and as talented as himself. The first conquests of the Mongols were in Northern China; their next exploit was the overthrow of the Chowaresmian Kingdom, which reached from India to the Caspian Sea, with its capital at Bokhara. From the Caspian to Russia was but a step; in 1237 (only thirty years after Gengis Khan's election) his grandson Batu, at the head of a Mongol army; had subdued Russia, burnt Moscow and Khiew, and compelled the Russian princes to do him homage and pay tribute to the Great Khan, his uncle Octal, the son of Genghis, who ruled at Karakorum, somewhere halfway in a straight line between Pekin and Lake Baikal. Entering Poland and Silesia, they were met by a German army at Wahlstatt in 1241, and, though victors in the battle, pushed their advances no further in this direction; but, devoting themselves to the strengthening of their dominions in South Russia, pushed their conquests into Hungary, drove the king of that country to take refuge on an island off the coast of Dalmatia, and advanced to within two days' march of Vienna. Their line of march was everywhere marked by terrible traces of vindictive cruelty. They spared neither age nor sex, neither town nor country, neither palace nor church. They had no respect for, and less fear of, the chivalry of Europe. They knew that Christendom was a conglomeration of States hostile to each other; they knew, also, that the best elements in Christendom were frittering away their strength in vain attempts to recover the Holy Sepulchre, and so long as it pleased Western Europe to keep up the Crusades, they did not trouble themselves much about attacking the Saracens. Nevertheless, in 1258, their Asiatic armies overthrew the Khalifate of Bagdad and destroyed that city, and when, between 1274 and 1279, Kublai Khan, the grandson and fourth successor of Gengis Khan, added the whole of China

to the dominions of the Mongols, their Empire could fairly claim to be the largest that the world had ever seen. It embraced the whole of Asia (except Hindustan, which was afterwards conquered, Burma, Siam, Arabia, and Japan), the whole of European Russia, and the eastern half of Hungary.