A just retaliation might be urged for the invasion of Turkestan, or the Eastern Tartary. The dignity of Timur could not endure the impunity of the Getes: he passed the Sihun, subdued the kingdom of Kashgar, and marched seven times into the heart of their country. His most distant camp was two months' journey to the northeast of Samarkand; and his emirs, who traversed the river Irtysh, engraved in the forests of Siberia a rude memorial of their exploits. The conquest of Kiptchak, or the Western Tartary, was founded on the double motive of aiding the distressed and chastising the ungrateful. Toctamish, a fugitive prince, was entertained and protected in his court; the ambassadors of Auruss Khan were dismissed with a haughty denial, and followed on the same day by the armies of Zagatai; and their success established Toctamish in the Mongol empire of the North.
But, after a reign of ten years, the new Khan forgot the merits and the strength of his benefactor—the base usurper, as he deemed him, of the sacred rights of the house of Genghis. Through the gates of Derbent he entered Persia at the head of ninety thousand horse: with the innumerable forces of Kiptchak, Bulgaria, Circassia, and Russia, he passed the Sihun, burned the palaces of Timur, and compelled him, amid the winter snows, to contend for Samarkand and his life. After a mild expostulation and a glorious victory the Emperor resolved on revenge; and by the east and the west of the Caspian and the Volga he twice invaded Kiptchak with such mighty powers that thirteen miles were measured from his right to his left wing. In a march of five months they rarely beheld the footsteps of man; and their daily subsistence was often trusted to the fortune of the chase. At length the armies encountered each other; but the treachery of the standard-bearer, who, in the heat of action, reversed the imperial standard of Kiptchak, determined the victory of the Zagatais and Toctamish—I speak the language of the Institutions—gave the tribe of Toushi to the wind of desolation. He fled to the Christian Duke of Lithuania, again returned to the banks of the Volga, and, after fifteen battles with a domestic rival, at last perished in the wilds of Siberia.
The pursuit of a flying enemy carried Timur into the tributary provinces of Russia; a duke of the reigning family was made prisoner amid the ruins of his capital; and Yelets, by the pride and ignorance of the orientals, might easily be confounded with the genuine metropolis of the nation. Moscow trembled at the approach of the Tartar. Ambition and prudence recalled him to the south, the desolate country was exhausted, and the Mongol soldiers were enriched with an immense spoil of precious furs, of linen of Antioch, and of ingots of gold and silver. On the banks of the Don, or Tanais, he received a humble deputation from the consuls and merchants of Egypt, Venice, Genoa, Catalonia, and Biscay, who occupied the commerce and city of Tana, or Azov, at the mouth of the river. They offered their gifts, admired his magnificence, and trusted his royal word. But the peaceful visit of an emir, who explored the state of the magazines and harbor, was speedily followed by the destructive presence of the Tartars. The city of Tana was reduced to ashes; the Moslems were pillaged and dismissed; but all the Christians who had not fled to their ships were condemned either to death or slavery. Revenge prompted him to burn the cities of Sarai and Astrakhan, the monuments of rising civilization; and his vanity proclaimed that he had penetrated to the region of perpetual daylight, a strange phenomenon, which authorized his Mahometan doctors to dispense with the obligation of evening prayer.
When Timur first proposed to his princes and emirs the invasion of India or Hindustan, he was answered by a murmur of discontent: "The rivers! and the mountains and deserts! and the soldiers clad in armor! and the elephants, destroyers of men!" But the displeasure of the Emperor was more dreadful than all these terrors; and his superior reason was convinced that an enterprise of such tremendous aspect was safe and easy in the execution. He was informed by his spies of the weakness and anarchy of Hindustan: the subahs of the provinces had erected the standard of rebellion; and the perpetual infancy of Sultan Mahmud was despised even in the harem of Delhi. The Mongol army moved in three great divisions, and Timur observes with pleasure that the ninety-two squadrons of a thousand horse most fortunately corresponded with the ninety-two names or epithets of the prophet Mahomet.
Between the Jihun and the Indus they crossed one of the ridges of mountains which are styled by the Arabian geographers the "Stony Girdles of the Earth." The highland robbers were subdued or extirpated; but great numbers of men and horses perished in the snow; the Emperor himself was let down a precipice on a portable scaffold—the ropes were one hundred and fifty cubits in length—and before he could reach the bottom, this dangerous operation was five times repeated. Timur crossed the Indus at the ordinary passage of Attock, and successively traversed, in the footsteps of Alexander, the Punjab, or five rivers, that fall into the master stream. From Attock to Delhi the high road measures no more than six hundred miles; but the two conquerors deviated to the southeast; and the motive of Timur was to join his grandson, who had achieved by his command the conquest of Multan. On the eastern bank of the Hyphasis, on the edge of the desert, the Macedonian hero halted and wept; the Mongol entered the desert, reduced the fortress of Batnir, and stood in arms before the gates of Delhi, a great and flourishing city, which had subsisted three centuries under the dominion of the Mahometan kings.
The siege, more especially of the castle, might have been a work of time; but he tempted, by the appearance of weakness, the Sultan Mahmud and his wazir to descend into the plain, with ten thousand cuirassiers, forty thousand of his foot-guards, and one hundred and twenty elephants, whose tusks are said to have been armed with sharp and poisoned daggers. Against these monsters, or rather against the imagination of his troops, he condescended to use some extraordinary precautions of fire and a ditch, of iron spikes and a rampart of bucklers; but the event taught the Mongols to smile at their own fears; and as soon as these unwieldy animals were routed, the inferior species (the men of India) disappeared from the field. Timur made his triumphal entry into the capital of Hindustan, and admired, with a view to imitate, the architecture of the stately mosque; but the order or license of a general pillage and massacre polluted the festival of his victory. He resolved to purify his soldiers in the blood of the idolaters, or Gentoos, who still surpass, in the proportion of ten to one, the numbers of the Moslems. In this pious design he advanced one hundred miles to the northeast of Delhi, passed the Ganges, fought several battles by land and water, and penetrated to the famous rock of Cupele, the statue of the cow,[58] that seems to discharge the mighty river, whose source is far distant among the mountains of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would degenerate into a race of Hindus.
It was on the banks of the Ganges that Timur was informed, by his speedy messengers, of the disturbances which had arisen on the confines of Georgia and Anatolia, of the revolt of the Christians, and the ambitious designs of the sultan Bajazet. His vigor of mind and body was not impaired by sixty-three years and innumerable fatigues; and, after enjoying some tranquil months in the palace of Samarkand, he proclaimed a new expedition of seven years into the western countries of Asia. To the soldiers who had served in the Indian war he granted the choice of remaining at home or following their prince; but the troops of all the provinces and kingdoms of Persia were commanded to assemble at Ispahan and wait the arrival of the imperial standard. It was first directed against the Christians of Georgia, who were strong only in their rocks, their castles, and the winter season; but these obstacles were overcome by the zeal and perseverance of Timur: the rebels submitted to the tribute or the Koran; and if both religions boasted of their martyrs, that name is more justly due to the Christian prisoners, who were offered the choice of abjuration or death.
On his descent from the hills the Emperor gave audience to the first ambassadors of Bajazet, and opened the hostile correspondence of complaints and menaces, which fermented two years before the final explosion. Between two jealous and haughty neighbors, the motives of quarrel will seldom be wanting. The Mongol and Ottoman conquests now touched each other in the neighborhood of Erzerum and the Euphrates; nor had the doubtful limit been ascertained by time and treaty. Each of these ambitious monarchs might accuse his rival of violating his territory, of threatening his vassals and protecting his rebels; and, by the name of rebels, each understood the fugitive princes, whose kingdoms he had usurped and whose life or liberty he implacably pursued. In their victorious career Timur was impatient of an equal, and Bajazet was ignorant of a superior.
