But again we have lost sight of the ambassador of Spain. After this banquet, he was taken about by Timour to other palaces, each more magnificent than the one preceding it. He speaks of the magnificent halls, painted with various colours, of the hangings of silk, of gold and silver embroidery, of tables of solid gold, and of the rubies and other precious stones. The most magnificent of these entertainments was on a plain; 20,000 pavilions being pitched around Timour's, which displayed the most gorgeous variety of colours. Two entertainments were given by the ladies of the court, in which the state queens of Timour, nine in number, sat in a row, and here pages handed round wine, not koumiss, in golden cups, which they were not slow in emptying.
The good friar, who went from St. Louis to the princes of the house of Zingis, several centuries earlier, gives us a similar account. When he was presented to the Khan, he went with a Bible and a Psalter in his hand; on entering the royal apartment, he found a curtain of felt spread across the room; it was lifted up, and discovered the great man at table with his wives about him, and prepared for drinking koumiss. The court knew something of Christianity from the Nestorians, who were about it, and the friar was asked to say a blessing on the meal; so he entered singing the Salve Regina. On another occasion he was present at the baptism of a wife of the Khan by a Nestorian priest. After the ceremony, she called for a cup of liquor, desired a blessing from the officiating minister, and drank it off. Then she drank off another, and then another; and continued this process till she could drink no more, and was put into her carriage, and taken home. At another entertainment the friar had to make a speech, in the name of the holy king he represented, to pray for health and long life to the Khan. When he looked round for his interpreter, he found him in a state of intoxication, and in no condition to be of service; then he directed his gaze upon the Khan himself, and found him intoxicated also.
I have made much mention of the wealth of the Tartars, from Attila to Timour; their foreign conquests would yield to them of course whatever of costly material their pride might require; but their native territory itself was rich in minerals. Altai in the north yielded the precious metals; the range of mountains which branches westward from the Himalaya on the south yielded them rubies and lapis lazuli. We are informed by the travellers whom I have been citing that they dressed in winter in costly furs; in summer in silk, and even in cloth of gold.[13] One of the Franciscans speaks of the gifts received by the Khan from foreign powers. They were more than could be numbered;—satin cloths, robes of purple, silk girdles wrought with gold, costly skins. We are told of an umbrella enriched with precious stones; of a train of camels covered with cloth of Bagdad; of a tent of glowing purple; of five hundred waggons full of silver, gold, and silk stuffs.
8.
It is remarkable that the three great conquerors, who have been our subject, all died in the fulness of glory. From the beginning of history to our own times, the insecurity of great prosperity has been the theme of poets and philosophers. Scripture points out to our warning in opposite ways the fortunes of Sennacherib, Nabuchodonosor, and Antiochus. Profane history tells us of Solon, the Athenian sage, coming to the court of Crœsus, the prosperous King of Lydia, whom in his fallen state I have already had occasion to mention; and, when he had seen his treasures and was asked by the exulting monarch who was the happiest of men, making answer that no one could be called happy before his death. And we may call to mind in confirmation the history of Cyrus, of Hannibal, of Mithridates, of Belisarius, of Bajazet, of Napoleon. But these Tartars finished a prosperous course without reverse; they died indeed and went to judgment, but, as far as the visible scene of their glory is concerned, they underwent no change. Attila was summoned suddenly, but the summons found him a triumphant king; and the case is the same with Zingis and Timour. These latter conquerors had glories besides of a different kind which increased the lustre of their rule. They were both lawgivers; it is the boast of Zingis that he laid down the principle of religious toleration with a clearness which modern philsophers have considered to rival the theory of Locke; and Timour, also established an efficient police in his dominions, and was a patron of literature. Their sun went down full and cloudless, with the merit of having shed some rays of blessing upon the earth, scorching and withering as had been its day. It is remarkable also that all three had something of a misgiving, or softening of mind, miserably unsatisfactory as it was, shortly before their deaths. Attila's quailing before the eye of the Vicar of Christ, and turning away from Italy, I have already spoken of. As to Zingis, as, laden at once with years and with the spoils of Asia, he reluctantly measured his way home at the impatient bidding of his veterans, who were tired of war, he seemed visited by a sense of the vanity of all things and a terror for the evil he had done. He showed some sort of pity for the vanquished, and declared his intention of rebuilding the cities he had destroyed. Alas! it is ever easier to pull down than to build up. His wars continued; he was successful by his lieutenants when he could not go to battle himself; he left his power to his children and grandchildren, and he died.
9.
Such was the end of Zingis, a pagan, who had some notion of Christianity in a corrupted form, and who once almost gave hopes of becoming a Christian, but who really had adopted a sort of indifference towards religious creeds altogether. Timour was a zealous Mahometan, and had been instructed in more definite notions of moral duty. He too felt some misgivings about his past course towards the end of his life; and the groans and shrieks of the dying and the captured in the sack of Aleppo awoke for a while the stern monitor within him. He protested to the cadhi his innocence of the blood which he had shed. "You see me here," he said, "a poor, lame, decrepit mortal; yet by my arm it has pleased the Almighty to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Touran, and Hindostan. I am not a man of blood; I call God to witness, that never, in all my wars, have I been the aggressor, but that my enemies have ever been the authors of the calamities which have come upon them."[14]
This was the feeling of a mind sated with conquest, sated with glory, aware at length that he must go further and look deeper, if he was to find that on which the soul could really feed and live, and startled to find the entrance to that abode of true greatness and of glory sternly shut against him. He looked towards the home of his youth, and the seat of his long prosperity, across the Oxus, to Sogdiana, to Samarcand, its splendid capital, with its rich groves and smiling pastures, and there the old man went to die. Not that he directly thought of death; for still he yearned after military success: and he went thither for but a short repose, between his stupendous victories in Asia Minor and a projected campaign in China. But Samarcand was a fitting halt in that long march; and there for the last time he displayed the glory of his kingdom, receiving the petitions or appeals of his subjects, ostentatiously judging between the deserving and the guilty, inspecting plans for the erection of palaces and temples, and giving audience to ambassadors from Russia, Spain, Egypt, and Hindostan. An English historian, whom I have already used, has enlarged upon this closing scene, and I here abridge his account of it. "The marriage of six of the Emperor's grandsons," he says, "was esteemed an act of religion as well as of paternal tenderness; and the pomp of the ancient caliphs was revived in their nuptials. They were celebrated in the garden of Canighul, where innumerable tents and pavilions displayed the luxury of a great city and the spoils of a victorious camp. Whole forests were cut down to supply fuel for the kitchens; the plain was spread with pyramids of meat and vases of every liquor, to which thousands of guests were courteously invited. The orders of the state and the nations of the earth were marshalled at the royal banquet. The public joy was testified by illuminations and masquerades; the trades of Samarcand passed in review; and every trade was emulous to execute some quaint device, some marvellous pageant, with the materials of their peculiar art. After the marriage contracts had been ratified by the cadhies, nine times, according to the Asiatic fashion, were the bridegrooms and their brides dressed and undressed; and at each change of apparel, pearls and rubies were showered on their heads, and contemptuously abandoned to their attendants."
You may recollect the passage in Milton's Paradise Lost, which has a reference to the Oriental ceremony here described. It is in his account of Satan's throne in Pandemonium. "High on a throne," the poet says,
"High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus or of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East, with richest hand,
Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exulting sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence."