The great central plains of Asia, stretching almost without an interruption from the Caspian Sea to China, have during all historical time produced hardy races of nomad warriors. On the three occasions in their history when they have found skilful leaders, their progress as conquerors has been epoch-marking. Twice their progress has been westward. Mounted warriors and hordes of foot soldiers made their way towards the Euxine, some going to the north and others to the south of that sea. The first of these waves of Genghis Khan moves westward.population thus moving westward was that led by Genghis Khan, a Mongol belonging to the smallest of the four great divisions of the Tartar[34] race. His followers were, however, mainly Turks, the most widely spread of these divisions.[35] He had established his rule before 1227, the year in which he died, from the Sea of Japan to the Dnieper. He and his immediate successors ravaged a greater extent of territory than any other conqueror. Like Alexander the Great, he and they advanced with regularly organised armies, with apparently no other object than conquest and plunder. Their victories facilitated the migration of his own subjects into the newly conquered territories and hastened the departure of large bodies of men, who fled before the terrible massacres which marked the progress of their ever victorious armies.
A branch of the same great horde, under the leadership of Subutai, destroyed Moscow and Kiev in a campaign conducted with striking ability and ending in 1239, and settled in Russia. Poland, aided by French Knights Templars and the Grand Master of the Teutonic order, had put forward all her strength to resist the same division of the all-devouring army, while another wing attacked the Hungarians with half a million of men.
Their entry into Europe was in such numbers and the excesses of cruelty committed by them were so alarming that their advance everywhere created terror. The Tartars—coming from Tartarus, as some of the Crusaders believed—were so little known, says Pachymer, that many declared they had the heads of dogs and fed upon human flesh.[36] Seen nearer, they were less formidable as individuals, though infernal, terrible, and invincible as an army.
In 1258, the year before the recapture of Constantinople and the destruction of the Latin empire by the Greeks, Houlagou, the grandson of Genghis Khan, captured Bagdad, and deposed the last of the Bagdad caliphs. He extended his conquests over Mesopotamia and Syria to the Mediterranean. Damascus and Aleppo were sacked. Houlagou sought to ally himself with the Crusaders in order to overthrow the Saracens and the sultan of Egypt.
The Seljukian Turks.
When Houlagou turned his attention to Asia Minor, he found among the Christian populations a division of the Turkish race known as Seljuks, whose sultan resided at Konia, and called himself sultan of Roum.[37] He attacked and inflicted injuries upon them from which they never recovered. It is difficult to state precisely what were the boundaries of the Seljuks and of other Moslem or partly Moslem peoples in Asia Minor and Syria, during the thirteenth century, and this difficulty arises from the fact that their boundaries were continually changing. The Saracens held certain places in Syria, but there was a Christian prince in Antioch; there were cities occupied by the western Knights Templars, a Christian prince in Caramania and a king of Lesser Armenia. There were Turcomans at Marash and in the hill country behind Trebizond, and Kurds invaded Cilicia in 1278. A large tract of country around Konia was ruled over by the Seljuks. No natural boundary marked the extent of territory occupied by any of these peoples or in Asia Minor by the Roman emperor.
It is certain, however, that the entry of the armies of the followers of Genghis Khan, continually renewed by the arrival of new hordes from Central Asia, changed the distribution of the peoples and spread terror everywhere at their approach. Even at Nicaea, within sixty miles of Constantinople, the rumour in 1267 of the arrival of a Tartar army caused a terrible panic.[38] Two years later the Tartars attacked the Saracens in Syria, whither they had been invited for such purpose by the Christians, defeated them, and carried off a rich booty. For a while they were a terror alike to Moslems and Christians. As from the followers of Genghis Khan there ultimately came the race of Ottoman Turks who conquered New Rome and its empire, it is desirable to consider them somewhat carefully.
Characteristics of Asiatic invaders.
It is important to note that the first hordes who came in with the great conqueror and those who followed for at least a century were not Mahometan fanatics. Some of their leading generals were indeed Christians. Genghis himself had married a Christian wife. Mango Khan (1251–1259), one of his successors, is described by Maundeville, who visited Palestine in 1322, as ‘a good Christian man, who was baptized and gave letters of perpetual peace to all Christian men,’ and sent to win the Holy Land to put it into the hands of the Christians and destroy the law of Mahomet.[39] His great successor, Houlagou, was the husband of the granddaughter of the famous Prester (or Presbyter) John, the king of a Christian state in Central Asia, visited by Marco Polo.[40] The army led by Houlagou contained Mahometans, but it contained also Christians, Buddhists, and professors of other creeds. Central Asiatics had up to the time which concerns us not developed any violent religious animosity. Christians, Moslems, and Buddhists dwelt together in harmony.
Not fanatical.