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READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
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HISTORY OF THE MONGOLS
PREFACE.
ONE
can conceive few things more melancholy than an author reading his own work. A
man may easily overrate the virtues and be blind to the vices of his children,
but unless he be singularly isolated and unaccustomed to the searching breezes
of criticism, he cannot avoid feeling sober and sad as he turns over the pages
of his own book. One can school oneself into treating mankind, the world, the
critics, contemporary opinion, or even posterity with cynical disregard, but it
is hardly possible to be cynical with one’s own product; and yet, unless
steeped to the finger-ends in vanity, even the most accurate and careful author
must feel that many sentences might have been better written, that mistakes,
the results of careless writing and careless correcting—some due to the author,
some to his unsuspecting friend the printer—feeble logic, slovenly English, and
other faults mar the product at every turn; and although the book itself has
worried him and caused him endless anxiety and trouble, he will see the blemishes
more distinctly than all the rest. If this be true of most authors, it is
assuredly true of those who have to deal with a vast mass of facts and
inferences, to thread their way through tortuous quagmires in which authorities
are at variance, and to march over some of those arid tracts of human
literature in which the heaps of shingle have few rhetorical flowers to grace
them, and yet every pebble of which has a separate and individual existence,
and marks a truth or an error. It is in such a wilderness that we have been
wandering, and we know that what we have done is very imperfect, and is as
remote from our ideal as the rude efforts of Theodoras from the marbled flesh
of Phidias.
We
know too well that those who wish to use a critical lash upon us may find a
knot of scorpions in every page. We are not afraid of those, however, who have
traversed the same path. They will know how the thorns prick and how hard it is
to come out with a whole skin; and if they are as candid to us as they would be
to their own work, they will at least do justice to the difficulty of the way.
But let that pass. The book is Writ, and who will care to read it? It is hard
to say. What excuse then for writing it? Are there not books enough and to
spare in the huge lumber-room of the world? Does not the future groan by
anticipation at the burden we are piling upon it? Most true; and yet it is not
merely the cacoethes scribendi, the mania for writing that has stirred
us. Like others, many others whom we know, we have looked along that
fascinating road which leads back towards the cradle of human progress. Looked
with longing eyes at those great banks of cloud and mist and darkness behind
which the sun of human history first rose, to try and dispel some of them, and
help to solve the riddle of whence it came, why it came, and whither it
hastens. It is a romantic and a stirring problem, only to be solved, if it ever
can be solved, by a dreary process, namely, that of mapping out accurately the
nearer vistas of the landscape, and from that vantage making a further conquest
of the land beyond. Taking up the intertangled and crooked
skein, the thousand twisted threads into which the story has been ravelled,
and following each one up to the beginning to reach at last, may be, the
fountain source whence Bushman and Englishman, Fetishman and Pope, black and
red and white all came. Like others who have gone before, we too started
ambitiously, our object having been to give a conspectus of ethnological facts,
to write a treatise in which the human race and its various varieties should
figure as it does in Pritchard’s great work, with such additions as fresh
discoveries have necessitated. But our purpose fell through; the work was too
great. We next essayed a narrower field, in which our early reading had
delighted, namely, to treat of the nomad races of Asia, a field very much
unexplored and very confused, upon which we have written and printed sundry
papers, some worthless and some otherwise may be. But our hobby grew bigger as
we tended it, it outgrew our resources, and we had once more to restrain our
coat within the limits of our cloth; our last resolve has resulted in these 800
pages, and more which may follow. And now as to our fitness for the work, a
question often a stumbling block to a vain man, who dreams he is exceptionally
qualified to do what he has done, and that none could have done it better, but
no stumblingblock to us, who know how much better it might have been done by
friends whom we could name. The field was singularly unoccupied. Amidst the
myriad volumes which the press turns out, few indeed touched even the skirts of
our question. Like the Sahara in Africa, or like the Saharas which occur in
large libraries where ancient folios lie asleep amidst dust and cobweb, our
subject has a forbidding aspect, a dry and arid look which might well frighten
any traveller who looked across it, and will doubtless scare many readers who
are not aware that even the Sahara has some oases, and almost every elephant
folio some few paragraphs to lighten up the rest. Dry and repulsive a good deal
of Mongolian history undoubtedly is, but it forms a vast chapter in human
annals, which we may not evade without seriously marring our historic
knowledge. In the absence of better guides, an inferior traveller may find a
great work to his hand, which he may do in the hope that when he has reduced it
somewhat to order, and traced out its topography rudely, others may follow who
shall have the lighter task of correcting his mistakes, of filling in the
canvas with more attractive detail, and of completing the work which the
pioneer can only begin. It is because the field was vacant that we took up the
mattock, and if it be beyond our power frequently, to do well, we may justify
our conscience by doing our best.
