[Sidenote: The Various Mongol Sovereignties In Asia And Eastern Europe.]
10. In Asia and Eastern Europe scarcely a dog might bark without Mongol
leave, from the borders of Poland and the Gulf of Scanderoon to the Amur
and the Yellow Sea.
The vast empire which Chinghiz had conquered still
owned a nominally supreme head in the Great Kaan,[2] but practically it
was splitting up into several great monarchies under the descendants of
the four sons of Chinghiz, Juji, Chaghatai, Okkodai, and Tuli; and wars on
a vast scale were already brewing between them. Hulaku, third son of Tuli,
and brother of two Great Kaans, Mangku and Kublai, had become practically
independent as ruler of Persia, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, and Armenia,
though he and his sons, and his sons' sons, continued to stamp the name of
the Great Kaan upon their coins, and to use the Chinese seals of state
which he bestowed upon them. The Seljukian Sultans of Iconium, whose
dominion bore the proud title of Rum (Rome), were now but the struggling
bondsmen of the Ilkhans. The Armenian Hayton in his Cilician Kingdom had
pledged a more frank allegiance to the Tartar, the enemy of his Moslem
enemies.
Barka, son of Juji, the first ruling prince of the House of Chinghiz to
turn Mahomedan, reigned on the steppes of the Volga, where a standing
camp, which eventually became a great city under the name of Sarai, had
been established by his brother and predecessor Batu.
The House of Chaghatai had settled upon the pastures of the Ili and the
valley of the Jaxartes, and ruled the wealthy cities of Sogdiana.
Kaidu, the grandson of Okkodai who had been the successor of Chinghiz in
the Kaanship, refused to acknowledge the transfer of the supreme authority
to the House of Tuli, and was through the long life of Kublai a thorn in
his side, perpetually keeping his north-western frontier in alarm. His
immediate authority was exercised over some part of what we should now
call Eastern Turkestan and Southern Central Siberia; whilst his hordes of
horsemen, force of character, and close neighbourhood brought the Khans of
Chaghatai under his influence, and they generally acted in concert with
him.
The chief throne of the Mongol Empire had just been ascended by Kublai,
the most able of its occupants after the Founder. Before the death of his
brother and predecessor Mangku, who died in 1259 before an obscure
fortress of Western China, it had been intended to remove the seat of
government from Kara Korum on the northern verge of the Mongolian Desert
to the more populous regions that had been conquered in the further East,
and this step, which in the end converted the Mongol Kaan into a Chinese
Emperor,[3] was carried out by Kublai.
[Sidenote: China.]
11. For about three centuries the Northern provinces of China had been
detached from native rule, and subject to foreign dynasties; first to the
Khitan, a people from the basin of the Sungari River, and supposed (but
doubtfully) to have been akin to the Tunguses, whose rule subsisted for
200 years, and originated the name of KHITAI, Khata, or CATHAY, by which
for nearly 1000 years China has been known to the nations of Inner Asia,
and to those whose acquaintance with it was got by that channel.[4] The
Khitan, whose dynasty is known in Chinese history as the Liao or "Iron,"
had been displaced in 1123 by the Churches or Niu-chen, another race of
Eastern Tartary, of the same blood as the modern Manchus, whose Emperors
in their brief period of prosperity were known by the Chinese name of
Tai-Kin, by the Mongol name of the Altun Kaans, both signifying
"Golden." Already in the lifetime of Chinghiz himself the northern
Provinces of China Proper, including their capital, known as Chung-tu or
Yen-King, now Peking, had been wrenched from them, and the conquest of the
dynasty was completed by Chinghiz's successor Okkodai in 1234.
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