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Next in order of succession we come to the name of Jean du Plan de Carpin, or as some authors render it simply, Carpini. He was a Franciscan or Grey Friar, born in 1182, at Perugia in Italy. It is well known what inroads the Mongolians had made under Gengis-Khan, and in 1206 this chieftain had made Karakorum, an ancient Turkish town, his capital. This town was a little north of China.
But when Barkaï was vanquished and his capital taken, the partisans of Houlagou induced the two Venetians to follow them to the residence of the grand Khan of Tartary, who was sure to give them a hearty welcome. This Kublaï-Khan, the fourth son of Gengis-Khan, was Emperor of China, and was then at his summer-palace in Mongolia, on the frontier of the Chinese empire.
On leaving Constantinople, Ibn Batuta went again to Astrakhan, thence crossing the sandy wastes of the present Turkestan, he arrived at Khovarezen, a large populous town, then at Bokhara, half destroyed by the armies of Gengis-Khan.
When he arrived there, he found a city measuring three miles in circumference, which had been for a long time the capital of the Empire, before it was conquered by Gengis-Khan, the grandfather of the reigning emperor.
The Persians, subdued by the grandsire of Astyages, seized the occasion to revolt. Among them rose up a native hero, the Gengis-khan of the ancient world.
There are nations which have subjugated a part of the world without having the usage of characters. We know that Gengis-khan conquered a part of Asia at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but it is not through either him or the Tartars that we know it. Their history, written by the Chinese and translated by Father Gaubil, states that these Tartars had not at that time the art of writing.
The conquests of a Gengis-Khan have nothing in them that is more strange to the eye of a philosopher than the explosion of a mine, caused in its principle by a feeble spark, which commences with setting fire to a single grain of powder; this presently communicates itself to many millions of other contiguous grains, of which the united force, the multiplied powers, terminate by blowing up mountains, overthrowing fortifications, or converting populous, well- built cities, into heaps of ruins.
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