I
approach the problem as an ethnologist and historian, and not as a linguist,
and I have to state at once that I have had no access to the authorities in
their original language, and only to translations and commentaries. Here,
therefore, at the very threshold, I have to break not a lance but only a bodkin
with my friend Sir Henry Rawlinson. At the meeting of the Oriental Congress in
London he laid it down that a man ought not to write history who cannot read
the original script in which the narrative was put down, in other words, that
those only who can reach the flowers have a right to use the honey. This view,
I humbly submit, is not a reasonable one. His own brother, my old friend the
Canon of Canterbury, who has done so much for Eastern history, is an instance
to the contrary, and so are many others; but I go deeper than this. Take the
history of the Mongols as a crucial example, and consider the various languages
in which the original story is enshrined. To be a profound Chinese, Persian,
Armenian, Russian, German, French, and Latin scholar is in itself an
impossibility; several of these languages are so difficult and complicated
that a lifetime is required for their mastery, and no time is left for the
other portion of the work, the comparing and sifting of the evidence; and of
course the argument requires that a man shall have a profound and not a
superficial knowledge, or else his reading of the original is very inferior in
value to a reading taken second-hand from a profound master of the language. I
hold the two works to be entirely apart. One matt carves the stone from the
quarry, and another shapes it into a figure; one man digs out the gold, and
another makes the embossed bowl out of it. It would be as unfair and
unreasonable to forbid the painter to paint his picture unless he knew how to
make his colours, or the architect to design his palace unless he were the
master of every handicraft necessary to supply the building with materials, as
to deny the historian the right to build up his story, to fill in his canvas,
unless he can quarry his own materials out of the rock for himself. It is not
only unreasonable, but it is in fact securing very inferior work; it is the
case of the western farmer whittling his own chairs and tables with his pocket
knife, instead of furnishing his house with objects made by men specially
skilled in their various crafts. How very engrossing even one language may be,
may best be illustrated by a story. When making inquiries once about some of
the tribes of Kashmir, I
was introduced by a friend of mine, a very distinguished Eastern scholar, to a
German gentleman who had long lived on the borders of Cashmere. I put my
question to him, and he answered that he knew nothing about these tribes, for
he was a pure Sanskritist. I was almost appalled by the reply. The difficulty
of Sanskrit was a matter with which I was more or less familiar, but that it
should so engross a man’s whole life as to leave him no time or inclination for
an inquiry into a not remotely connected subject, which was at his very elbow,
was startling. If this be true of Sanskrit, it is surely doubly true of
Chinese, a language so difficult that the quarrels of Chinese linguists as to
the meaning of Chinese words and phrases form a not inconsiderable literature.
It is only once in a thousand years that men of the gigantic powers of
Klaproth, at once a profound linguist and a most acute ethnologist, come to the
surface. For these reasons, therefore, I do not deem it an objection that one
who is writing an Eastern history should collect his materials from secondary
sources, but rather an advantage. The only thing in which he should be careful
is to consult the translations of scholars and of men of repute, and I trust
that in the following pages I have done so, and to the best of my ability have
ransacked the literature of Germany, France, and England to bring together my
materials. A more detailed criticism of them will appear in the introduction.
There
is one pitfall into which I am aware that I have frequently fallen, and for
which my distinguished correspondent Major Raverty will take me to task, and
that is in the orthography of the proper names. Here I confess to have been met
by a difficulty of singular moment, and one which appears to be almost
insuperable until some uniform scheme of spelling shall have been devised.
