Toushi to the wind of desolation.18 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 car. ried Timour into the tributary provinces of Russia: a duke of the reigning family was made prisoner amidst the ruins of his capital; and Yeletz, 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, and the resistance would have been feeble, since the hopes of the Russians were placed in a miraculous image of the Virgin, to whose protection they ascribed the casual and voluntary retreat of the conqueror. Ambition and prudence recalled him to the South, the desolate country was exhausted, and the Mogul soldiers s were enriched with an immense spoil of precious furs, of linen of Antioch,19 and of ingots of gold and silver.20 On the banks of the Don, or Tanais, he received an humble deputation from the consuls and merchants of Egypt,21 Venice, Genoa, Catalonia, and Biscay, who occupied the commerce and city of Tana, or Azoph, 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 was reduced to ashes; the Moslems were pillaged and dismissed; but all the Christians, who had not fled to their ships, were condemned either 9318 Institutions of Timour, p. 123, 125. Mr. White, the editor, bestows some animadversion on the superficial account of Sherefeddin, (1. iii. c. 12, 13, 14,) who was ignorant of the designs of Timour, and the true springs of action. 19 The furs of Russia are more credible than the ingots. But the linen of Antioch has never been famous and Antioch was in ruins. I suspect that it was some manufacture of Europe, which the Hanse merchants ad imported by the way of Novogorod. 20 M. Levesque (Hist. de Russie, tom. ii. p. 247. Vie de Timour, p. 64-67, before the French version of the Institutes) has corrected the error of Sherefeddin, and marked the true limit of Timour's conquests. His arguments are superfluous; and a simple appeal to the Russian annals is sufficient to prove that Moscow, which six years before had been taken by Toctamish, escaped the arms of a more formidable invader. solar ki (15mail nor 19ado) moddio * 21 An Egyptian consul from Grand Cairo is mentioned in Barbaro'a voyage to Tana in 1436, after the city had been rebuilt, (Ramusio tom. ii. fol. 92.) o death or slavery.22 Revenge prompted him to burn the cities of Serai and Astrachan, the monuments of rising civil ization; and his vanity proclaimed, that he had penetratea to the region of perpetual daylight, a strange phenomenon, which authorized his Mahometan doctors to dispense with the obligation of evening prayer.23 III. When Timour first proposed to his princes and emirs the invasion of India or Hindostan,24 he was answered by a murinur 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 superio. 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 Hindostan : the soubahs of the provinces had erected the standard of rebellion; and the perpetual infancy of Sultan Mahmoud was despised even in the harem of Delhi. The Mogul army moved in three great divisions; and Tirour observes with pleasure, that the ninety-two squadrons of a thousand horse most fortu nately corresponded with the ninety-two names or epithets of the prophet Mahomet.* Between the Jihoon and the Indus they crossed one of the ridges of mountains, which are styled by 22 The sack of Azoph is described by Sherefeddin, (l. iii. c. 55,) and much more particularly by the author of an Italian chronicle, (Andreas de Redusiis de Quero, in Chron. Tarvisiano, in Muratori, Script Rerum Italicarum, tom. xix. p. 802-805.) He had conversed with the Mianis, two Venetian brothers, one of whom had been sent a deputy to the camp of Timour, and the other had lost at Azoph three sons and 12,000 ducats. 23 Sherefeddin only says (1. iii. c. 13) that the rays of the setting, and those of the rising sun, were scarcely separated by any interval; a problem which may be solved in the latitude of Moscow, (the 56th degree,) with the aid of the Aurora Borealis, and a long summer twilight. But a day of forty days (Khondemir apud D'Herbelot, p. 880) would rigorously confine us within the polar circle. 24 For the Indian war, see the Institutions, (p. 129-139,) the fourth book of Sherefeddin, and the history of Ferishta, (in Dow, vol. ii. p. I-20,) which throws a general light on the affairs of Hindostan. • Gibbon (observes M von Hammer) is mistaken in the correspondence of the ninety-two squadrons of his army with the ninety-two names of God: the names of God are ninety-nine, and Allah is the hundredth, p 286, note. But Gibbor, speaks of the names or epithets of Mahomet, not of Gol. M the Arabian geographers The Stony Girdles of the Earth. 