Great leaders: Historic portraits from the great historians

by Unknown

The code of laws which Zingis dictated to his subjects was adapted to the preservation of domestic peace and the exercise of foreign hostility. The punishment of death was inflicted on the crimes of adultery, murder, perjury, and the capital thefts of a horse or an ox; and the fiercest of men were mild and just in their intercourse with each other. The future election of the great kahn was vested in the princes of his family and the heads of the tribes, and the regulations of the chase were essential to the pleasures and plenty of a Tartar camp. The victorious nation was held sacred from all servile labors, which were abandoned to slaves and strangers, and every labor was servile except the profession of arms. The service and discipline of the troops, who were armed with bows, cimeters, and iron maces, and divided by hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands, were the institutions of a veteran commander. Each officer and soldier was made responsible, under pain of death, for the safety and honor of his companions; and the spirit of conquest breathed in the law that peace should never be granted unless to a vanquished and suppliant enemy.

But it is the religion of Zingis that best deserves our wonder and applause. The Catholic inquisitors of Europe, who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of philosophy, and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration. His first and only article of faith was the existence of one God, the author of all good, who fills by his presence the heavens and earth, which he has created by his power. The Tartars and Moguls were addicted to the idols of their peculiar tribes, and many of them had been converted by the foreign missionaries to the religions of Moses, of Mahomet, and of Christ. These various systems in freedom and concord were taught and practiced within the precincts of the same camp, and the bonze, the imaum, the rabbi, the Nestorian and the Latin priest, enjoyed the same honorable exemption from service and tribute. In the mosque of Bokhara, the insolent victor might trample the Koran under his horse’s feet, but the calm legislator respected the prophets and pontiffs of the most hostile sects. The reason of Zingis was not informed by books—the khan could neither read nor write—and, except the tribe of the Igours, the greatest part of the Moguls and Tartars were as illiterate as their sovereign. The memory of their exploits was preserved by tradition; sixty-eight years after the death of Zingis, these traditions were collected and transcribed. The brevity of their domestic annals may be supplied by the Chinese, Persians, Armenians, Syrians, Arabians, Greeks, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, and Latins; and each nation will deserve credit in the relation of their own disasters and defeats.

The arms of Zingis and his lieutenants successively reduced the hordes of the desert, who pitched their tents between the wall of China and the Volga; and the Mogul emperor became the monarch of the pastoral world, the lord of many millions of shepherds and soldiers, who felt their united strength, and were impatient to rush on the mild and wealthy climates of the south. His ancestors had been the tributaries of the Chinese emperors, and Temugin himself had been disgraced by a title of honor and servitude. The court of Pekin was astonished by an embassy from its former vassal, who, in the tone of the king of nations, exacted the tribute and obedience which he had paid, and who affected to treat the son of heaven as the most contemptible of mankind. A haughty answer disguised their secret apprehensions, and their fears were soon justified by the march of innumerable squadrons, who pierced on all sides the feeble rampart of the great wall. Ninety cities were stormed, or starved, by the Moguls; ten only escaped; and Zingis, from a knowledge of the filial piety of the Chinese, covered his vanguard with their captive parents—an unworthy, and by degrees a fruitless, abuse of the virtue of his enemies. His invasion was supported by the revolt of one hundred thousand Khitans who guarded the frontier, yet he listened to a treaty, and a princess of China, three thousand horses, five hundred youths and as many virgins, and a tribute of gold and silk were the price of his retreat. In his second expedition, he compelled the Chinese emperor to retire beyond the Yellow River to a more southern residence. The siege of Pekin was long and laborious; the inhabitants were reduced by famine to decimate and devour their fellow-citizens; when their ammunition was spent, they discharged ingots of gold and silver from their engines; but the Moguls introduced a mine to the center of the capital, and the conflagration of the palace burned above thirty days. China was desolated by Tartar war and domestic faction, and the five northern provinces were added to the empire of Zingis.

