Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

themselves with their skins. They ate gluttonously when supplies

were plentiful, but they could bear hunger and thirst, heat and

cold, "more patiently than any people in the world." `063017 Armed

with arrows- sometimes tipped with flaming naphtha- and cannon and all

the medieval mechanisms of siege, they were a fit and ready instrument

for a man who dreamed of empire with his mother's milk.

When Genghis Khan died (1227) he divided his dominions among his

four sons. To Jagatai he gave the region around Samarkand, and the

name of this son came to be applied to the Mongol or Tatar tribes

under his rule. Timur (i.e., iron) was born at Kesh in Transoxiana

to the emir of one such tribe. According to Clavijo the new "Scourge

of God" assumed this function precociously: he organized bands of

young thieves to steal sheep or cattle from near-by herds. `063018

In one of these enterprises he lost the third and fourth fingers of

his right hand; in another he was wounded in the heel, and so limped

the rest of his life. `063019 His enemies called him Timur-i-Lang,

Timur the Lame, which careless Occidentals like Marlowe made into

Tamburlane or Tamerlane. He found time for a little schooling; he read

poetry, and knew the difference between art and degeneration. When

he was sixteen his father bequeathed to him the leadership of the

tribe and retired to a monastery, for the world, the old man said,

is "no better than a golden vase filled with serpents and

scorpions." *06060 The father, we are told, advised his son always

to support religion. Timur followed the precept even to turning men

into minarets.

In 1361 the khan of Mongolia appointed Khoja Ilias governor of

Transoxiana, and made Timur one of Khoja's councilors. But the

energetic youth was not ripe for statesmanship; he quarreled violently

with other members of Khoja's staff, and was forced to flee from

Samarkand into the desert. He gathered some youthful warriors about

him, and joined his band with that of his brother Amir Husein, who was

in like straits. Wandering from one hiding place to another, they were

hardened in body and soul by danger, homelessness, and poverty,

until they were raised to moderate fortune by being employed to

suppress a revolt in Sistan. So ripened, they declared war on Khoja,

deposed and slew him, and became joint rulers, at Samarkand, over

the Jagatai tribes (1365). Five years later Timur connived at the

assassination of Amir Husein, and became sole sultan.

"In 769," (1367) reads his dubious autobiography, "I entered my

thirty-third year; and being of restless disposition, I was much

inclined to invade some of the neighboring countries." `063020 Resting

at Samarkand during the winters, he marched forth almost every

spring in a new campaign. He taught the towns and tribes of

Transoxiana to accept his rule docilely; he conquered Khurasan and

Sistan, and subdued the rich cities of Herat and Kabul; he discouraged

resistance and revolt by savage punishments. When the city of Sabzawar

surrendered after a costly siege, he took 2,000 captives, "piled

them alive one upon another, compacted them with bricks and clay,

and erected them into a minaret, so that men, being apprised of the

majesty of his wrath, might not be seduced by the demon of arrogance";

so the matter is reported by a contemporary panegyrist. `063021 The

town of Zirih missed the point and resisted; the heads of its citizens

made more minarets. Timur overran Azerbaijan, took Luristan and

Tabriz, and sent their artists to Samarkand. In 1387 Isfahan

yielded, and accepted a Tatar garrison, but when Timur had gone the

population rose and slew the garrison. He returned with his army,

stormed the city, and ordered each of his troops to bring him the head

of a Persian. Seventy thousand Isfahan heads, we are told, were set on

the walls, or were made into towers to adorn the streets. `063022

Appeased, Timur reduced the taxes that the city had been paying to its

governor. The remaining towns of Persia paid ransom quietly.

At Shiraz in 1387, says a tradition too pretty to be trusted,

Timur summoned to his presence the town's most famous citizen, and

angrily quoted to him the lines which had offered all Bokhara and

Samarkand for the mole on a lady's cheek. "With the blows of my

lustrous sword," Timur is said to have complained, "I have

subjugated most of the habitable globe... to embellish Samarkand and

Bokhara, the seats of my government; and you, miserable wretch,

would sell them both for the black mole of a Turk of Shiraz!" Hafiz,

we are assured, bowed low and said: "Alas, O Prince, it is this

prodigality which is the cause of the misery in which you find me."

