5.
And now for Zingis and Timour:—like the Huns, they and their tribes came down from the North of Asia, swept over the face of the South, obliterated the civilization of centuries, inflicted unspeakable misery on whole nations, and then were spent, extinguished, and only survived to posterity in the desolation they caused. As Attila ruled from China to the Rhine, and wasted Europe from the Black Sea to the Loire, so Zingis and his sons and grandsons occupied a still larger portion of the world's surface, and exercised a still more pitiless sway. Besides the immense range of territory, from Germany to the North Pacific Ocean, throughout which their power was felt, even if it was not acknowledged, they overran China, Siberia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Anatolia, Syria, and Persia. During the sixty-five years of their dominion, they subdued almost all Asia and a large portion of Europe. The conquests of Timour were as sudden and as complete, if not as vast, as those of Zingis; and, if he did not penetrate into Europe, he accomplished instead the subjugation of Hindostan.
The exploits of those warriors have the air of Eastern romance; 700,000 men marched under the standard of Zingis; and in one of his battles he left 160,000 of his enemies upon the field. Before Timour died, he had had twenty-seven crowns upon his head. When he invaded Turkistan, his army stretched along a line of thirteen miles. We may conceive his energy and determination, when we are told that, for five months, he marched through wildernesses, subsisting his immense army on the fortunes of the chase. In his invasion of Hindostan he had to pass over a high chain of mountains, and, in one stage of the passage, had to be lowered by ropes on a scaffold, down a precipice of 150 cubits in depth. He attempted the operation five times before he got safely to the bottom.
These two extraordinary men rivalled or exceeded Attila in their wholesale barbarities. Attila vaunted that the grass never grew again after his horse's hoof; so it was the boast of Zingis, that when he destroyed a city, he did it so completely, that his horse could gallop across its site without stumbling. He depopulated the whole country from the Danube to the Baltic in a season; and the ruins of cities and churches were strewed with the bones of the inhabitants. He allured the fugitives from the woods, where they lay hid, under a promise of pardon and peace; he made them gather in the harvest and the vintage, and then he put them to death. At Gran, in Hungary, he had 300 noble ladies slaughtered in his presence. But these were slight excesses compared with other of his acts. When he had subdued the northern part of China, he proposed, not in the heat of victory, but deliberately in council, to exterminate all its inhabitants, and to turn it into a cattle-walk; from this project indeed he was diverted, but a similar process was his rule with the cities he conquered. Let it be understood, he came down upon cities living in peace and prosperity, as the cities of England now, which had done him no harm, which had not resisted him, which submitted to him at discretion on his summons. What was his treatment of such? He ordered out the whole population on some adjacent plain; then he proceeded to sack their city. Next he divided them into three parts: first, the soldiers and others capable of bearing arms; these he either enlisted into his armies, or slaughtered on the spot. The second class consisted of the rich, the women, and the artizans;—these he divided amongst his followers. The remainder, the old, infirm, and poor, he suffered to return to their rifled city. Such was his ordinary course; but when anything occurred to provoke him, the most savage excesses followed. The slightest offence, or appearance of offence, on the part of an individual, sufficed for the massacre of whole populations. The three great capitals of Khorasan were destroyed by his orders, and a reckoning made of the slain; at Maru were killed 1,300,000; at Herat, 1,600,000; and at Neisabour, 1,747,000; making a total of 4,647,000 deaths. Say these numbers are exaggerated fourfold or tenfold; even on the last supposition you will have a massacre of towards half a million of helpless beings. After recounting such preternatural crimes, it is little to add, that his devastation of the fine countries between the Caspian and the Indus, a tract of many hundred miles, was so complete, that six centuries have been unable to repair the ravages of four years.
Timour equalled Zingis, if he could not surpass him, in barbarity. At Delhi, the capital of his future dynasty, he massacred 100,000 prisoners, because some of them were seen to smile when the army of their countrymen came in sight. He laid a tax of the following sort on the people of Ispahan, viz, to find him 70,000 human skulls, to build his towers with; and, after Bagdad had revolted, he exacted of the inhabitants as many as 90,000. He burned, or sacked, or razed to the ground, the cities of Astrachan, Carisme, Delhi, Ispahan, Bagdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Broussa, Smyrna, and a thousand others. We seem to be reading of some antediluvian giant, rather than of a medieval conqueror.