THE HUNNISH
INVASION
CHAPTER I.
EARLY HISTORY
OF THE HUNS.
THERE is a race
on Scythia’s verge extreme
Eastward,
beyond the Tanais’ chilly stream.
The Northern
Bear looks on no uglier crew :
Base is their
garb, their bodies foul to view;
Their souls are
Ne'er subdued to sturdy toil
Or Ceres’ arts
: their sustenance is spoil.
With horrid
wounds they gash their brutal brows,
And o'er their
murdered parents bind their vows.
Not e'en the
Centaur-offspring of the Cloud
Were horsed
more firmly than this savage crowd.
Brisk, lithe,
in loose array they first come on,
Fly, turn,
attack the foe who deems them gone.”
Claudian, In
Rufinum,
Such is the
account which the courtier-poet of Rome gave of the Huns half a century before
the name of Attila became a terror to the nations. In the fifth chapter of the
first book we witnessed the effect which the appearance of these wild Tartar
hordes produced upon the Gothic warriors. The swarthy faces, without either
beard or whisker, the twinkling black eyes, the squat figures, the perfect
understanding which seemed to exist between the riders and their little steeds,
were there described in the words of the Gothic bishop, Jordanes, and we heard
what he had to say concerning their ‘execranda
origo’, descended, as he believed them to be, from Gothic sorceresses and
from evil spirits.
The German
professor of today emerges from his library to gaze at the descendants and
representatives of the Huns, and liking them as little as his primeval kinsmen
did, brands them with a term of deeper condemnation than Jordanes’s epithets of
“witch-born” or “fiend-begotten”—the terrible name, Turanian. For by thus defining their ethnological position he cuts
them off from all connection with the great Aryan stern whose branches have
overspread Europe, America, and Australia, Persia, and India; he equally
destroys their claim to share in any of the glory of the Semitic races through
whose instrumentality Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism were given to
the world; and he shuts them up with a multitude of dull barbarians, mighty in
destruction, powerless in construction, who have done nothing for the cause of
civilization or human progress, and who, even where they have adopted some of
the varnish of modern customs, have remained essentially and incurably
barbarous to the present day.
Now this
Turanian (or, to speak popularly and with less accuracy, Tartar) race which
burst upon the affrighted Goths in the reign of the Emperor Valens, being a
people of unlettered nomads, neither cared to give, nor probably could give to
the European nations whom they terrified, any information as to their history
in the remote past. Some traditions of a mythical kind as to the origin of
their race they probably possessed, and had they established themselves in
Europe permanently, these might, like the Scandinavian sagas, have floated down
into a literary age and been so preserved. But the Huns vanished out of Europe
almost as suddenly as they came, leaving no trace behind of their history,
their language, or their religion. But for one somewhat disputed source of
information, all is dark concerning them. That source is the History of China.
If the Huns be the Hiong-nu, whose
ravages are recorded in that history, then we have a minute account of their
doings for centuries before the Christian era, and we know, in fact, far more
about them than about the inhabitants of Gaul or Britain before the time of
Julius Caesar : if they are not, our ignorance is complete.
A learned and
laborious Frenchman, M. Deguignes, in the middle of last century, conceived the
idea that the Huns might be thus identified, and with infinite pains he wrote
out their history from Chinese sources, and exhibited it in its connection with
that of the various Tartar conquerors who, since their day, have poured down
upon the civilized kingdoms of Europe and Asia, and wasted them. As before
hinted, this identification has been questioned, and it must be admitted that
mere similarity of name is dangerous ground to build upon in the history of barbarous
races. But as the hypothesis though looked upon with much less favor than it
received a century ago, does not seem to be yet absolutely disproved, we may be
permitted to spend some pages on the history of the Hiong-nu, in the
possibility that we are thus contemplating the formation of that volcano which
hurled forth Attila. From the description which physical geographers give of
Central Asia, it would surely be one of the most striking features of our
globe, in the sight of any visitor who might be approaching us from another
sphere. Eastwards from longitude 73° it rises, we are told, to the almost
incredible average height of 8000 feet, bearing the character of a vast
insulated upland, and, its extent and average elevation being taken into account,
it may be said to form on the whole the most considerable projection on the
surface of our planet.
From this
mighty upraised altar great rivers flow down in all directions, the Obi,
Yenisei, and Lena through Siberia into the Arctic Sea, the Amour and the two
great rivers of China, the Hoang-ho and Yang-tsi-kiang, into the Pacific; the
Irawaddy, Brahmahpootra, Ganges, Indus, into the Indian Ocean; the Oxus and
Jaxartes into the sea of Aral. Rivers of its own it has none (or only one, the
Yar-kiang), having apparently no deep valleys : the small streams which it does
possess find their way to some insignificant inland lake, and are lost there.
Four great mountain chains, limiting or traversing it, run from west to east.
The mountains of Altai mark it off from Siberia on the north. The Thian Shan,
or Mountains of Heaven, pass across the middle of it at about the 42nd parallel
of latitude. The Kuen-Lun fence off what is now Chinese Tartary from Thibet.
The Himalayas bound the great plateau to the south. No mountain chain of any
importance appears to intersect the country from north to south till we reach
the Bolor Mountains (longitude 73), which are its western boundary, and which
form a kind of step down into the lower, but still lofty plateau (4000 feet high)
of Eastern Turkestan.