Timur so relished the reply that he spared the poet and gave him a

handsome gift. It is regrettable that no early biographer of Timur

mentions this charming incident. `063023

While Timur was in south Persia word was brought to him that

Tuqatmish, Khan of the Golden Horde, had taken advantage of his

absence to invade Transoxiana, and even to sack that picturesque

Bokhara which Hafiz had valued at half a mole. Timur marched a

thousand miles north (consider the commissary problems involved in

such a march), and drove Tuqatmish back to the Volga. Turning south

and west, he raided Iraq, Georgia, and Armenia, slaughtering en

route the heretical Sayyids, whom he branded as "misguided

communists." `063024 He took Baghdad (1393) at the request of its

inhabitants, who could no longer put up with the cruelty of their

Sultan Ahmed ibn Uways. Finding the old capital in decay, he bade

his aides rebuild it; meanwhile he added some choice wives to his

harem, and a celebrated musician to his court. Ahmed found asylum in

Brusa with the Ottoman Sultan Bajazet I; Timur demanded Ahmed's

extradition; Bajazet replied that this would violate Turkish canons of

hospitality.

Timur would have advanced at once upon Brusa, but Tuqatmish had

again invaded Transoxiana. The angry Tatar swept across south

Russia, and, while Tuqatmish hid in the wilderness, he sacked the

Golden Horde's cities of Sarai and Astrakhan. Unresisted, Timur

marched his army westward from the Volga to the Don, and perhaps

planned to add all Russia to his realm. Russians of all provinces

prayed feverishly, and the Virgin of Vladimir was borne to Moscow

between lines of kneeling suppliants who cried out, "Mother of God,

save Russia!" The poverty of the steppes helped to save it. Finding

little to plunder, Timur turned back at the Don, and led his weary and

hungry soldiers back to Samarkand (1395-96).

In India, said all reports, there was wealth enough to buy a hundred

Russias. Proclaiming that Moslem rulers in north India were too

tolerant of Hindu idolatry, and that all Hindus must be converted to

Mohammedanism, Timur, aged sixty-three, set out for India at the

head of 92,000 men (1398). Near Delhi he met the army of its Sultan

Mahmud, defeated him, slaughtered 100,000 (?) prisoners, pillaged

the capital, and brought back to Samarkand all that his troops and

beasts could carry of the fabled riches of India.

In 1399, still remembering Ahmed and Bajazet, he marched forth

again. He crossed Persia to Azerbaijan, deposed his wastrel son as

governor there, hanged the poets and ministers who had seduced the

youth into revelry, and redevastated Georgia. Entering Asia Minor,

he besieged Sivas, resented its long resistance, and, when it fell,

had 4,000 Christian soldiers buried alive- or were such stories war

propaganda? Wishing to protect his flank while attacking the Ottomans,

he sent an envoy to Egypt proposing a nonaggression pact. The Sultan

al-Malik imprisoned the envoy and hired an assassin to kill Timur. The

plot failed. After reducing Aleppo, Hims, Baalbek, and Damascus, the

Tatar moved on to Baghdad, which had expelled his appointees. He

took it at great cost, and ordered each of his 20,000 soldiers to

bring him a head. It was done- or so we are told: rich and poor,

male and female, old and young, paid this head tax, and their skulls

were piled in ghastly pyramids before the city's gates (1401).

Moslem mosques, monasteries, and nunneries were spared; everything

else was sacked and destroyed, so thoroughly that the once brilliant

capital recovered only in our time, by the grace of oil.

Feeling now reasonably sure on left and right, Timur sent Bajazet

a final invitation to submit. The Turk, made too confident by his

triumph at Nicopolis (1396), retorted that he would annihilate the

Tatar army, and would make Timur's chief wife his slave. `063025 The

two ablest generals of the age joined battle at Ankara (1402 ).

Timur's strategy compelled the Turks to fight when exhausted by a long

march. They were routed. Bajazet was taken prisoner, Constantinople

rejoiced, Christendom was for half a century saved by the Tatars

from the Turks. Timur continued Europeward to Brusa, burned it, and

carried away its Byzantine library and silver gates. He marched to the

Mediterranean, captured Smyrna from the Knights of Rhodes, butchered

the inhabitants, and rested at Ephesus. Christendom trembled again.

