Download PDF | The mongol Empire Its Rise and Legacy By Michael Pradwin,Transtated By Eden and Cedar Paul, London , 1953.
582 Pages
PROLOGUE
EUROPE AWAITS KING DAVID
THE date is A.D. 1221. For the last four years, since Pope Honorius III summoned Christendom to a new crusade, a human torrent had been pouring from Europe to the East, mainly from Low Germany, Denmark, and Norway. In Frisia, Cologne, and Bremen men took ship, rounded the west coast, tarried awhile in Portugal to give their fellow-Christians there a hand against the infidel. After a year’s sojourn they continued their voyage to Syria, the place of assembly for crusaders of all nationalities. Here was formed a composite army of the devout, the ambitious, adventurers of many races and speaking many tongues, with nothing in common but the Cross on their attire and the hope of battle and victory. There was little bond of unity, and the Moslems, aware of their advantage, feeling secure in their impregnable fortresses, bided their time.
Nor did they need to wait long before the crusading army began to crumble. The King of Hungary was the first leader to return to Europe, being soon followed by Duke Leopold of Austria. Those left behind in Syria removed to Egypt, which offered richer booty. They attacked the wealthy port of Damietta at the mouth of the Nile, and took it after an eighteen months’ siege during which 65,000 of the 70,000 inhabitants died of pestilence and famine.
But the rejoicings in Europe over this success and over the vastness of the loot were short-lived, for now Saladin’s nephews, the Sultans of Egypt and Damascus, joined forces against the Christian army and beleaguered it. The besiegers were in turn besieged, and nothing but a new crusade and fresh recruits could save them. Hopes were centred upon Frederick II, the Hohen-staufen Emperor, who had just been crowned by Pope Honorius III upon giving a pledge to take up the Cross. Under pressure of public opinion Frederick sent the Duke of Bavaria to Egypt in command of a fleet of galleys, but refrained from going thither in person at the head of a powerful army, so that at Easter 1221 Europe was anxiously expecting tidings of disaster from the East.
But amid the gloom came a message of hope from the crusading zealot Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Ptolemais. He wrote to the Pope, to Duke Leopold of Austria, to King Henry III of England, to the University of Paris. Beyond belief were the tidings which the bishop sent in his various missives to Europe.
“A new and mighty protector of Christianity has arisen. King David of India, at the head of an army of unparalled size, has taken the field against the unbelievers.”
Giving the most circumstantial details, Vitry wrote that the Caliph of Bagdad had sought out the Nestorian Patriarch of that city, begging him to indite a dispatch to this Christian King David craving support against the Shah of Khwarizm, since the latter, though a Mohammedan, wished to make war against the Commander of the Faithful.
In response to the Patriarch’s appeal, King David, said Vitry, had defeated the Shah of Khwarizm, conquered the mighty realm of Persia, and was (at the time of writing) only five days’ march from Bagdad and Mosul. He had then sent envoys to the Caliph, demanding the cession of five-sixths of the latter’s realm including the city of Bagdad, which was to become the see of the Catholic Patriarch. The Moslem ruler was further to pay so huge an indemnity that David would be able to rebuild of gold and silver the walls of Jerusalem razed a few years before.
Loud was the jubiliation throughout Europe when the news came of this divine intervention. True, no one could say where in the East could be the kingdom of the Christian King David, nor who was the Shah of Khwarizm overthrown by the monarch with so propitious a name. But even the most learned saw no reason to doubt the accuracy of the information, for Jacques deVitry’s description was precise, and who could fail to welcome the story about David “the King of Kings who was destroying the realm of the Saracens and would protect Holy Church’’? It chimed in with what had been so fervently believed not a hundred years before, that in the Far East was a huge kingdom ruled by Prester John “whose power was greater than that of all the Kings of the World.”