The dominions
of the Hiong-nu at the time of their greatest supremacy reached over the whole
of the northern and central sections of this plateau—from Mount Altai, that is,
to the Kuen-Lun. And westwards, their rule extended beyond the Bolor Mountains
down into Turkestan, down lower still to the old seabed between Lake Aral and
the Caspian, nay, even across the Ural Mountains to the Volga. In its more
contracted state, their empire still touched the Irtish (long. 80) on the west;
but it seems to have receded to the Thian-Shan Mountains on the south; and the
proper home of the race—if nomads can be said to have a home—was that district
between China and Siberia bounded on the east by the Inshan Mountains (long.
115), which is marked in modern maps Mongolia. Very roughly estimated, it is
probably about as large as Germany and Austria put together. Across the center
of it stretches the great sandy desert of Gobi or Shamo. Here, then, if we may
trust our French guide, the nation of the Huns was roaming before the date
usually assigned to the Call of Abraham. In winter they crowded down upon the
Northern frontier of China, which lies in the latitude of Madrid; in summer
they drove their cattle northwards, across the great desert of Gobi, and took
refuge from the heat in the cool valleys under the mountains which lie to the
south of Lake Baikal, and which are in the same latitude as London.
Under the first
two historic dynasties of China (the Hia,
BC. 2207-1767, and the Shang,
1767-1122), the Huns—if it be indeed the same race—are spoken of under the name
of Chan-yong (barbarians of the mountains) and Tchong-yo. Their country was
called Kuei-fang, “the country of spirits”, so denominated by the same
unchanging nation which at this day calls us Europeans foreign devils.
Chow Dynasty,
B.C. 1122-258
About one
hundred years before the building of Solomon’s Temple, the Chow dynasty
ascended the Chinese throne, and slumbered there for nearly nine centuries,
till the year 258 BC. These were the Carolingians of China, monarchs nominally
supreme, but really overshadowed and overawed by their great feudatories; in
their personal character debauched and cruel—in short, conspicuous offenders
against the golden-mean maxims of morality so dear to the Chinese heart. This
cycle of anarchy (it would probably have lasted but a century in Europe) was
the harvest-time of the northern barbarians, who are now spoken of as Hien-yun. The three northern provinces
of the Chinese Empire, Shen-se, Shan-se, and Pe-tche-li (which comprise an area
about equivalent to the whole of Great Britain) seem to have been in a state of
perpetual border-warfare with these savage enemies, who after each inroad
retired laden with booty to the northern portion of their own territory. Their
fleet ponies and trackless wildernesses rendered hopeless any attempt on the
part of regular troops to pursue or to avenge. At length, about the middle of
the third century B.C., the long-smouldering light of the Chow dynasty went
out, and the Tsin dynasty succeeded. Ching-wang, otherwise Che-Hwang-te, the
greatest monarch of this new house, the Napoleon of China, united her warring
provinces into one compact empire, took the title 0f the Hwang-te (universal Emperor) instead of Wang (King), which had been borne by all previous monarchs, drove
back the Hiong-nu (for such is now
the name of the barbarians) to their deserts, and finally, about the time of
the Second Punic War, completed the Great Wall of China (portions of which had
been already built by two provincial sovereigns) in order to protect the
northern frontier from their incursions. Thus then (if only the theory of
Deguignes be true) this great work, 1500 miles long, the name of which has been
familiar to all of us from our childhood, was really built to guard the
civilization of Eastern Asia from the inroads of the ancestors of Attila, and
might as fairly be called the Huns’ Wall as Hadrian’s barrier across the
Northumbrian isthmus is called by many the Picts’ Wall. Che-Hwang-te in the
course of his great career found himself frequently thwarted by the traditions,
the etiquette, the state-maxims of the literati, who seem to have been even
then a powerful class in China. To recur to a former simile, the Napoleonic
idea could not be made to accord with the Bourbon tradition. Violently breaking
with the Past of his country, he ordered, it is said, that all the books of
history which could be found should be destroyed, sparing however those on
medicine, agriculture, astrology, and other branches of science. This strange
story may be the invention of national vanity, unable to trace up the written
history of China beyond the third century B.C. In this case, all that has been
hitherto said as to the early history of China and the Hiong-nu must be relegated
to dreamland, for an oral transmission of the events of sixteen centuries may
be set aside as an impossibility. On the other hand, if the story be true, and
if Che-Hwang-te was in the main successful in his onslaught on the works of the
earlier historians, it does not follow that Chinese history must necessarily
begin with him. For if the Chinese were by this time a literary nation, which
the story seems to imply, no mere destruction of books would avail to wipe out
from the fully-formed historical consciousness the general outlines of their
past national life. Had every roll of manuscript perished out of the world at
the time of the Peloponnesian war, the Greeks of that period would still have
been able to reconstruct, with sufficient distinctness, by an act of memory,
both the mythical and the historical record of previous ages which they had
read from their childhood. Considering the apparently early development of the
literary character in this enigmatic nation with which we are dealing, one is
inclined to conjecture that this is the true view of the subject, and that
there is at least some historic value in the Chinese annals previous to the
third century B.C.