The Genoese, who still held Chios, Phocaea, and Mitylene, sent in

their submission and tribute. The Sultan of Egypt released the Tatar

envoy, and entered the distinguished company of Timur's vassals. The

conqueror returned to Samarkand as the most powerful monarch of his

time, ruling from Central Asia to the Nile, from the Bosporus to

India. Henry IV of England sent him felicitations, France sent him a

bishop with gifts, Henry III of Castile dispatched to him a famous

embassy under Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo.

It is to Clavijo's detailed memoirs that we owe most of our

knowledge of Timur's court. He left Cadiz on May 22, 1403, traveled

via Constantinople, Trebizond, Erzerum, Tabriz, Tehran (here first

mentioned by a European), Nishapur, and Mashhad, and reached Samarkand

on August 31, 1404. He had with some reason expected to find there

only a horde of hideous butchers. He was astonished at the size and

prosperity of Timur's capital, the splendor of the mosques and

palaces, the excellent manners of the upper class, the wealth and

luxury of the court, the concourse of artists and poets celebrating

Timur. The city itself, then over 2,000 years old, had some 150,000

inhabitants, and "most noble and beautiful houses," and many palaces

"embowered among trees"; altogether, and not including the extensive

suburbs, Clavijo reckoned Samarkand to be "rather larger than

Seville." Water was piped into the houses from a river that ran by the

city, and irrigation canals greened the hinterland. There the air

was fragrant with orchards and vineyards; sheep grazed, cattle ranged,

lush crops grew. In the town were factories that made artillery,

armor, bows, arrows, glass, porcelain, tiles, and textiles of

unsurpassed brilliance, including the kirimze or red dye that gave

its name to crimson. Working in shops or fields, dwelling in houses of

brick or clay or wood, or taking their ease urbanely on the

riverside promenade, were Tatars, Turks, Arabs, Persians, Iraqi,

Afghans, Georgians, Greeks, Armenians, Catholics, Nestorians,

Hindus, all freely practicing their rites and preaching their

contradictory creeds. The principal streets were bordered with

trees, shops, mosques, academies, libraries, and an observatory; a

great avenue ran in a straight line from one end of the city to the

other, and the main section of this thoroughfare was covered with

glass. `063026

Clavijo was received by the Tatar emperor on September 8. He

passed through a spacious park "wherein were pitched many tents of

silk," and pavilions hung with silk embroideries. The tent was the

usual abode of the Tatar; Timur himself, in this park, had a tent

300 feet in circumference. But there were palaces there too, with

floors of marble or tile, and sturdy furniture inset with precious

stones or sometimes altogether made of silver or gold. Clavijo found

the monarch seated cross-legged on silken cushions "under the portal

of a most beautiful palace," facing a fountain that threw up a

column of water which fell into a basin wherein apples bobbed

incessantly. Timur was dressed in a cloak of silk, and wore a high,

wide hat studded with rubies and pearls. He had once been tall,

vigorous, and alert; now, aged sixty-eight, he was bent, weak, ailing,

almost blind; he could barely raise his eyelids to see the ambassador.

He had acquired as much culture as a man of action could bear; he

read history, collected art and artists, befriended poets and

scholars, and could on occasion assume elegant manners. His vanity

equaled his ability, which no one exceeded in that time. Contradicting

Caesar, he reckoned cruelty a necessary part of strategy; yet, if we

may believe his victims, he seems to have been often guilty of cruelty

as mere revenge. Even in civil government he conferred death lavishly-

as to a mayor who had oppressed a city, or a butcher who had charged

too much for meat. `063027 He excused his harshness as needed in

ruling a people not yet reconciled to law, and he justified his

massacres as means of forcing disorderly tribes into the order and

security of a united and powerful state. But, like all conquerors,

he loved power for its own sake, and spoils for the grandeur they

could finance.

In 1405 he set out to conquer Mongolia and China, dreaming of a

half-world state that would wed the Mediterranean to the China Sea.

His army was 200,000 strong; but at Otrar, on the northern border of

his realm, he died. His last orders were that his troops should

march on without him; and for a while his white horse, saddled and

riderless, paced the host. But his soldiers well knew that his mind

and will had been half their might; soon they turned back, mourning

and relieved, to their homes. His children built for him at

Samarkand the majestic Gur-i-Mir, or Mausoleum of the Emir, a tower

crowned with a massive bulbous dome, and faced with bricks enameled in

lovely turquoise blue.