There
are hardly two authors whom I have consulted who spell the names in the same
way, and very often their spelling is so different that it is nearly impossible
to recognise the name under its various aspects; I am aware that 1 have in
consequence in several cases failed to spell the same name consistently. The
difficulty is a profound one. Thus in Erdmann’s history of Genghis Khan, an admirable work, the letter g is used
constantly where other writers put k, and a friend of mine, a
distinguished linguist, assures me that with many Germans known to him the
difference between the pronunciation of the two letters is not an appreciable
one. Again, the Chinese orthography of names so disguises them that it is not
always possible to recognise them. Major Raverty, in his capital edition of the
Tabakat i Nasiri, lays down certain methods of spelling, and is very severe on
those who differ from him ; but we must remember that in adopting the Persian
orthography for Turkish and Mongolian names, we are applying an Arian
orthography to Turanian names, and that such a solution is really an arbitrary
one. The way in which Mongol names are pronounced at Shiraz or Teheran is no
doubt to be gathered from Persian authors, but hardly the way in which Mongol
names are pronounced in Mongolia. As a rule, I have followed the spelling of
Schmidt in his edition of Ssanang Setzen, the native chronicler. In other cases
I have followed Erdmann, who was a professor at Kazan and a good scholar; in
the absence of these authorities I have been guided by what seemed to me the
best authority, but in doing so I have, I am aware, made some mistakes, and can
only do the kow-tow humbly to my readers for them. After all, the spelling of
the names, so long as we are not misled by it, is not a very grave error, and
we can only hope that in due time some settled system may make the path of my
successors a more easy one.
Having
said so much about the difficulties of the author, I must now turn to the work.
If we wish to enter upon a branch of inquiry which seems utterly wanting in
unity, to be as disintegrated as sand, and defying any orderly or rational
treatment, we can hardly choose a better one than the history of the Asiatic
nomads. These tribes which, under a variety of names, occupy the vast steppe
lands, the deserts, mountains, and river valleys which stretch from the
frontiers of Hungary to the Yellow Sea, seem at first sight to be quite
unconnected with one another in history and traditions, and unless we can find
some common element around which to group the story, we cannot hope to make
much headway. In looking round to find a girdle with which to bind these disconnected
threads, I have chosen what seems to be the most convenient one. In the early
part of the thirteenth century the Mongols, an obscure tribe of Eastern Asia,
headed by their chief Genghis Khan, succeeded in conquering the greater portion
of the nomads of Asia. Not all of them, but the greater portion; destroyed or
displaced the many ruling families which controlled them, and integrated under
one government and one law a multitude of independent tribes. Genghis Khan left the empire which he had conquered to his
son Ogotai, while he left to his other sons dependent appanages. They were
subject in a kind of feudal fashion to their more fortunate brother. And thus
matters continued for generations, until, as is almost inevitable in vast
unwieldy empires, where intercommunication is difficult and interests are
different, the various appanages broke away and became independent, each one,
however, ruled over by descendants of Genghis Khan. These appanages in turn were broken into lesser fragments, still,
however, ruled by princes of the same royal stock, until the vast empire was
shattered into the many fragments which make the political geography of Asia so
confusing.
The
empire of Genghis was anything but homogeneous in its elements. It consisted of
tribes of various languages and origins, the Turks predominating largely in
numbers, while the Mongols, who lived mainly in their old homes in Eastern
Asia, formed but a ruling caste elsewhere. What the empire was, its fragments
became, very heterogeneous,—some Turkish, some Mongol, &c., but all having one
common bond in that they were ruled by princes of the same stock, the
descendants of the Mongol Genghis Khan. It is this common bond which I have chosen as my sheet-anchor, on which
to hook on the histories of the various tri has, and thus give unity and
coherence to the story. The history of the Mongols in this sense, therefore,
includes not only history of the Mongols proper of Mongolia, but of all the
tribes whose ruling house was Mongol, and who could trace descent from the
royal stock of Genghis Khan. In the present volume I shall confine myself to the history of the
Mongols proper, and leave the various Turkish tribes which obey princes of the
Mongol royal stock for another volume. The Mongols may be divided into two
sections; the Eastern Mongols, to whom the name more properly belongs, and the
Western Mongols or Kalmuks. The former occupy the first eight chapters of the
volume, and the latter the last four.