From this time
onwards, at any rate, the chronicle seems to be complete, and full, to the reader's
exhaustion, of the doings of the robber-nation, the Hiong-nu. These latter had
now taken to themselves a king after the manner of the nations. He was called
the Tan-jou, which we are told is a
contraction of the formidable title Tcem-li-ko-to-tan-jou (mighty son of Heaven). The Tan-jou’s queen was always called Yen-chi. All the
great commands of the state were filled up in duplicate, one officer for the
Right and one for the Left. Characteristically enough, as showing how their
faces were ever set towards the fertile and opulent South, the Left with them
meant the east and the Right the west. The Left was, as we are informed that it
is still with their Tartar nephews at Constantinople, the post of honors; and
thus “Hien-wang” (which signifies ‘wise-king’) being the highest grade of
office under royalty, the Hien-wang of the Left, or Viceroy of the East, was
the next greatest person to the Tan-jou, and the office was generally held by
the heir-apparent of that monarch. In their prosperous days the sovereigns of
the Hiong-nu trampled upon the civilized and literary pride of the Chinese
Emperors with the greater pride of the uncouth barbarian. On tablets, the exact
size of which had been prescribed by generations of Masters of the Ceremonies,
the Chinese monarch thus wrote with the vermilion pencil, “The Emperor
respectfully begs the Great Tan-jou of the Hiong-nu, &c.” To which, on much
larger tablets, the Tan-jou replied, “The Great Tan-jou of the Hiong-nu, born
of the Heavens and the Earth, established by the Sun and Moon, respectfully
begs the Emperor of China, &c.” Frequently an invading Tan-jou would ask
for the hand of a Chinese princess as the price of his return to his own land,
and the Court, not unwilling to plant by the side of the robber-king a representative
of its own interests, would comply with the request. National vanity however
will not allow the Chinese historians to confess that one of the princesses of
the blood-royal was really given in marriage to a barbarian, and they
accordingly relate that a custom prevailed of adopting for the occasion a
female slave into the family of the Emperor, giving her the title of
Kum-tcheou, or Princess of the Blood, and then sending her off to be the bride
of the Tan-jou. An improbable story doubtless; but what is certain is that the
transition from the highly civilized luxurious life of a Chinese palace to the
squalor of the Tan-jou’s home would be keenly felt by the sufferer, whatever
her station in life might be, and perhaps even more by the domestic than by the
mistress. Here is the melancholy outpouring in verse of one of these victims of
policy, sent indeed not to a king of the Hiong-nu but to a prince of the
neighbouring nation, the Ou-sioun, whose mode of life was indistinguishable
from theirs :
Me to a husband have my kindred tied,
And in a far-off laud have bid me bide;
A wretched tent is now my palace-hall,
And a rough paling is its only wall.
Raw flesh must now my hunger satisfy,
And curdled milk, my thirst : nought else have I.
Oh native land! I still must think of thee,
And my heart’s wound bleeds ever inwardly.
Why am I not a happy bird of air
To thee, dear home, that I might straight repair”
The Hiong-nu were ignorant of the art of writing, but the Chinese
historians, with a candor which we should scarcely have expected, admit that
when they had verbally pledged themselves to a treaty they generally showed
strict good faith in the observance of it. The children were early trained in
the use of missile weapons. It is said that they were first taught to ride on
the wild scampering moorland sheep, and to shoot with their little bows at
birds and mice. As boys they hunted hares and foxes, as young men they assumed
the weapons of war. They were not deemed full-grown men till they had slain a
foe. When they reached old age they fell into poverty and contempt, all the
good things being reserved for the active warriors of the nation. Flight was,
as hinted in the verses of Claudian, a great part of their strategy. Like the
Parthians, they would discharge a cloud of arrows at the pursuing foe, and even
if their rapid return failed to throw his ranks into confusion, they easily
vanished into the terrible solitudes of those trackless deserts whither for
many generations their harassed neighbors feared to pursue them.
Of the two chief residences of the Tan-jous, one appears to have been
situated in the north of their dominions, under the continuation of the Altai
mountain-range, and near the place which, as the capital of later Tartar
chieftains, was known as Karakorum; the other near the Inshan mountains on the
eastern frontier, where a large manufactory of bows and arrows was established.
At the first moon of each year there was a general assembly of all the
officers of the kingdom and army at the Tan-jou’s court, and a solemn sacrifice
was then offered up. They met again in the fifth month, and sacrificed to the
Heavens, the Earth, and the Spirits of their ancestors. At another assembly
held in the autumn they numbered the people and their flocks, thus taking
stock, and striking a balance of the profit or loss of the summer’s operations
in the way of plunder.
Every morning the Tan-jou issued from his tent on the left hand of the
camp to pay his devotions to the Sun, and in the evening he offered similar
adoration to the Moon, presumably during that part of the month only when she
was visible. Such was the simple and primitive nature-worship of this tribe. We
are informed that one of the other tribes of Central Asia stuck a naked sabre
hilt-downwards into the earth, and then gathered round to adore it.
The great aim of the Hiong-nu in war was to take as many prisoners as
possible. They reduced them, of course, to a state of slavery, and employed
them to tend their flocks and herds, that they themselves might be left more
free to practise the one art of the barbarian—war. If one of their number fell
in battle, the comrade who succeeded in carrying off his dead body (as in the
Homeric combats) to a place of safety, might claim his inheritance. In the
later days of the Hiong-nu empire, when we might have expected that their
contact with the Chinese would have exerted some civilizing influence upon
them, we find the Tanjou Hou-han-sie confirming an oath by drinking blood from
the skull of a hostile chief who had been slain by one of his ancestors 13o
years before.
Such was the general character of the relations between the Hiong-nu
and their southern neighbors. A few striking features of the history of the two
nations, selected from a mass of monotonous details, will sufficiently explain
the movement which eventually launched the Hunnish nation, not upon Pekin
(Beijing), but upon Rome.