His empire crumbled with his brain. The western provinces almost

at once fell away, and his progeny had to content themselves with

the Middle East. The wisest of this Timurid line was Shah Rukh, who

allowed his son Ulug to govern Transoxiana from Samarkand, while he

himself ruled Khurasan from Herat. Under these descendants of Timur

the two capitals became rival centers of a Tatar prosperity and

culture equal to any in Europe at the time (1405-49). Shah Rukh was

a competent general who loved peace, favored letters and art, and

founded a famous library at Herat. "Herat," wrote a Timurid prince,

"is the garden of the world." `063028 Ulug Beg cherished scientists,

and raised at Samarkand the greatest observatory of the age. He was,

says a florid Moslem biographer,

-

learned, just, masterful, and energetic, and attained to a high

degree in astronomy, while in rhetoric he could split hairs. In his

reign the status of men of learning reached its zenith.... In geometry

he expounded subtleties, and on questions of cosmography he elucidated

Ptolemy's Almagest. ... Until now no monarch like him has ever sat on

a throne. He recorded observations of the stars with the

co-operation of the foremost scientists.... He constructed in

Samarkand a college the like of which, in beauty, rank, and worth,

is not to be found in the seven climes. `063029

-

This paragon of patronage was murdered in 1449 by his bastard son;

but the high culture of the Timurid dynasty continued under the

sultans Abu Sa'id and Husein ibn-Baiqara at Herat till the end of

the fifteenth century. In 1501 the Uzbeg Mongols captured Samarkand

and Bokhara; in 1510 Shah Ismail, of the new Safavid dynasty, took

Herat. Babur, last of the Timurid rulers, fled to India, and founded

there a Mogul (Mongol) dynasty which made Moslem Delhi as brilliant

a capital as Medicean Rome.

IV. THE MAMLUKS: 1340-1517

-

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++++

While Islam in Asia suffered repeated invasions and revolutions,

Egypt was exploited with relative stability by the Mamluk sultans

(1250-1517). The Black Death destroyed Egyptian prosperity for a time,

but through such vicissitudes the Mamluks continued to reconcile

competent administration and artistic interests with embezzlement

and atrocity. In 1381, however, with Sultan Malik al-Nasir Barquq, the

Burji Mamluks began a dynasty of luxury, intrigue, violence, and

social decay. They debased the coinage even beyond the custom of

governments, taxed the necessaries of life, abused the state

monopoly of sugar and pepper, and laid such heavy dues at Alexandria

on European trade with India that Occidental merchants were provoked

into finding a route to India around Africa. Within a generation after

Vasco da Gama's voyage (1498) Egypt lost much of its once rich share

of the commerce between East and West; and this economic disaster

reduced the country to such destitution that it offered only feeble

resistance when Selim I ended the Mamluk rule and made Egypt a

province of the Ottoman Empire.

Cairo remained from 1258 to 1453 the richest, fairest, and most

populous city in Islam. Ibn-Batuta described it glowingly in 1326; and

Ibn-Khaldun, visiting it in 1383, called it "the metropolis of the

universe, the garden of the world, the ant heap of the human

species, the throne of royalty; a city adorned with palaces and

chateaux, convents, monasteries, and colleges, and illumined by the

stars of erudition; a paradise so bounteously watered by the Nile that

the earth seems here to offer its fruits to men as gifts and

salutations"- `063030 to which the toilsome fellaheen might have

demurred.

The Egyptian mosques of this age reflected the severity of the

government rather than the colors of the sky. Here were no "ivans"

or portals of glazed brick and tinted tile as in Islamic Asia, but

massive stone walls that made the mosque a fortress rather than a

house of prayer. The mosque (1356-63) of Sultan Hassan was the

wonder of its age, and is still the stateliest monument of Mamluk art.

The historian al-Maqrizi thought that "it surpassed all other

mosques ever built," `063031 but he was a Cairene patriot. An

uncertain tradition tells how the Sultan collected renowned architects

from many lands, asked them to name the tallest edifice on earth,

and bade them erect a loftier one. They named the palace of Khosru I

at Ctesiphon, whose surviving arch rises 105 feet from the ground.