In the days of the Second Crusade (1147-1149) the rumour was current that Prester John had attacked and overthrown the Saracens in order to help the crusaders, and Christian hearts had been profoundly stirred by the news. Then belief faded, and only the Nestorians, whose communities were spread far and wide throughout Asia, continued stubbornly to hold that a huge Christian empire existed somewhere in the East. But the Sultan would not permit any Christians from the West to gain access thither, even as Prester John closed his frontiers against the Moslems.
Vitry, however, was explicit in his story that King David was the grandson of Prester John, being “the son of King Israel”. The vanguard of the troops had reached the borders of the Mesopotamian empire, but had then turned northwards to safeguard communications before attacking Jerusalem. In the north they had defeated the Georgians, who professed Christianity, indeed, but were heretical.
Jews in all the towns of Europe rejoiced no less than Christians, holding services of thanksgiving and collecting funds for a mission to meet King David, since in two of Jacques de Vitry’s epistles he was described as “rex Judeorum’’.—This deliverer was the King of the Jews, marching westward to deliver his people from exile.
Although after a time a collation of texts showed that there had been an error on the part of the copyist in Damietta, who had written “rex Judeorum”’ instead of “rex Indorum”—meanwhile, as news passed from Jew to Jew by word of mouth, “King David” became “the Son of David”, and “the Son of King Israel” was modified to “the King of Israel”. As for the people whose enormous army was approaching, they must be the scattered tribes of Israel who, at the foot of Mount Sinai, had prayed to the Golden Calf.
But while Europe was thus awaiting King David, no further news of him came from the East. In the autumn Damietta had to surrender to the infidel, and the crusaders could congratulate themselves on receiving permission to depart.
Still this was taken as fresh proof of the nearness of King David. The Saracens were unusually merciful because their Sultan had warned them against proceeding to extremities. Let them profit by the example of the Shah of Persia who, heretofore always victorious, had been defeated and dethroned and had died in poverty.—Somewhere between Mesopotamia and the Caspian there must assuredly be these formidable armies. But if they were there, they failed to come to the help of the crusaders.
Far from it, for intelligence poured in from the Christian principalities of Armenia, Georgia, and other parts of Transcaucasia to the effect that their forces had been annihilated, their cities sacked, their fortresses destroyed. Then news came to hand that the assailants had crossed the Caucasus and were ravaging the plains that lay northward of the Black Sea. Here dwelt the dreaded Kumans, whose raids to the north had long been a scourge to the principalities of Russia, and in the west an affliction to the kingdom of Hungary. Now these same Kumans fled across the Danube imploring succour, and were glad when the Byzantine Emperor allowed them to settle in Macedonia and Thrace.
From the Genoese fortress of Sudak in Crimea came galleys bearing news that the place had been taken by storm and burned. Two years after the sending of Vitry’s jubilant letters, from the Russian steppes information trickled through to western Europe to the effect that the armies of the Russian princelings had been destroyed and that the whole country was being ruthlessly ravaged by eastern barbarians. Terrible fellows they were, these invaders. Short in the legs but with excessively long bodies, broad in the chest and dark of visage. They drank blood.—But rumour ran that their banners bore the emblem of the Cross.
Further reports as to their origin and their intentions were as follows. They were descendants of the peoples ruled over by the Three Kings of the East, and they were making for Cologne to carry off the relics of these Kings.—Then came later news. The invaders had turned back towards the East, and had vanished as suddenly as they had come, without leaving a trace.
Europe breathed freely. Still undiscovered was the primal law of the Europasian continent, whose working was to persist until it was counteracted by the growth of European civilisation and the development of a new technique of war—the law of unceasing struggle between nomads and settled population. Nor did anyone yet know that this incursion had been no more than the beginning of the last and mightiest onslaught of the nomads upon the civilized world. Not until two decades later, when these fierce horsemen made a fresh descent upon Europe, turning its eastern regions into a heap of ruins and spreading terror throughout the West—exposed to the greatest peril in history—, did it become plain who had been the potentate taken by Vitry for King David. Then only did Europe begin to understand what had happened in the Far East, with the birth of a man and a nation destined to change the aspect of the world for centuries.
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