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Russia, China, and India contain vast plains given over to peasant agriculture; they are easily swayed by military empires such as that of Jenghis Khan; with modern railways, they could be dominated from a centre more securely than in former times.
The Tartar storm, ridden by Jenghis Khan, which had overwhelmed Central Asia, spent its last force on the kingdom of Konia, and, withdrawing, left the Seljuks bankrupt of force and prestige and Anatolia without an overlord.
Before the death of Jenghis Khan in 1227, the Tartar rule was established in northern China or Cathay, and in central Asia from India to the Caspian; while within half a century the successors of the first emperor were dominant to the Euphrates and the Dniester on the west, and as far south as Delhi, Burma, and Cochin China.
It has taken Attila to its heart, and rehabilitated Jenghis Khan, Timur, Oghuz, and the rest with the erudition of a Turanian Walter Scott. "My Attila, my Jenghis," sings Ziya Gök Alp, "these heroic figures, which stand for the proud fame of my race, appear on the dry pages of the history books as covered with shame and disgrace, while in reality they are no less than Alexander and Caesar.
Temuchin, Jenghis Khan, born in a tent in 1162, son of a petty Mongolian chieftain, succeeded his father when only thirteen years old.
See, with Herodotus, young Greece spring up into life, or note with him how already the wondrous old Orient world is crumbling into giant decay; or go with Carpini and Rubruquis to Tartary, meet 'the carts of Zagathai laden with houses, and think that a great city is travelling towards you. 'Gaze on that vast wild empire of the Tartar, where the descendants of Jenghis 'multiply and disperse over the immense waste desert, which is as boundless as the ocean. Sail with the early Northern discoverers, and penetrate to the heart of winter, among sea-serpents and bears and tusked morses with the faces of men.
But the heritage of "Rûm" is not the final factor in the Ottoman Empire as it exists to-day; for after the successors of Osman had founded their military monarchy with blood and iron on the ruins of one-third of Europe, they turned eastwards, with a genuinely Oriental gesture, and overran kingdoms and lands with the apparently mechanical impetus of all Asiatic conquerors, from Sargon of Akkad and Cyrus the Persian to Jenghis Khan and Timur.
Jenghis and his generals, starting from Mongolia, appeared as conquerors in China, India, Persia, and Russia. Throughout Central Asia, Jenghis destroyed every man, woman, and child in the cities he captured. When Merv was captured, it was transformed into a desert and 700,000 people were killed.
The type of horse that bore Alexander and Jenghis Khan and the Prophet's War Chieftains to victory. As a colt he had escaped the rodeo. No mark of the branding-irons scarred his shoulder or thin transparent flanks.
The times of Jenghis Khan remind one of the present day, except that his methods of causing death were more merciful than those that have been employed since the Armistice. By this time, contact with China had somewhat abated the savagery of the first conquerors. Kublai removed his capital from Kara Korom in Mongolia to Peking.
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