Stealing stones from crumbling pyramids, their workmen built the walls

of the new mosque up to 100 feet, added a cornice for thirteen feet

more, and raised at one corner a minaret to 280 feet. The gloomy

towering mass impresses, but hardly pleases, the Western eye; the

Cairotes, however, were so proud of it that they invented or

borrowed a legend in which the Sultan cut off the right hand of the

architect lest he should ever design an equal masterpiece- as if an

architect designed with his hand. More attractive, despite their

function, were the funerary mosques that the Mamluk sultans built

outside Cairo's walls to embalm their bones. Sultan Barquq al-Zahir,

who began life as a Circassian slave, ended in mute glory in the

most splendid of these tombs.

The greatest builder among the Burji Mamluks was Qa'it Bey. Though

harassed by war with the Turks, he managed to finance costly

edifices in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem; restored in Cairo the

Citadel of Saladin and the university mosque of el-Azhar; built a

hotel famous for its arabesques of stone; raised within the capital

a mosque with ornate ornament; and crowned his demise with a

memorial mosque, in granite and marble, whose superb decoration, lofty

balconied minaret, and geometrically carved dome make it one of the

lesser victories of Moslem art.

All the minor arts flourished under the Mamluks. Carvers in ivory,

bone, and wood made a thousand handsome products, from pen boxes to

pulpits, conceived with taste and executed with unremitting industry

and skill; witness the pulpit from Qa'it Bey's extramural mosque, in

the Victoria and Albert Museum. Gold and silver inlay reached its peak

during these bloody dynasties. And Egyptian pottery, which had

invented a thousand novelties in its immemorial millenniums, now

gave the world enameled glass: mosque lamps, beakers, vases, painted

with figures or formal ornament in colored enamel sometimes enhanced

with gold. In these and numberless other ways the Moslem artists,

giving beauty a lasting form, atoned for the barbarities of their

kings.

===========================================================

==========

V. THE OTTOMANS: 1288-1517

-

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

++++++++++

History begins after origins have disappeared. No one knows where

the "Turks" arose; some have guessed that they were a Finno-Ugric

tribe of the Huns, and that their name meant a helmet, which is

durko in one Turkish dialect. They formed their languages from

Mongolian and Chinese, and later imported Persian or Arabic words;

these "Turkish" dialects are the sole means of classifying their

speakers as Turks. One such clan took its name from its leader Seljuq;

it grew from victory to victory, until its multiplied descendants,

in the thirteenth century, ruled Persia, Iraq, Syria, and Asia

Minor. A kindred clan under Ortoghrul fled in that century from

Khurasan to avoid drowning in the Mongol inundation. It found military

employment with the Seljuq emir of Konya (Iconium) in Asia Minor,

and received a tract of land to pasture its herds.

When Ortoghrul died (1288?) his son Othman or Osman, then thirty

years old, was chosen to succeed him; from him the Ottomans or

Osmanlis received their name. They did not, before the nineteenth

century, call themselves Turks; they applied that name to

semi-barbarous peoples in Turkestan and Khurasan. In 1290, seeing that

the Seljuqs were too weak to prevent him, Othman made himself the

independent emir of a little state in northwestern Asia Minor; and

in 1299 he advanced his headquarters westward to Yeni-Sheir. He was

not a great general, but he was patiently persistent; his army was

small, but it was composed of men more at home on horse than on

foot, and willing to risk a weary life or limb for land, gold,

women, or power. Between them and the Sea of Marmora lay drowsy

Byzantine cities ill governed and poorly defended. Othman laid siege

to one such town, Brusa; failing at first, he returned again and again

to the attempt; finally it surrendered to his son Orkhan, while Othman

himself lay dying at Yeni-Sheir (1326).

Orkhan made Brusa, sanctified with his father's bones, the new

capital of the Ottomans. "Manifest destiny"- i.e., desire plus

power- drew Orkhan toward the Mediterranean, ancient circlet of

commerce, wealth, and civilization. In the very year of Brusa's fall

he seized Nicomedia, which became Izmid; in 1330 Nicaea, which

became Iznik; in 1336 Pergamum, which became Bergama. These cities,

reeking with history, were centers of crafts and trade; they

depended for food and markets upon environing agricultural communities

already held by the Ottomans; they had to live with this hinterland or

die. They did not resist long; they had been oppressed by their

Byzantine governors, and heard that Orkhan taxed lightly and allowed

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.