The
history of the Mongols is necessarily a “drum and trumpet history.” It deals
chiefly with the conquests of great kings and the struggles of rival tribes,
and many of its pages are crowded with incidents of butchery, and a terrible
story of ravage and destruction. It is in the main the story of one of those
hardy, brawny races cradled amidst want and hard circumstances, in whose blood
there is a good mixture of iron, which are sent periodically to destroy the
luxurious and the wealthy, to lay in ashes the arts and culture which only grow
under the shelter of wealth and easy circumstances, and to convert into a
desert the paradise which man has painfully cultivated. Like the pestilence and
the famine, the Mongols were essentially an engine of destruction; and if it be
a painful, harassing story to read, it is nevertheless a necessary one if we
are to understand the great course of human progress. Nor is the story wholly
one of bloodshed and destruction; far from it. I would commend those who wish
to see the other side of the shield to the concluding pages of the lives of Genghis
Khan, and Ogotai, his son, and to the lives of Khubilai and his successors.
Political philosophy has much to learn from institutions which were founded by
a race of nomads, and were found capable of reducing to order and to good
government the disintegrated robbers of Asia, and for a while to make the
desert as safe as the Queen’s highway. It is assuredly a valuable lesson to
learn what wise and beneficent laws and institutions could be devised by the
ingenuous shepherds of the Mongolian desert, and what worldly wisdom and shrewd
insight into human character they were masters of. And it may be that while we
deplore the terrible destruction that we shall conclude that what was swept away
had seen its heyday that like the apple which ripens and then becomes overripe
till it rots, human society reaches a term at last, when there is no longer
progress, when there is nothing but stagnation, and with it the products of
stagnation, vice, and mental disease. If we cannot forget that Byzantium was
the daughter of Rome, and the rival factions of the Circus, in some measure,
the heirs of the old parties in the Forum, we shall not be cynical enough to
affirm that the child was as good as the parent, that the scrofulous and
utterly base and degraded moral atmosphere of the mistress of the Bosphorus,
with its decrepitude in the arts, in literature, in everything save vice, was
not ready for the destroyer, nor affect to deplore the revolution which swept
it away. Greece had been dwarfed in every sense, and become a poor shadow of
its former self when the Romans trampled it under. The Saxons had, for nearly
two centuries, been almost stagnant in literature and the arts when the Norman
heel crushed them and restored new life to the decaying carcase; and it was so,
to a large extent with the victims of the arms; their prosperity was hollow and
pretentious, their grandeur very largely but outward glitter, and the
diseased body needed a sharp remedy; the apoplexy that was impending could
probably only be staved off by much blood letting, the demoralised cities must
be sown with salt, and their inhabitants inoculated with fresh streams of
vigorous blood from the uncontaminated desert. And then there came, as there
always comes, a Renaissance—a new life. When the wave of destruction was spent,
the relics and fragments of the old arts and culture became the seeds of a more
vigorous growth. The virgin soil was speedily covered with fresh green. From
China, Persia, Europe, from all sides, where the hoofs of Mongol horses had
tramped, there was furnished a quota of ideas to the common hive, whence it was
distributed. Europe, which had sunk into lethargy under the influence of feudal
institutions and of intestine wars, gradually awoke. An afflatus of
architectural energy, as Colonel Yule has remarked, spread over the world
almost directly after the Mongol conquests. Poetry and the arts began rapidly
to revive. The same thing occurred in Persia under the Ilkhans, the heirs and
successors of Khulagu, and in Southern Russia at Serai, under the successors of
Batu Khan. While in China it would be difficult to point to any epoch of
Asiatic history which could rival the vigorous life and rejuvenescence which
marks the reign of the great Khubilai Khan, whose history I have described in
the fifth chapter. As the Mongols controlled the communications between these
various centres, and protected them effectually so long as they remained
powerful, Eastern and Western nations were brought together, and reacted on one
another. I have no doubt myself, as 1 have pointed out in the following pages
that the art of printing, the mariner’s compass, firearms, and a great many
details of social life, were not discovered in Europe, but imported by means of
Mongol influence from the furthest East.