In the west he touched the dominions of Mohammed, sultan of Carizme, who reigned from the Persian Gulf to the borders of India and Turkestan; and who, in the proud imitation of Alexander the Great, forgot the servitude and ingratitude of his fathers to the house of Seljuk. It was the wish of Zingis to establish a friendly and commercial intercourse with the most powerful of the Moslem princes; nor could he be tempted by the secret solicitations of the caliph of Bagdad, who sacrificed to his personal wrongs the safety of the Church and state. A rash and inhuman deed provoked and justified the Tartar arms in the invasion of the southern Asia. A caravan of three ambassadors and one hundred and fifty merchants was arrested and murdered at Otrar, by the command of Mohammed; nor was it till after a demand and denial of justice, till he had prayed and fasted three nights on a mountain, that the Mogul emperor appealed to the judgment of God and his sword. Our European battles, says a philosophic writer, are petty skirmishes, if compared to the numbers that have fought and fallen in the fields of Asia. Seven hundred thousand Moguls and Tartars are said to have marched under the standard of Zingis and his four sons. In the vast plains that extend to the north of the Sihon or Jaxartes, they were encountered by four hundred thousand soldiers of the sultan; and in the first battle, which was suspended by the night, one hundred and sixty thousands Carizmians were slain.

The Persian historians will relate the sieges and reduction of Otrar, Cogende, Bochara, Samarcand, Carizme, Herat, Merou, Nisabour, Balch, and Candahar; and the conquest of the rich and populous countries of Transoxiana, Carizme, and Chorasan. The destructive hostilities of Attila and the Huns have long since been elucidated by the example of Zingis and the Moguls; and in this more proper place I shall be content to observe, that, from the Caspian to the Indus, they ruined a tract of many hundred miles, which was adorned with the habitations and labors of mankind, and that five centuries have not been sufficient to repair the ravages of four years. The Mogul conqueror yielded with reluctance to the murmurs of his weary and wealthy troops, who sighed for the enjoyment of their native land. Incumbered with the spoils of Asia, he slowly measured back his footsteps, betrayed some pity for the misery of the vanquished, and declared his intention of rebuilding the cities which had been swept away by the tempest of his arms. After he had repassed the Oxus and Jaxartes, he was joined by two generals, whom he had detached with thirty thousand horse to subdue the western provinces of Persia. They had trampled on the nations which opposed their passage, penetrated through the gates of Derbend, traversed the Volga and the Desert, and accomplished the circuit of the Caspian Sea, by an expedition which had never been attempted and has never been repeated. The return of Zingis was signalized by the overthrow of the rebellious or independent kingdoms of Tartary; and he died in the fulness of years and glory, with his last breath exhorting and instructing his sons to achieve the conquest of the Chinese Empire.

SIMON DE MONTFORT, EARL OF LEICESTER.
By JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[A valiant soldier, astute politician, and public-spirited reformer of the thirteenth century, born about 1200, died 1265. The son of that De Montfort who led the cruel crusade against the Albigenses of southern France, Simon became in early life an English subject, received the highest honors from Henry III, and also secured the hand of his sister in marriage. He sympathized with and became a leader of the English barons in demanding the necessary concessions to complete and enforce that great charter wrung from King John at Runnymede; and finally took up arms to constrain Henry. In the civil war which ensued Simon of Montfort was for the most part victorious, but finally found himself forsaken by the fickle baronage whose cause he had espoused. He was obliged to throw himself on the support of the people. In the last Parliament he convoked, in the year of his death, he summoned knights and burgesses to sit by the side of the barons and bishops, thus creating a new force in the English constitution, which wrought a great change in the political system of the country. He was slain and his army defeated some months later at the battle of Evesham by Prince Edward.]

When a thunderstorm once forced the king, as he was rowing on the Thames, to take refuge at the palace of the Bishop of Durham, Earl Simon of Montfort, who was a guest of the prelate, met the royal barge with assurances that the storm was drifting away, and that there was nothing to fear. Henry’s petulant wit broke out in his reply: “If I fear the thunder,” said the king, “I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the world.”