In his first expedition, Timur was satisfied with the siege and destruction of Sebaste, a strong city on the borders of Anatolia. He then turned aside to the invasion of Syria and Egypt, where the military republic of the mamelukes still reigned. The Syrian emirs were assembled at Aleppo to repel the invasion; they confided in the fame and discipline of the mamelukes, in the temper of their swords and lances of the purest steel of Damascus, in the strength of their walled cities, and in the populousness of sixty thousand villages; and instead of sustaining a siege, they threw open their gates and arrayed their forces in the plain. But these forces were not cemented by virtue and union, and some powerful emirs had been seduced to desert or betray their more loyal companions. Timur's front was covered with a line of Indian elephants, whose turrets were filled with archers and Greek fire; the rapid evolutions of his cavalry completed the dismay and disorder; the Syrian crowds fell back on each other; many thousands were stifled or slaughtered in the entrance of the great street; the Mongols entered with the fugitives; and after a short defence the impregnable citadel of Aleppo was surrendered by cowardice or treachery. Among the suppliants and captives, Timur distinguished the doctors of the law, whom he invited to the dangerous honor of a personal conference. The Mongol Prince was a zealous Mussulman; but his Persian schools had taught him to revere the memory of Ali and Hasan; and he had imbibed a deep prejudice against the Syrians as the enemies of the son of the daughter of the apostle of God. To these doctors he proposed a captious question, which the casuists of Samarkand and Herat were incapable of resolving. "Who are the true martyrs, of those who are slain on my side or on that of my enemies?" But he was silenced, or satisfied, by the dexterity of one of the cadis of Aleppo, who replied, in the words of Mahomet himself, that the motive, not the ensign, constitutes the martyr; and that the Moslems of either party who fight only for the glory of God may deserve that sacred appellation. The true succession of the caliphs was a controversy of a still more delicate nature; and the frankness of a doctor, too honest for his situation, provoked the Emperor to exclaim: "Ye are as false as those of Damascus: Moawiyah was a usurper, Yezid a tyrant, and Ali alone is the lawful successor of the Prophet." A prudent explanation restored his tranquillity, and he passed to a more familiar topic of conversation. "What is your age?" said he to the cadi. "Fifty years." "It would be the age of my eldest son: you see me here," continued Timur, "a poor, lame, decrepit mortal. Yet by my arms has the Almighty been pleased to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Turan, and the Indies. I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness that in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always been the authors of their own calamity." During this peaceful conversation the streets of Aleppo streamed with blood and reëchoed with the cries of mothers and children, with the shrieks of violated virgins. The rich plunder that was abandoned to his soldiers might stimulate their avarice; but their cruelty was enforced by the peremptory command of producing an adequate number of heads, which, according to his custom, were curiously piled in columns and pyramids. The Mongols celebrated the feast of victory, while the surviving Moslems passed the night in tears and in chains.
I shall not dwell on the march of the destroyer from Aleppo to Damascus, where he was rudely encountered, and almost overthrown, by the armies of Egypt. A retrograde motion was imputed to his distress and despair; one of his nephews deserted to the enemy; and Syria rejoiced in the tale of his defeat, when the Sultan was driven, by the revolt of the mamelukes, to escape with precipitation and shame to his palace of Cairo. Abandoned by their Prince, the inhabitants of Damascus still defended their walls; and Timur consented to raise the siege if they would adorn his retreat with a gift or ransom, each article of nine pieces. But no sooner had he introduced himself into the city, under color of a truce, than he perfidiously violated the treaty, imposed a contribution of ten millions of gold, and animated his troops to chastise the posterity of those Syrians who had executed, or approved, the murder of the grandson of Mahomet. After a period of seven centuries Damascus was reduced to ashes, because a Tartar was moved by religious zeal to avenge the blood of an Arab.