I
must now give a short abstract of the contents of this volume. The first
chapter contains a description of the most important tribes and nations which
the Mongols came in contact with in their early days. I have remitted the
controversial questions to the notes at the end of the volume, to which I would
commend my ethnological friends for a good deal of new matter upon the
ethnography of many of the nomads. Let me call attention especially to the note
on the Keraits. The second chapter is devoted to an examination of the Origins
of the Mongols and a criticism of their traditions, and the accounts we have of
them in the Persian and Chinese authors down to the time of Genghis Khan. This
is dry enough, but will, I hope, be found to be a considerable advance on any
previous venture in the same field. The third chapter deals with Genghis Khan,
and traces his history from his early days to his death, with an account, as
far as I have met with it, of his various laws and institutions. This is more
or less well trodden ground. Erdmann, D’Ohsson, and De la Croix have written
largely upon it. I have added several Sagas from Ssanang Setzen, the native
chronicler, and have tried to make the narrative more correct. I must beg my
readers, however, to consult the notes in reading it, for it is a difficult
part of the subject, and I have modified my views about certain portions of it.
The fourth chapter is devoted to Ogotai, the son and successor of Genghis Khan,
and his descendants. Ogotai consolidated the empire his father had won, and
largely widened its borders. The account of the campaign undertaken during his
reign into Central Europe has been carefully elucidated by Wolff, and his
results will be found condensed in this chapter. Ogotai was succeeded by his
son Kuyuk Khan, to whom the Franciscan missionary Carpini went. On the death of
Kuyuk there was a revolution in Mongolia. The family of Ogotai was displaced by
that of Tului, but Ogotai’s descendants kept up a struggle for the throne for a
long time, and were de facto sovereigns of a large territory in Central
Asia. I have given their history until they finally submitted to the rival
house. In the fifth chapter I have given the history of the two brothers Mangu
Khan and Kublai Khan, whose reigns coincide with the apogee of Mongol power and
greatness. During the reign of the former, the Khaliphate and the Assassins
were conquered by his brother Khulagu, who founded a line of Mongol sovereigns
in Persia known as the Ilkhans. The court of Mangu was visited by the Franciscan
Rubruquis, who has left a graphic picture of it. Kublai was the patron of Marco
Polo. He moved the seat of government from Mongolia to China, subjected the
southern half of that empire, and became the virtual founder of the Mongol
dynasty of Chinese Wang tis or emperors known as the Yuen dynasty. His reign is
a brilliant one, not merely in Mongol history, but in the annals of Asia. The
sixth chapter is devoted to the history of the Yuen dynasty, the successors of
Kublai down to their expulsion from China, and continues their history through
the period of depression, when the Kalmuks and Mongols separated and formed two
distinct nations, and down to the final conquest of the Chakhars, the tribe
ruled over by the senior line of Mongol chiefs representing the old supreme
Khans of the Mongols. The seventh chapter contains an account of the topography
and history of the Chahars and of the various tribes constituting the so-called
Forty-nine Banners, that is, of the various Mongol tribes who migrated to the south
of the desert of Gobi and became subjects of the Manchus in the early days of
the latter’s prosperity. In this chapter will be found considerable details
about the conversion of the Mongols to Lamaism. The eighth chapter contains the
history of the Khalkhas, whose several divisions constitute the Mongols who
live north of the desert of Gobi, and who did not become subject to China until
much later. As in the case of the former tribe, my account of them closes with
their conquest by China. In this chapter will be found many details about the
early intercourse of the Russians with the Mongols. In the ninth chapter I
commence the history of the Kalmuks, and begin with the Khoshotes or Kalmuks of
Thibet. There will be found, collected from various sources, an account of the
influence of the Lamas upon the Mongols, and of the rise and growth of the now
dominant sect of the Yellow Lamas, who are presided over by the well-known
Dalai Lama. I believe this is the first account of this interesting story which
has appeared in English. The tenth chapter contains the history of the Keraits.