In China the Tsin dynasty, founded by the book-destroying Che-Hwang-te,
was of short duration, like that of the Buonapartes, to which it has been
already compared.
In the year 207 BC. another period of anarchy was ended by Kaou-te,
who, gathering up again all China under his rule, founded the celebrated Han dynasty, which flourished till 220 AD., or, roughly speaking, from the
days of Hannibal to those of Caracalla.
Mé-tée-Tanjou
Contemporaneously with Kaou-te in China, the terrible Mé-tée-Tanjou
reigned over the Hiong-nu. His father, his step-mother, his half-brother, all
atoned to him with their lives for an abortive attempt to exclude him from the
succession. Yet, fierce as he had shown himself against his own flesh and
blood, he appeared to submit with patience to the accumulated insults of the
Sien-pi, a nation perhaps of Tungusic origin on the east of his dominions.
Mé-té had in his stable a horse of fabulous speed and endurance, which could
travel, it was said, 150 miles in one day. The Sien-pi sent to ask for this
horse; he gave it up to them. Emboldened by this act of submission, they
demanded one of his wives; she was sent to their king’s tent. Then came a
requisition for some waste lands, on a disputed frontier between the two
nations, and at last the pent-up rage of Mé-té burst forth, “Whatever touched my
own honor or profit I have given up for the sake of peace, but of the land of
my people I will not surrender, to you a foot’s-breadth”. And he smote the
people of the Sien-pi with a great destruction, and pursued them till they took
refuge in the mountains of Manchuria, where they remained a crippled and
enfeebled remnant, but ever brooding over their wrongs, till, after the lapse
of nearly three centuries, they sallied forth to enjoy their long-delayed
vengeance.
Towards China, Mé-té assumed an attitude of permanent hostility. He
fixed his court at Ta-tum-fou, or Tai-tong, just south of the Great Wall, and
pushed forward his Hien-wang of the Left as far as Changkow, and him of the
Right to Yen-gan, both apparently from 100 to 200 miles within the Chinese
frontier.
The Emperor Kaou-te levied an army of 320,000 men and marched against
him, but was outmaneuvered, and shut up in a fortress near Ta-tum-fou, where
for seven days his army was left without provisions. By the favor of the
Tanjou’s wife he escaped from this perilous position; but those seven days of
semi-starvation were long remembered by the sleek Chinese troops. Peace of some
sort was patched up between the two powers, but after the death of Kaou-te an
audacious Hien-wang of the Right pushed his inroads so far that his barbarian
hordes came almost within sight of Sin-gan-fou (in the province of Shen-si),
which was then the capital of the empire. The Chinese Court complained, and the
Tanjou sent his too zealous Viceroy of the West on a tour of conquest through
Central Asia. Tibet, all that we now call Eastern and Western Turkestan, and
part of Siberia, were made subject to Mé-té’s domination, and it is even said
that the conquering Hiong-nu reached on this occasion as far as the Volga
itself. With a great show of courtesy, the Tanjou sent an embassy to inform the
Chinese Emperor these conquests, by which he had become the greatest potentate
in Asia; and hereupon, after a copious exchange of compliments, the Emperor, we
are informed, concluded to accord to him a renewal of the treaty of peace. As
it is clear that at this time China was almost helpless in the hands of her
barbarian foe, the Tanjou’s humble supplications for peace, and the gracious
concession of it by the Emperor, were probably recorded by the literati of that
day, the contemporaries of Hannibal, with about as much accuracy as may be
evinced by some Chinese historian, upon whom in our own day may have devolved
the duty of chronicling the destruction of the Summer Palace, and the treaty graciously
conceded to El-gin and Mon-to-ban.
From the death of Mé-té-Tanjou, which occurred BC 174, we have, for the
space of 26o years, a history of the wars of China and the Huns, almost as
detailed and circumstantial as the records of Roman conquest during the same
period. Happily for the reader there is no necessity to reproduce these details
here. The same kind of events repeat themselves with monotonous regularity. The
Tanjou sought for peace from the Chinese Emperor. A wife was sent to him, and presents
were exchanged. The Hiong-nu at once recommenced their inroads and ravaged a
great belt of country in the three provinces of Shen-se, Shan-se, and
Pet-che-li. The Emperor sent three armies, amounting to 200,000 men, into the
country of the Hiong-nu. Two of the generals obtained great successes, the
third lost all his men in a march through the desert. He ought to have returned
to China, and there submitted to degradation from all his posts of honor, and
afterwards committed suicide. But he preferred to take refuge at the Court of
the Tanjou, where the information which he gave as to the movements of the
troops and the strength of the frontier-cities proved extremely injurious to
the interests of China. The Tanjou now supplicated for peace; rich presents
were exchanged, and various complimentary speeches were made, but both parties
understood that there was no reality in the peace thus arranged. A Chinese
princess was sent as a wife for the heir-apparent, the Hien-wang of the Left.
The Hiong-nu recommenced their invasions of the three provinces of Shen-se,
Shan-se, and Petche-li, and so on as before.
There was however during all this period a pretty steady decline of the
power of the barbarians, and an equally steady increase in that of their
civilized neighbors. Especially noteworthy in this respect was the reign of the
great Emperor Woo-te, which lasted from BC 140-86, or, shall we
say, from the time of Cato the Censor to that of Cicero. This monarch Woo-te,
whose victorious arms extended to Pegu, Siam, and Bengal, and who was a zealous
patron of the morality of Confucius, was contemporary with seven successive
Tanjous, and, but that his prosperity did not desert him at the end of his
reign, he might, not inaptly, be called the Louis XIV of China.
