285 CHAPTER I. THE LOSS OF TEMPORAL POWER. A.D. 847-1050. THE name of Tartary has been given in Europe to that immense region extending almost entirely across Asia from the Caspian Sea to the Eastern Ocean. The most eastern division of Tartary is the country of the Mautchous, which fills up the interval between China and Siberia, having the Sea of Japan as its eastern boundary, and the Hingun mountains as its western. On the western limits of this division commence the spacious plains roamed over by the tribes of Mongolia ; and to the west, again, of Mongolia, is Independent Tartary, comprising Bokhara, Khiva, Khokand, and other small states. This part of Asia formed the home of the Turcomans. According to the learned Chinese scholar, De Guignes, the ancestors of these Turks or Turcomans were a people dwelling to the north of the northern provinces of China, and known to ancient Chinese historians as "the Barbarians of the Mountains." Two thousand years, he tells us, before the birth of Christ, we obtain our first glimpse of this people, living in tents pitched upon carts, and moving in these travelling houses along the banks of the rivers, and over the plains which promised to furnish the best pasture for their flocks. For the next fifteen hundred years, only some fitful gleams-few and far betweenilluminate the obscurity of Chinese history, but we can discern by the uncertain glimmer vast hordes of these barbarians entering the northern provinces of China, and spreading misery and devastation in every direction. The Great Wall of China was constructed (B.C. 210) as a protection against their terrible raids. When, at length, the daylight of historical knowledge has arisen, we find these barbarians united into a great and powerful nation under a single sovereign. For two centuries and a half they continued to be the scourge of the Chinese dominions. Advance towards civilization they made none. They practised none of the arts of sedentary life. They built no cities; they carried on no trade. They lived by plunder; their amusements were the chase and the foray. In their dreadful and monotonous history, as pourtrayed by the marvellous industry of De Guignes, we hear of nothing, year after year, but huge swarms of horsemen traversing the country, either pursuing or pursued, harrying, plundering, and burning. So it goes on until the close of the third century after Christ, when the reader is greatly rejoiced to find that the barbarians have fallen into a disunited and feeble condition; that on all their frontiers, hosts of infuriated Chinese are pressing in; that a terrible famine has come in to aid the avengers; that one great battle after another utterly breaks up their power, and terminates "the Empire of the Hioung Nou," after a duration of more than thir |