CHAPTER XIII.
[(1.)] “Scarcely had Tämerlin returned to his own country.”—After the fall of Sebaste, Timour proceeded to Syria, where he took several cities, Damascus being of the number; and having recrossed the Euphrates, he entered Baghdad. Bajazet had in the meantime seized upon Erzingan, which belonged to Taharten, who had already acknowledged the supremacy of Timour; an act on the part of the sultan which accelerated the struggle between himself and Timour, and to which Schiltberger alludes in this chapter. In chapters 14–19, he depicts the above-mentioned campaigns and other expeditions of Timour, imagining that they were conducted after the battle of Angora; but as he reports from hearsay only, he was not in a position to form a correct idea of the chronological order in which they occurred.—Bruun.
[(2.)] “Tarathan.”—It is by the name of Tabarten that Eastern writers know this prince, who, at that time, possessed the city of Erzingan; whilst Clavigo, who enters into numerous details on the private affairs of the “gran Caballero”, calls him Zaratan. The residence of this ruler was near the Kara-sou, at that time the great western arm of the Euphrates, at a place called by the Turks, Erznga or Eznga, a name derived from the Armenian, Eriza, as I am informed by Bishop Aïvazoffsky of the Armenian church at Theodosia. According to Marco Polo, who called it Arzinga (Yule, 2nd edit., i, 47), it was the capital of Greater Armenia, Sis being that of Lesser Armenia. The apparent contradiction in our author’s statements arises from the fact that, in another chapter, he represents Sis, Erzingan, and Tiflis, as being the chief towns of the three divisions of Armenia. The first belonged to the sultan of Egypt; the others to the Timourides, actually to Shah Rokh, the son of Timour. In ancient times, Erzingan was celebrated for the temple of Anaïtis (Strabo, xi, 14, 16), destroyed by St. Gregory the Enlightener. Procopius calls the place, Aurea Comana, and tells us that it contained a temple of Artemis, founded, according to tradition, by Orestes and Iphigenia; a temple already transformed into a Christian church at the time he wrote (De Bell. Pers., i, 177; Ritter, Die Erdkunde, etc., x, 774).
In quoting, together with Arzes and Erzingan, the fortress of Chliat and Percri, Constantine Porphyrogenitus (De Adm. Imp., 44, 8) referred to Akhlat or Gelath, and the modern town of Pergri on the Bandoumaky, and not, as supposed by Ritter, to the village of Bagaran or Pacaran, near the ruins of Ani, the ancient capital of Armenia, close to the river Arpa-tchaï. Erzingan was destroyed by the Mongols in 1242; in 1387, Taharten acknowledged the suzerainty of Timour, and in 1400 he was expelled by Bajazet, who, in his turn, lost the city to the Tatars. It had not risen out of its ruins in the time of Barbaro, and now they are scarcely to be traced. Etiam periere ruinæ!—Bruun.
[(3.)] “but he died on the way.”—Schiltberger’s silence with regard to the cage in which Timour confined his captive, agrees, says Neumann, with the result of the researches of Hammer, who seeks to prove that the tale is the invention of a sworn enemy of Timour. The Baron’s opinion is supported by the Russian Academician Sresneffsky, in his quotation from a Russian chronicler (Nikitin, in Hojdenye za try Mory’a), a contemporary of Timour, who, in alluding to the fate of Ilderim, has not thought it necessary to speak of the cage in which he was made to follow his conqueror. Hammer’s argument does not appear to have satisfied Weil (ii, 96), on the grounds that the story of the iron cage does not emanate from Arabshah only, but also from other Arabian chroniclers. Weil equally disputes the assertion that the term cage was intended to signify a litter, and disagrees with Rehm (iv, 3, 151) in his interpretation of the word kafass, that it implied a litter as well as a cage, the Arabian word for the former being handedj, mahaffah, and kubbet; and concludes by saying, that if Bajazet was not really carried about in a cage, his litter must have been of most peculiar construction.—Bruun.