The lives of three of his servants may be briefly noticed here for the
sake of the light which they throw on the history of the Hiong-nu.
Chang-kiao was instructed by his
master to establish communications with the Yue-ché, a Tartar people whom the
Hiong-nu had driven from the east to the west of Central Asia, and who had now
established themselves in great force between the Oxus and Jaxartes, and even
within the confines of the present. Persian kingdom. Chang-kiao was made
prisoner by the Hiong-nu while seeking to pass through their country in
disguise. After ten years of captivity he escaped, reached the country of the
Yue-ché (the modern Khorasan), remained there some time, storing up a large
amount of valuable political information, and returned by way of Thibet, but
even so was unable to escape from the Hiong-nu. His second captivity however
was of short duration. Under cover of the troubles of a disputed succession, he
again made his escape, and after an absence of twelve years, returned to his
master’s court.
Li-kwang-li, one of
the bravest of the Chinese officers, was for sixty years perpetually giving and
receiving hard blows in the wars with the northern barbarians. They themselves
so highly esteemed the skill and rapidity of his movements that they called him
the “Winged General”. Once, it is said, at the head of 100 horsemen, he put a
large body of their cavalry to flight. Yet even he, after a defeat, had to
endure the systematic ingratitude of his countrymen, and after counterfeiting
death on the field of battle, was on the point of receiving it at the hands of
the executioner. He was permitted, however, to redeem his life by the payment
of a large sum of money, but was degraded from all his dignities. But in the
very next year the Emperor found himself compelled to restore him to the chief
military command, so pressing was the danger from the northern invaders.
In the decline of life, this veteran soldier had the misfortune to see
the honors of his family tarnished by the treason of his grandson Li-ling, one
of the many Chinese generals who after defeat fled to the Court of the Tanjou,
and sold their knowledge of the strategic combinations of their countrymen for
honors and offices in the barbarian court.
About nine years later, the brave old general, who must now have been
fully eighty years of age, again headed a grand attack upon the Hiong-nu. He
met at first with complete success, and pushed the foe before him to the
mountain-barrier at the extreme north of their dominions. The forced marches,
however, across the terrible desert of Gobi had too much weakened his troops.
The Tanjou brought 50,000 fresh men into the field, dug in the night a deep
ditch in the rear of the Chinese forces, and thus added to the disorder and
panic of their flight after the defeat of the morrow.
Li-kwang-li was compelled to surrender at discretion, and taken
prisoner to the Court of the Tanjou, who treated him with such marked favor
(partly, perhaps, on account of his relationship to the already exiled
(Li-ling) that all the barbarian officers became jealous of his predominating
influence. Superstition was enlisted on the side of envy; in a dangerous
illness of the Queen-mother, the soothsayers declared that the gods of the Hiong-nu
were offended because they received no more human sacrifices as of yore, but
prisoners of war were now preserved alive, and even received into favour.
Li-kwang-li was seized and sacrificed; a terrible succession of snow-storms
followed, which destroyed a vast number of cattle, and prevented the seeds from
germinating in the earth. Then they changed their minds and said that they had
mistaken the will of the gods; but the fine old warrior, after his sixty years
of battle, was beyond the reach of their repentance.
Woo-soo was sent by the Emperor
Woo-te upon one of those endless embassies for the arrangement of a lasting and
honorable peace, which vary with their ill-treated monotony of fraud the
monotony of bloodshed. In the course of the discussions on this subject, he
addressed himself to one of the Chinese fugitives, who had been promoted to a
subordinate kingship in Western Siberia, and reproached him so bitterly for his
treason and want of patriotism, that the Tanjou, disregarding the sanctity of an
ambassador’s person, seized him and cast him into a ditch. There he lived for
several days, exposed to all the rigor of the climate, and feeding only upon
snow and the offal of the camp. The barbarians conceived that there must be
something divine in the nature of a man who could endure such hardships, but
they chose a singular means of testifying their admiration. They carried him
off to the inhospitable shores of Lake Baikal, in the east of Siberia, where he
dragged out life for nineteen years, his food being mice and the bitter fruits
of the desert. Some of his countrymen, deserters, tried to reconcile him to
his lot, and to persuade him to accept, as they had done, the bounty of the
barbarian. “No”, said he, “I will remain true to my country, whatever tortures
her enemies may inflict upon me. A minister owes to his king the same
affectionate duty which a child does to his parent”. And when he heard of the
death of his master, the great Woo-te, he turned his face to the beloved South,
looked towards China, and burst into tears. The remorse which the Tanjou felt
for the death of Li-kwang-li turned out beneficially for Woo-soo, who, after
his weary captivity, was at length restored to his country.
In the early days of the conquering Tanjous, Tibet appears to have felt
their influence, and the whole of Eastern Turkestan (or what Deguignes calls
“Little Bukharia”) seems to have been in complete dependence upon them. Even
then, however, for some reason which is not explained, but which is probably
connected with the physical geography of the country, their invasions of China
were always made on the north, never on the west frontier. If they thus missed
an opportunity of taking their enemy in flank, he, when his turn of superiority
came, showed more skillful strategy; and the great triumph of the reign of
Woo-te was the series of conquests and alliances by which he turned the
south-west flank of the Hiong-nu position.
