REQUIRED READING[A]
FOR THE Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle for 1882-83.
APRIL.
[HISTORY OF RUSSIA.]
By Mrs. MARY S. ROBINSON.
CHAPTER IX.
THE TATAR INVASIONS—1224-1264.
The Russian principalities, weakened by civil wars, had no time for federation or concentration against the race that, moving with the swiftness of wild horses, darkened the horizon of the realm with their coming in 1224. Their aspect was rude, gross, and frightful: collectively, they were like an army of goblins. An English writer, who had perhaps witnessed one of their attacks, describes them: “They have broad and flat visages of a tanned color, yellow and black; thin hayre upon the upper lip, and a pit upon the chin. Their speeche is sudden and loud, speaking as if out of a deep hollow throat. When they sing, you would think a cow lowed, or a great Ban dog howled. They suffer not their children to eat till they have shot near the Marke, within a certain scantling.” The bellowing of their cattle, the neighing of their wild horses, the grinding of the wooden wheels of their wagons, heightened the din and terror of their approach. In appearance and in warfare they were, in effect, half a million maniacs, mounted on horses as frenzied as themselves. Such conception of government as they had, took form in companies or hordes, who lived together in consenting communities, guarded by hosts of mounted archers. The poet, Matthew Arnold, in “Sohrab and Rustum,” gives a vivid enumeration of a Tatar host, as it mustered “by the broad-flowing Oxus,” many centuries prior to the period whereof we write:
“Kalmucks and Kuzzaks, tribes who stray