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Forst. Voy. and Disc. 105. Of sundry Nations, and of certain People who used to eat their Parents. I am convinced that these Jugurs, who are mixed with Christians and Mahometans, have arrived at the knowledge and belief of one God, by frequent disputations with them. This nation dwells in cities, which were brought under subjection to Zingis, who gave his daughter in marriage to their king.

You will recollect that the Seljukians were broken, not simply by the Crusaders, but also, though not so early, by the terrible Zingis. What Zingis was to the Seljukians, such, and more than such, was Timour to the Ottomans.

Shankars, Shonkers, or Shongars, are birds of prey, famous among the Tartars, and may probably have been the most esteemed species of falcon, and which are said to have been white. Astl. These silver balishes seem to have come in place of the paper money of the emperors of the race of Zingis, formerly mentioned; but its value is nowhere described.

Leo retired, when the barbarian king availed himself of the brief interval in his work of blood, to celebrate a new marriage. In the deep corruption of the Tartar race, polygamy is comparatively a point of virtue: Attila's wives were beyond computation. Zingis, after him, had as many as five hundred; another of the Tartar leaders, whose name I forget, had three hundred.

An Alaric, an Attila, or a Zingis Khan, and the chiefs around them, might fight for glory, for the fame of extensive conquests, but the true cause that set in motion the great tide of northern emigration, and that continued to propel it till it rolled at different periods against China, Persia, Italy, and even Egypt, was a scarcity of food, a population extended beyond the means of supporting it.

Timour pressed the Ottomans even more severely than Zingis pressed the Seljukians; yet the Seljukians did not recover the blow of Zingis; but the Ottomans survived the blow of Timour, and rose more formidable after it, and have long outlived the power which inflicted it. Zingis and Timour were but the blind instruments of divine vengeance. They knew not what they did.

If I do not go into scenes such as these in detail, it is because I have wearied and troubled you more than enough already, in my account of the savage perpetrations of Zingis and Timour.

After recounting such preternatural crimes, it is little to add, that his devastation of the fine countries between the Caspian and the Indus, a tract of many hundred miles, was so complete, that six centuries have been unable to repair the ravages of four years. Timour equalled Zingis, if he could not surpass him, in barbarity.

Zingis seems only to have wanted a reasonable pretence to justify him in the estimation of his nobles for entering into war against Umcan; he therefore immediately levied a great army, with which he marched boldly against Umcan, and encamped in a great plain named Tanduc , sending a message to Umcan to defend himself.

On this Zingis collected the whole strength of his subjects, and the Naymani, united with the Cara-Cathayans, gathered a mighty army in a certain narrow valley to oppose him, in which a great battle was fought, and the Mongals obtained the victory, the confederates being mostly slain, and those who escaped were reduced to subjection.