China gradually
gains the ascendancy.
Anyone who now looks at the map of Asia will see a long thin slice of
territory stretching forth at the north-western angle of China (from the
Hoang-ho to Su-chow, long. 98°). This is ground won from the barbarians, and
made strong by the Chinese monarchs for the defence of the Empire. It is, in
fact, an arm stretched forth into the desert, by which China seems to say, “Not
this way, barbarians of the North! fight, if you will fight, fairly, face to
face; but you shall not come round to my left side, and there deal me
stealthily an assassin’s blow”.
After the conquest of this territory came the secret mission of
Chang-kiao through Tibet, to the country between the Oxus and Jaxartes, and
this produced immense results. Where the stealthy emissary had gone, victorious
armies followed. Khotan, Yarkand, Kashgar accepted the alliance, or became the
subjects of the Chinese Emperor. The Ou-sioun, a powerful people, kindred with
but hostile to the Hiong-nu, and dwelling to the south of Lake Balkhash, were
encouraged to lean on China for protection against the common intervening foe :
and a Chinese governor was permanently established at Aksou, under the steeps
of the Thian Shan (about 78° long, and 42° lat).
In the year 71 BC a great army amounting, it is said, to 200, 000 men,
was sent against the Hiong-nu under the command of seven generals.
Notwithstanding the mismanagement and cowardice of some of the generals, this
expedition seems, more than anything else, to have broken the power of the
Hiong-nu.
It was not without some protest from the timid conservatism of the Chinese
ministers that this energetic policy was pursued. When Siven-ti, the
great-grand-son of Woo-te, was meditating an expedition, half-hostile,
half-friendly, to the country of the Ouigours (near Turfan, long, 89°) he was
met by the outspoken remonstrances of a wise old counsellor named Goei-siang.
This sage appears not to have been perplexed by any of those difficulties as to
the triumph of injustice and the downfall of the good which have troubled the
sages and seers of other nations.
“There are five sorts of wars”, said he. “The first, for the
suppression of civil tumult. This is a war of Justice, and it is sure to be
successful. The second, in which you oppose a foreign invader, is a war of
Necessity, and is generally crowned with victory. In the third kind of war, one
of Rage and Fury, in which men take up arms about mere trifles, one is often
beaten. To invade the lands of others for the sake of spoil is the fourth
species of war, that of Avarice, and in this success is not to be expected. But
when a monarch fights only in order to acquire glory, to render his family
illustrious and become a terror to his neighbors, that is a war of Ambition and
Pride, the results of which are uniformly disastrous. These five points are so
many maxims founded on the dealings of Heaven. At present the Hiong-nu desire
peace, while our own internal condition is far from satisfactory. It is no rare
occurrence to see a son murder his father, a younger brother the elder, a wife
her husband. Twenty-two crimes of this kind have occurred in the course of the
past year. We ought to apply a remedy to these social disorders instead of
carrying war into the country of our neighbors”.
Notwithstanding these excellent remarks, the policy of war and
annexation prevailed. The Ouigours became tributary, and the Hiong-nu felt the
predominant influence of China all round their southern and western frontiers.
The barbarians saw that their Empire was departing from them, and fell into
confusion and anarchy. In the year 58 BC five Tanjous were warring against one
another. Hou-han-sie, apparently the rightful heir, at length emerged from the
contest, sole Tanjou; but, almost immediately after, had to enter upon a new
and fiercer contest with two fresh competitors, one of them his own brother. The
upshot of the whole business was, that he humbly presented himself at the court
of the Chinese Emperor, promised subjection and tribute, and received from this
hereditary enemy assistance which at length enabled him to reign without a
rival.
In a feeble and crippled state, the Hiong-nu Empire lasted on for a
century and a half from this time, but never again as the equal foe, generally
as the vassal, occasionally as the revolted subject of the Court of China.
About the middle of the first century after Christ, the nation became
finally divided into two hostile sections—a northern and a southern. Doubtless
the Southern dwellers in the immediate neighbourhood of China became more
dependent on the good things which accompany civilization than the wild nomads
of the north-west; and then the physical barrier of the great desert of Gobi
would probably intensify and perpetuate the moral division. From this time
forwards the Tanjou of the south becomes one of the most eager enemies of the
northern kingdom, ever besieging the ear of the Chinese Emperor with cries for
its demolition.
At the same time a new enemy pressed upon them from the east. The
neighbouring tribe of the Sien-pi whom the great Tanjou Mé-té had cooped up in
the mountains of what is now called Mantchuria, after brooding for three
centuries over their wrongs, now found the longed-for opportunity of vengeance.
After forty years of more or less constant warfare with this triple league of
foes, symptoms of dissolution began to show themselves in the northern kingdom.
Vast hordes of the Hiong-nu, in one case amounting to a quarter of a million of
fighting men, went over bodily to the Chinese. A terrible famine, the work of
some locust-like insect, then wasted the country. A combined invasion of the
Chinese and the southern Hiong-nu on a large scale took place in the year 89.
The Chinese general, Teou-hien, put the Tanjou to flight, and having advanced
1000 miles into his kingdom, left upon one of the mountain ranges an
inscription composed by the historiographer who accompanied the expedition,
recording the success of his arms. In two years however even this effort was
surpassed : the Chinese troops reached the Irtish, the western frontier of the
dominions of the Hiong-nu, the Tanjou had again to take shelter in some
Siberian desert, and his mother was taken prisoner.