'The highland robbers were subdued or extirpated; but grea. numbers of men and horses perished in the snow; the em peror 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. Timour crossed the Indus at the ordinary passage of Attok; and successively traversed, in the footsteps of Alexander, the Funjab, or five rivers,25 that fall into the master stream. From Attok to Delhi, the high roada measures no more than six hundred miles; but the two conquerors deviated to the south-east; and the motive of Timour was to join his grandson, who had achieved by his command the conquest of Moultan. On the eastern bank of the Hyphasis, on the edge of the desert, the Macedonian hero halted and wept the Mogul entered the desert, reduced the fortress of Batmir, 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 Mahmoud and his vizier to descend into the plain, with ten thousand cuirassiers, forty thousand of this foot-d guards, and one hundred and twenty elephants, whose tusks are said to have been armed with sharp and poisoned daggers. hainst these monsters, or rather against the imagination of troops, he condescended to use some extraordinary pre-i cautions of fire and a ditch, of iron spikes and a rampart of bucklers; but the event taught the Moguls 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. Timour made his triumphal entry into the capital of Hindostan; and admired, with a view to imitate, 25 The rivers of the Punjab, the five eastern branches of the Indus, have been laid down for the first time with truth and accuracy in Major Rennel's incomparable map of Hindostan. In his Critical moir he illustrates with judgment and learning the marches ander and Timour.* * See vol. i. ch. ii. note 1. M. guftuskin They took, on their march, 100,000 slaves, Guebers: they were all murdered. V. Hammer, vol. i p 286. They are called idolaters Briggs's Ferishta, vol. i. p. 491.-M. 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 north-east of Delhi, passed the Ganges, fought several battles by land and water, and penetrated to the famous rock of Coupele, the statue of the cow, that seems to discharge the mighty river, whose source is far distant among the mountains of Thibet.26 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 Hindoos. It was on the banks of the Ganges that Timour 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 Samarcand, he proclaimed a new expedition of seven years into the western countries of Asia.27 To the soldiers who had 26 The two great rivers, the Ganges and Burrampooter, rise in Thibet, from the opposite ridges of the same hills, separate from each other to the distance of 1200 miles, and, after a winding course of 2000 miles, again meet in one point near the Gulf of Bengal. Yet so capricious is Fame, that the Burrampooter is a late discovery, while his brother Ganges has been the theme of ancient and modern story. Coupele, the scene of Timour's last victory, must be situate near Loldong, 1100 miles from Calcutta ; and in 1774, a British camp! (Rennel's Memoir, p. 7, 59, 90, 91, 99.) See the Institutions, p. 141, to the end of the ist book, and Sherefeddin, (1. v. c. 1-16,) to the entrance of Timour into Syria. *See a curious passage on the destruction of the Hindoo Idols, Memoirs, p. 15. M. † Consult the very striking description of the Cow's Mouth, by Captain Hodgson, Asiat. Res. vol. xiv. p. 117. “A most wonderful scene. The B'hagiratha or Ganges issues from under a very low arch at the foot of the grand snow bed. My guide, an illiterate mountaineer, compared the pendent icicles to Mahodeva's hair." (Compare Poems, Quarterly Rev. vol. xiv. p. 37, and at the end of my translation of Nala.) "Hindoos of research may former v have been here; ant if so, I cannot think of any place to which they might more aptly give he name of a cow's mouth than to this extraordinary debouclie.' M. 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 o 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 Timour: 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 Mogul and Ottoman conquests now touched each other in the neighborhood of Erzeroum, 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. The resemblance of character was still more dangerous than the opposition of interest; and in their victorious career, Timour was impatient of an equal, and Bajazet was ignorant of a superior. The first epistle 28 of the Mogul emperor must have provoked, instead of reconciling, the Turkish sultan, whose family and nation he affected to despise.29 Dost 28 We have three copies of these hostile epistles in the Institutions, (p. 147,) in Sherefeddin, (1. v. c. 14,) and in Arabshah, (tom. ii. c. 19, p. 183-201;) which agree with each other in the spirit and substance rather than in the style. It is probable, that they have been translated, with various latitude, from the Turkish original into the Arabic and Persian tongues.* 29 The Mogul emir distinguishes himself and his countrymen by the name of Turks, and stigmatizes the race and nation of Bajazet with the less honorable epithet of Turkmans. Yet I do not understand how the Ottomans could be descended from a Turkman sailor; those 214 hawaich ainda bed odr * Von Hammer considers the letter which Gibbon inserted in the text. o be spurious. On the various copies of these letters, see his note, p €10. - M |