The man whom Henry dreaded as the champion of English freedom was himself a foreigner, the son of a Simon de Montfort whose name had become memorable for his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian heretics in southern Gaul. Though fourth son of this crusader, Simon became possessor of the English earldom of Leicester, which he inherited through his mother, and a secret match with Eleanor, the king’s sister and widow of the second William Marshal, linked him to the royal house. The baronage, indignant at this sudden alliance with a stranger, rose in a revolt which failed only through the desertion of their head, Earl Richard of Cornwall; while the censures of the Church on Eleanor’s breach of a vow of chastity, which she had made at her first husband’s death, were hardly averted by a journey to Rome. Simon returned to find the changeable king quickly alienated from him and to be driven by a burst of royal passion from the realm. He was, however, soon restored to favor, and before long took his stand in the front rank of the patriot leaders. In 1248 he was appointed governor of Gascony, where the stern justice of his rule and the heavy taxation which his enforcement of order made necessary earned the hatred of the disorderly nobles. The complaints of the Gascons brought about an open breach with the king. To Earl Simon’s offer of the surrender of his post if the money he had spent in the royal service were, as Henry had promised, repaid him, the king hotly retorted that he was bound by no promise to a false traitor. Simon at once gave Henry the lie; “and but that thou bearest the name of king it had been a bad hour for thee when thou utteredst such a word!” A formal reconciliation was brought about, and the earl once more returned to Gascony, but before winter had come he was forced to withdraw to France. The greatness of his reputation was shown in an offer which its nobles made him of the regency of their realm during the absence of King Lewis on the crusade. But the offer was refused, and Henry, who had himself undertaken the pacification of Gascony, was glad before the close of 1253 to recall its old ruler to do the work he had failed to do.

Simon’s character had now thoroughly developed. He had inherited the strict and severe piety of his father; he was assiduous in his attendance on religious services, whether by night or day; he was the friend of Grosseteste and the patron of the Friars. In his correspondence with Adam Marsh we see him finding patience under his Gascon troubles in the perusal of the Book of Job. His life was pure and singularly temperate; he was noted for his scant indulgence in meat, drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheerful and pleasant in talk; but his natural temper was quick and ardent, his sense of honor keen, his speech rapid and trenchant. His impatience of contradiction, his fiery temper, were in fact the great stumbling-blocks in his after career. But the one characteristic which overmastered all was what men at that time called his “constancy,” the firm, immovable resolve which trampled even death under foot in its loyalty to the right. The motto which Edward I chose as his device, “Keep troth,” was far truer as the device of Earl Simon. We see in his correspondence with what a clear discernment of its difficulties both at home and abroad he “thought it unbecoming to decline the danger of so great an exploit” as the reduction of Gascony to peace and order; but once undertaken, he persevered in spite of the opposition he met with, the failure of all support or funds from England, and the king’s desertion of his cause, till the work was done. There is the same steadiness of will and purpose in his patriotism. The letters of Grosseteste show how early he had learned to sympathize with the bishop in his resistance to Rome, and at the crisis of the contest he offers him his own support and that of his associates. He sends to Adam Marsh a tract of Grosseteste’s on “the rule of a kingdom and of a tyranny,” sealed with his own seal. He listens patiently to the advice of his friends on the subject of his household or his temper. “Better is a patient man,” writes honest Friar Adam, “than a strong man, and he who can rule his own temper than he who storms a city.” “What use is it to provide for the peace of your fellow-citizens and not guard the peace of your own household?” It was to secure “the peace of his fellow-citizens” that the earl silently trained himself as the tide of misgovernment mounted higher and higher, and the fruit of his discipline was seen when the crisis came. While other men wavered and faltered and fell away, the enthusiastic love of the people gathered itself round the stern, grave soldier who “stood like a pillar,” unshaken by promise or threat or fear of death, by the oath he had sworn.