Teou-hien, though victorious, recommended his imperial master to spare
his fallen foes. But on his death sterner counsels prevailed. A new Tanjou who
had been raised to the throne was driven into revolt, a revolt hopeless from
the first. He himself fell into the hands of the Chinese forces, and was
beheaded. The Sien-pi poured into the defenseless country like a torrent. Great
multitudes of the Hiong-nu consented to pass under their yoke and bear their
name, the rest fled westwards across the Irtish, settling by the Ural River and
near the modern Russian Government of Orenbourg. Thus did the great barbarian
empire, which for 2000 years had been measuring its forces against the
civilization of China, fall, with apparently irretrievable ruin.
All this occurred in the reign of Domitian. It was not till nearly
three centuries later that the Huns, during the reign of Valens, crossed the
Sea of Azof or the stream of the Volga, and fell upon the affrighted and
disgusted Gothic subjects of King Hermanric. This long interval of quiescence
and of obscurity is the weak place in the identification of the Hiong-nu and
the Huns. It is impossible not to feel that many changes might have occurred
during that time, and that mere similarity of name is a slight clue by which to
traverse so vast a distance.
The Chinese historians necessarily give during this interval far
scantier information than previously as to the affairs of Central Asia. The
expulsion of the northern Hiong-nu appears to have been a victory of Pyrrhus’
for the Chinese Empire. The southern Hiong-nu and the Sien-pi, under various
barbarous names, formed settlements within its limits and erected dynasties
which disputed the throne of China itself with its native princes. In such a
state of things the historians of that country had but little inducement or
opportunity to record the revolutions of Western Asia. We are enabled however,
dimly and at long intervals, to trace the continued existence of a Hiong-nu
people along the line of the Volga and the northern shores of the Caspian.
To the west of them, but separated by one fierce Tartar people, the
Chinese historians placed the great kingdom of Ta-Tsin. Their description of
this kingdom is so curious that a few of its leading features may be here
inserted. It is a country of large extent with many dependent kingdoms. The
walls are built of stone; inns are placed along the lines of road. All sorts of
trees and plants are found there. The inhabitants are given to agriculture, and
even understand how to keep silkworms. They cut their hair and wear very fine
clothes. They have all sorts of chariots with white coverings : in war they
have drums, flags, and tents. The capital is thirty-four miles in circumference;
it contains five palaces by the waterside, supported on pillars. Every day the
king goes to one or other of these palaces to administer justice. Before his
chariot walks an officer holding an open bag in which are placed the petitions
of all who present themselves, which are examined by the king when he enters
the palace. Thirty-six generals of the army form a Council of State to
deliberate on the affairs of the Empire. The king does not always hold his
office for life; they generally endeavor to choose a wise man, but should any
extraordinary calamity occur, for instance any great whirlwind or inundation,
they change their ruler, and he who is thus deposed appears to descend into
private life without a sigh.
‘Gold, silver, precious stones, rich and beautifully embroidered
vestments abound in this country. They have both gold and silver money : ten
pieces of the latter are equivalent to one of the former. They trade both with
the Parthians and Indians. They have often endeavored to enter into direct commercial
relations with China, but have always been prevented by the Parthians.
Recently’ [in the year corresponding to A.D. 166] ‘the king of the Ta-Tsin
named Gan-tun succeeded in sending ambassadors, who were followed by merchants,
to China by way of India. The inhabitants of Ta-Tsin are tall and well-made
like the Chinese, whence their name’ [Ta = Great : Tsin = China or the
Chinese]. This last sentence will probably have disclosed to the reader the
real name of the country in question. Only the Romans of that day could be
considered worthy of being called by a Chinese historian Great as the Chinese.
He has been reading a description of Imperium Romanum by a
Chinese pen, and the king, Gan-tun, is the Emperor Marcus (Aurelius) Antoninus.
The question will naturally be asked, Why if this Hiong-nu, marauders
as they were by nature, had wandered so near to the confines of this alluring
kingdom of Ta-Tsin, did they allow three centuries to elapse before they
commenced their invasions of that empire? Dimly and vaguely, through the faint
twilight of their history, we may conjecture the following reasons for their
quiescence : there may have been hundred others which are to us undiscoverable.
First, their eyes were still turned eastwards; their expeditions still
sometimes reached as far as Khamil (Long. 95. E.), and for generations they
seem to have cherished the hope of once more ravaging the valley of the
Hoang-ho. At length their old enemies, the Sien-pi, under the dynasty of the
Topas, built up, in the old country of the Hiong-nu, a sufficiently solid
empire to check all eastward incursions on their part. But, secondly, between
their new home and western civilization a strong barrier was presented by the
fierce nation of the Alani, Turanian nomads like themselves, who, under the
name of Alanna, are spoken of by the Chinese historians as occupying the
country of Yen-Tcai, the extensive district which is bounded by the Volga on
the north, the Caucasus on the south, the Sea of Azof and the Don on the west,
and the Caspian and Volga on the east. These are the people who for so many
generations adored a naked sabre stuck into the earth as their only divinity.
They were at length, after contests the duration and severity of which are
hidden from us, overcome by those neighbors of theirs whom we may now without
fear of contradiction venture to call the Huns. Some, the Alani of the Don,
became amalgamated with the armies of the conqueror, others fled westwards and
bore a part, recognized in history, in the subversion of the Roman Empire,
though it did not fall to their lot to found any enduring kingdom within its
borders.
