A Tartar metaphor, which is lost in the English, but preserved in the French, version of the Institutes, (p. 156, 157.)]
[Footnote 43: The Greek fire, on Timour’s side, is attested by Sherefeddin, (l. v. c. 47;) but Voltaire’s strange suspicion, that some cannon, inscribed with strange characters, must have