When I wrote it I believed the Keraits to have been the ancestors of the
Torguts, following in this respect the very able lead of Abel Remusat. As I
have said in the note on the Keraits at the end of the volume, I no longer
think so, and I have given my reasons there for my change of opinion. In this
chapter will be found a detailed account of that hero of so much romance and
fable, Prester John, with a criticism of the latest views in regard to him, as
well as an account of the most important tribe among the European Kalmuks,
namely, the Torguts. The tenth chapter is devoted to the Sungars, Derbets,
&c., whom I class under the generic name Choros. In this will be found the
history of the rise of the Sungar royal family, which for a while built up a
power in Central Asia that promised to rival that of the older Mongols, and to
fight upon equal terms with the Manchu conquerors of China. The twelfth and
last chapter deals with the Buriats, the least sophisticated of the Mongol
tribes, and the one about whose history we have the least information. While
nearly all the other Mongols are subject to China, the Buriats live under the
authority of Russia. In the notes and corrections, &c., I have added such
new information as has become accessible to me since the book was written, and
corrected the errors which I have found, and others which have been pointed out
to me by my very kind friend Colonel Yule. Many still remain, and I shall be exceedingly
grateful to any critics who may notice my work, for pointing out to me where I
have gone astray, that I may add their hints to an appendix, for I hardly
expect that in this generation there will be found another English student who
will venture over the same ground.
It
now remains to thank those who have assisted me. In the introduction I have
given a list of the authorities upon which the work is founded—I hope a fair
and tolerably complete one. To that list I must commend my readers for the
sources of my matter. These I have had very largely to consult in my own
library, away in the Boeotian fields of Lancashire, far from the pleasant book
shelves of the Great National Library; far, too, from the companionship of
those who could have helped me in many a crooked comer. I may say, without
exaggeration, that it has been written alone. After it was written and printed
off, the sheets were posted to Palermo to Colonel Yule, facile princeps in
questions relating to Central Asia, and not more widely- known for his great stores
of learning and his accuracy than for his urbanity and kindness. Most of the
suggestions he has made I have incorporated in the notes, and I only repeat
myself when I return him grateful thanks for them. To Dr. Rost, of the India
Library, I am specially indebted for loans of books in any number, and still
more for the confidence with which I have been allowed to retain them as long
as I pleased. He also is widely known for his profound scholarship, and his
willingness to assist the humblest student; and I am very proud to be allowed
to call him my friend. The Librarians of the Asiatic Society of the
Anthropological Institute and of the Geographical Society have also earned my
thanks for their ready loan of books. Lastly there are three names which I cannot
leave out without grave injustice. First, my dear old mother, who was the first
to teach, and who has never ceased to encourage me, who was always prodigal in
every favour, and who will, of all my critics, I know, be the most tender to my
failings. Secondly, my friend George Hector Croad, now the honoured Secretary
of the London School Board, my old master, whose enthusiasm, whose
thoroughness, and whose integrity I feel it a privilege to have tested in a
hundred ways, and who first gave me a taste for historical inquiries. I hope he
will not deem I have disgraced him. Lastly, my wife, my ever patient wife, who
has sat out many hundred lonely hours while I have turned over the dusty pages,
who has resisted the importunities of many kind friends to burn the heaps of
dry-as-dust—which I call my library. She has done what no amount of gratitude
can repay; but there is one thing she will not dare to do, and that is to read
my book. I have now finished. It is a cold shivering world that such a work as
this goes into; the hard names and the dry sentences are not tempting to the
casual reader. Some few, may be, will read it; others turn to it to verify a
fact, or to find materials for a pedantic sentence ; others may busy themselves
with tearing it to pieces. All are welcome; and to all I say—
“Vive,
vale! si quid novisti rectius istis,
Candidus
imperti, si non, his utere mecum.”
INTRODUCTION
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