Hopes of Chinese spoil on the east, the reality of Alan resistance on
the west, were doubtless two reasons for the long sojourn of the Hiong-nu
eastwards of the Volga. A third, which it is sufficient merely to indicate, is
the prestige, slowly and with difficulty impaired, of the Roman Empire, of that
Ta-Tsin “which Gantun” and his immediate predecessors had ruled so wisely and
made so strong.
A fourth is the utterly broken and dispirited state of the Hiong-nu
themselves. After their flight from their old home in Central Asia, they seem
to have ceased to elect Tanjous; the unity of the nation was gone, the degree
of organization, the semblance of a polity which they had before possessed,
probably vanished. Removed from the civilizing influences of contact with China
they doubtless sank lower and lower into mere squalid savagery, becoming a
loosely united bundle of roving hordes, until at length increase of numbers
brought with it confidence, the remembrance of past supremacy stirred up shame
at their present abject condition, the success of their conflict with the Alans
assured them of victory, and turning their backs definitively on the East, they
crossed the Cimmerian Bosporus—whether guided by a demon-stag or not we need
not inquire—to work, both directly and indirectly, more ruin and greater
changes in the fair kingdoms of Ta-Tsin than their mightiest Tanjous had ever
done in the often-wasted provinces of the real China.
This chapter was commenced by Claudian’s poetical description of the
Huns; at its close let us listen to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a
soldier, and more strictly a contemporary, describing in what guise they showed
themselves when first 1500 years ago, they burst upon Europe.
Ammianus on the
Manners of the Huns
“The nation of the Huns, little known to ancient records, but spreading
from the marshes of Azof to the Icy Sea, surpasses all other barbarians in
wildness of life. In the first days of infancy, deep incisions are made in the
cheeks of their boys, in order that, when the time comes for whiskers to grow
there, the sprouting hairs may be kept back by the furrowed scars : and hence
they grow to maturity and to old age beardless as eunuchs. They all, however,
have strong and well-knit limbs and fine necks. Yet they are of portentous
ugliness and so crook-backed that you would take them for some sort of
two-footed beasts, or for the roughly-chipped stakes which one sees used for
the railings of a bridge. And though they do just bear the likeness of men (of
a very ugly pattern), they are so little advanced in civilization that they
make no use of fire, nor of any kind of relish, in the preparation of their
food, but feed upon the roots which they find in the fields, and the half-raw
flesh of any sort of animal. I say half-raw, because they give it a kind of
cooking by placing it between their own thighs and the backs of their horses.
They never seek the shelter of houses, which they look upon as little better
than tombs, and will only enter upon the direst necessity : nor would one be
able to find among them even a cottage of wattled rushes : but wandering at
large over mountain and through forest, they are trained to bear from their
infancy all the extremes of cold, of hunger, and of thirst.
They are clad in linen raiment, or in the skins of field-mice sewn
together, and the same suit serves them for use in-doors and out. However dingy
the color of it may become, the tunic which has once been hung round their
necks is never laid aside nor changed till through long decay the rags of it
will no longer hold together. Their heads are covered with bent caps, their
hairy legs with the skins of goats; their shoes, never having been fashioned on
a last, are so clumsy that they cannot walk comfortably.
On this account they are not well adapted to pedestrian encounters; but
then on the other hand they are almost welded to their horses, which are hardy,
though of ugly shape, and on which they sometimes ride women's fashion. On
horseback every man of that nation lives night and day; on horseback he buys
and sells; on horseback he takes his meat and drink, and when night comes he
leans forward upon the narrow neck of his horse and there falls into a deep
sleep, or wanders into the varied phantasies of dreams.
When a discussion arises upon any matter of importance they come on
horseback to the place of meeting. No kingly sternness overawes their
deliberations, but being upon the whole well-contented with the disorderly
guidance of their chiefs, they do not scruple to interrupt the debates with
anything that comes into their heads.
When attacked, they will sometimes engage in regular battle. Then,
going into the fight in order of columns, they fill the air with varied and
discordant cries. More often, however, they fight in no regular order of
battle, but being extremely swift and sudden in their movements, they disperse,
and then rapidly come together again in loose array, spread havoc over vast
plains, and flying over the rampart, they pillage the camp of their enemy
almost before he has become aware of their approach. It must be owned that they
are the nimblest of warriors; the missile weapons which they use at a distance
being pointed with sharpened bones admirably fastened to the shaft : when in
close combat, they fight without regard to their own safety, and while their
enemy is intent upon parrying the thrusts of their swords, they throw a net
over him and so entangle his limbs that he loses all power of walking or
riding.
Not one among them cultivates the ground, or ever touches a
plough-handle. All wander abroad without fixed abodes, without home, or law, or
settled customs, like perpetual fugitives, with their wagons for their only
habitations, in which their wives weave their foul garments, and bring forth
children, and rear them up to the age of puberty. If you ask them, not one can
tell you what is his place of origin; he was conceived in one place, born in
another, educated perhaps in some yet more distant one. They are great
truce-breakers, fickle, always ready to be swayed by the first breath of a new
desire, abandoning themselves without restraint to the most ungovernable rage.
Finally, like animals devoid of reason, they are utterly ignorant of
what is seemly and what is not; they are tricksters with words, and full of
dark sayings they are never moved by either religious or superstitious awe;
they burn with unquenchable thirst for gold, and they are so changeable and so
easily moved to wrath, that many times in the day they will quarrel with their
comrades on no provocation, and be reconciled having received no satisfaction”.
