Next in point of time is Sir Henry Howorth's great History of the Mongols in four large volumes. * His (2) Sir Henry Howorth view of the Tartars differs somewhat from d'Ohsson's, for he sees in them “one of those hardy, brawny races, cradled amidst want and hard circumstances, in whose blood there is a good mix­ture of iron, which are sent periodically to destroy the luxurious and the wealthy, to lay in ashes the arts and culture which only grow under the shelter of wealth and easy circumstances, and to convert into a desert the para­dise which man has painfully cultivated. Like the pestilence and the famine the Mongols were essentially an engine of destruction; and if it be a painful, harassing story to read, it is nevertheless a necessary one if we are to understand the great course of human progress.” * After enumerating other luxurious and civilized peoples who have been simi­larly renovated by the like drastic methods, he asserts that this “was so to a large extent, with the victims of the Mongol arms; their prosperity was hollow and pretentious, their grandeur very largely but outward glitter, and the diseased body needed a sharp remedy; the apoplexy that was impending could probably only be staved off by much blood-letting, the demoralized cities must be sown with salt and their inhabitants inoculated with fresh streams of vigorous blood from the uncontaminated desert.” * With more justice he insists on the wonderful bringing together of the most remote peoples of the East and West which was the most important constructive effect of the Mongol conquest, and concludes: “I have no doubt myself…that the art of printing, the mariner's compass, firearms, and a great many details of social life, were not discovered in Europe, but imported by means of Mongol influence from the furthest East.”

The third book which demands notice, chiefly on account of its influence in Turkey in generating the Yeñi Túrán,

(3) Léon Cahun or Pan-Turanian movement, of which it is not yet possible exactly to appraise the political importance, is M. Léon Cahun's Introduction à l'Histoire de l'Asie: Turcs et Mongols, des Origines à 1405. * This writer goes very much further than Howorth in his admi­ration of the Mongols and the various kindred Turkish peoples who formed the bulk of their following. A note of admiration characterizes his description of their military virtues, * their “culte du drapeau, la glorification du nom turc, puis mongol, le chauvinisme”; * their political com­binations against the Sásánian Persians, * and later against the Islamic influences of which Persia was the centre; their courage, hardihood, discipline, hospitality, lack of religious fanaticism, and firm administration. This book, though diffuse, is suggestive, and is in any case worth reading because of its influence on certain chauvinistic circles in Turkey, as is a historical romance about the Mongols by the same author, translated into English under the title of The Yeñi Túrán, or “New Tura­nian” Move­ment The Blue Banner. Of the Yeñi Túrán movement I have spoken briefly elsewhere, * and this is hardly the place to discuss it more fully, though it has perhaps a greater significance than I was at that time disposed to think. On the literary side it aims at preferring Turkish to Arabic and Persian words, idioms and vehicles of expression, and at combating Arabic and Persian influences and traditions; while on the political side it dreams of amalgamating in one State all the Turkish and kindred peoples west and east of the Caspian Sea (in­cluding the Mongols on the one hand and the Bulgarians on the other), and of creating a great Turkish or Turanian Empire more or less coextensive with that of Chingíz Khán. The ideas of this school were chiefly embodied in a fort­nightly publication entitled Turk Yurdu (the “Turkish Hearth”) inaugurated in December, 1911.

It is not, however, with the Mongol Empire as a whole, but with Persia under Mongol dominion that we are here State of Persia under the Mon­gols chiefly concerned, nor is it necessary to record in detail the history of the Mongol Íl-kháns who succeeded Húlágú, which can be read in full in the pages of d'Ohsson and Howorth. Considering what Persia suffered at the hands of the Tartars, it is wonderful how much good literature was produced during this period.

Relative immu­nity of South Persia Generally speaking the South of Persia, lying apart from the main track of conquest to the West, suffered much less than the North, West and Centre. Iṣfahán suffered a massacre in which one famous poet at least perished, * but Shíráz, owing to the timely and prudent submission of its ruler, escaped almost scatheless, a fact to which Sa'dí ingeniously alludes in the panegyric on his patron prefixed to the Bústán, where he says:*

<text in Arabic script omitted>

“Alexander, by means of a Wall of brass and stone, narrowed the
road of Gog from the world:
Thy barrier to the Gog of Paganism is of gold, not of brass like
the Wall of Alexander.”

“By the ‘Gog of Paganism,’” says the commentator, “Chingíz Khán is meant. The King-Atábek made peace with him by money, so that the Musulmáns of Shíráz were saved from the hands of his tyranny. The author ascribes pre-eminence to his patron because, says he, ‘Alexander barred Gog's advance with a brazen barrier, but thou didst check the advance of the Gog of Paganism with gold.’”

Twenty-five years before Sa'dí wrote this, Shamsu'd-Dín Muḥammad ibn Qays of Ray, flying before the first fury of the Tartar irruption, had found at Shíráz a haven of refuge wherein to complete his interrupted work on the Ars Poetica and prosody of Persia; * and the life of Shíráz seems to have gone on fairly tranquilly and suffered relatively little dis­turbance during those stormy days.

Another point to be noted is that, while all learning suffered from the wholesale massacres of scholars and des- Why certain branches of learning suffered less than others struction of mosques, libraries, and other pious foundations, some branches of learning suffered much less than others. For theology and philo­sophy, for example, the pagan Mongols naturally cared little; but they attached considerable importance to medicine, botany, astronomy and other natural sciences, were especially desirous that their achievements should be fully and accurately recorded by competent historians, and were not altogether indifferent to the praises of poets. At no other period, as will be pointed out more fully in the next chapter, were so many first-rate histories written in Persian; but it must be remembered that the writers were, as a rule, men whose education reposed on the more scholarly tradi­tion of pre-Mongol days, and that such historical works as the Ta'ríkh-i-Jahán-gushá of Juwayní and the Jámi'u't-Tawáríkh of Rashídu'd-Dín Faḍlu'lláh were isolated phe­nomena, hardly approached in excellence in later days. The Ta'ríkh-i-Guzída is as inferior to the latter as it is superior to the over-estimated histories of Mírkhwánd and Khwándamír which will be discussed in the concluding chapter of this volume. On the whole, then, it may be safely said that, allowing for the terrible crisis through which Persia was passing, when heathen rulers dominated the land, and Christians and Jews lorded it over Muslims, the period of Mongol ascendancy, from the death of Húlágú Khán on February 8, 1265, until the death of the last Mongol Íl-khán, Músá, in 1337, was wonderfully rich in literary achievements.

Before passing to the detailed consideration of these achievements, a brief sketch must be given of the external history of this period, which is divided into two nearly equal halves by the reign of Gházán, who, though not the first Mongol Íl-khán to embrace the religion of Islám, was the first to restore it to its position of supremacy and to purge the land of Mongol heathenism.