Historical Sketches, Volume I | Page 9

foot of that high plateau of central and eastern Asia, which I have designated as their proper home. But he was too prudent to be entangled in extended expeditions against them, and having made trial of their formidable strength, and made some demonstrations of the superiority of his own, he left them in possession of their wildernesses.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Isai. xli. 25: Jer. i. 14; vi. 1, 22; Joel ii. 20; etc., etc.
[2] Gibbon.
[3] Gibbon.
[4] Caldecott's Baber.
[5] Vid. Mitford's Greece, vol. viii. p. 86.
[6] Pritchard's Researches.

LECTURE II.
The Tartars.
1.
If anything needs be added to the foregoing account, in illustration of the natural advantages of the Scythian or Tartar position, it is the circumstance that the shepherds of the Ukraine were divided in their counsels when Darius made war against them, and that only a portion of their tribes coalesced to repel his invasion. Indeed, this internal discord, which is the ordinary characteristic of races so barbarous, and the frequent motive of their migrations, is the cause why in ancient times they were so little formidable to their southern neighbours; and it suggests a remark to the philosophical historian, Thucydides, which, viewed in the light of subsequent history, is almost prophetic. "As to the Scythians," he says, "not only no European nation, but not even any Asiatic, would be able to measure itself with them, nation with nation, were they but of one mind." Such was the safeguard of civilization in ancient times; in modern unhappily it has disappeared. Not unfrequently, since the Christian era, the powers of the North have been under one sovereign, sometimes even for a series of years; and have in consequence been brought into combined action against the South; nay, as time has gone on, they have been thrown into more and more formidable combinations, with more and more disastrous consequences to its prosperity. Of these northern coalitions or Empires, there have been three, nay five, which demand our especial attention both from their size and their historical importance.
The first of these is the Empire of the Huns, under the sovereignty of Attila, at the termination of the Roman Empire; and it began and ended in himself. The second is in the time of the Crusades, when the Moguls spread themselves over Europe and Asia under Zingis Khan, whose power continued to the third generation, nay, for two centuries, in the northern parts of Europe. The third outbreak was under Timour or Tamerlane, a century and more before the rise of Protestantism, when the Mahometan Tartars, starting from the basin of the Aral and the fertile region of the present Bukharia, swept over nearly the whole of Asia round about, and at length seated themselves in Delhi in Hindostan, where they remained in imperial power till they succumbed to the English in the last century. Then come the Turks, a multiform and reproductive race, varied in its fortunes, complicated in its history, falling to rise again, receding here to expand there, and harassing and oppressing the world for at least a long 800 years. And lastly comes the Russian Empire, in which the Tartar element is prominent, whether in its pure blood or in the Slavonian approximation, and which comprises a population of many millions, gradually moulded into one in the course of centuries, ever growing, never wavering, looking eagerly to the South and to an unfulfilled destiny, and possessing both the energy of barbarism in its subjects and the subtlety of civilization in its rulers. The two former of these five empires were Pagan, the two next Mahometan, the last Christian, but schismatic; all have been persecutors of the Church, or, at least, instruments of evil against her children. The Russians I shall dismiss; the Turks, who form my proper subject, I shall postpone. First of all, I will take a brief survey of the three empires of the Tartars proper; of Attila and his Huns; of Zingis and his Moguls; and of Timour and his Mahometan Tartars.
I have already waived the intricate question of race, as regards the various tribes who have roamed from time immemorial, or used to roam, in the Asiatic and European wilderness, because it was not necessary to the discussion in which I am engaged. Their geographical position assimilated them to each other in their wildness, their love of wandering, their pastoral occupations, their predatory habits, their security from attack, and the suddenness and the transitoriness of their conquests, even though they descend from our first parent by different lines. However, there is no need of any reserve or hesitation in speaking of the three first empires into which the shepherds of the North developed, the Huns, the Moguls, and the Mahometan Tartars: they were the creation of Tribes, whose identity of race is as certain as their community of country.
2.
Of these the