With an army of eight hundred thousand fighting men and a multitude of slaves so vast that it is said that they dried up the earth as they marched, he started westward. Words are lacking to describe the desolation and cruelty that attended his march and the sacking of cities.
Multitudes of Christians suffered untold horrors rather than deny their faith. The cities that attempted to resist behind their walls were effaced from the earth, and upon their sites towers were erected, the walls of which were composed of living men cemented in the lime.
Pursuing the people of Georgia into the gorges of the Caucasus Mountains he inflicted upon them great slaughter, and discovering many caverns into which men, women and children had fled for safety he walled up their entrances and left them to perish.
Ispahan in a moment of folly having rebelled and massacred three thousand Tartars he sent back one hundred thousand soldiers with orders that every man should bring him a head on penalty of losing his own. Ispahan in consternation and horror paid this price for its revolt, and on the site of a dismantled city, a mason-wrought pyramid of a hundred thousand heads told the awful story of their doom.
Proceeding westward Tamerlane laid siege to Siwas, or Sebaste, modern Siwas, a city having walls of prodigious thickness and a broad moat filled with running water.
It contained one hundred and fifty thousand souls, was defended by intrepid Armenians and seemed able to defy every assault of a Tartar multitude without battering artillery to shake the walls.
But Tamerlane hesitated only a moment. Prodigal of men, he set thousands at work to undermine the rocks that formed the foundation of the walls. He emptied the moats by cutting deeper channels for the river. He cut down adjacent forests to prop up the mines dug under the towers of the walls; and then setting on fire this underground forest he saw the rocks give way engulfing walls, houses and defenders in the ruins. Twenty days and nights sufficed to open enormous breaches for his soldiers. The city naked and trembling before him awaited its fate. Timour promised to spare the lives of Mohammedans and Christians, and to be content with servitude. But scarcely had he entered it before he inundated it with the blood of its defenders. By his ferocity he made all the East and the West to shudder, and the world to stand aghast at its recital after more than four centuries have covered its horrors. Four thousand Ottomans were buried alive up to the neck and thus left to perish. Countless Christians were bound in couples and cast into trenches which were then covered with boards and earth, and over them the Tartars pitched their tents and took fiendish delight in their moanings. Women were bound by the hair of their heads to the tails of wild young horses and thus dragged to death. The young children were bound hand and foot and laid together on an open plain and trampled to death by his cavalry. With the exception of the male children fit for slavery, and the young girls reserved for the harem the entire population was destroyed.
The New Grand Vizier on His Way to the Sublime Porte.
THE NEW GRAND VIZIER. TASHIN BEY. THE SHEIK-AL-ISLAM.