THE PRINCIPAL Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, AND Discoveries OF The English Nation.

Collected by RICHARD HAKLUYT, PREACHER,

AND

Edited by EDMUND GOLDSMID, F.R.H.S.

VOL. II.

NORTHEASTERN EUROPE, AND ADJACENT COUNTRIES.

Part I.

TARTARY.

EASTERN EUROPE AND THE MUSCOVY COMPANY.

Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries in EASTERN EUROPE

Part of an Epistle written by one Yuo of Narbona vnto the Archbishop of Burdeaux, containing the confession of an Englishman as touching the barbarous demeanour of the Tartars, which had liued long among them, and was drawen along perforce with them in their expedition against Hungarie: Recorded by Mathew Paris in the yere of your Lord 1243.

The Lord therefore being prouoked to indignation, by reason of this and other sinnes committed among vs Christians, is become, as it were, a destroying enemie, and a dreadful auenger. This I may iustly affirme to be true, because an huge nation, and a barbarous and inhumane people, whose law is lawlesse, whose wrath is furious, euen the rod of Gods anger, ouerrunneth, and vtterly wasteth infinite countreyes, cruelly abolishing all things where they come, with fire and sword. And this present Summer, the foresayd nation, being called Tartars, departing out of Hungarie, which they had surprised by treason, layd siege vnto the very same towne, wherein I my selfe abode, with many thousands of souldiers: neither were in the sayd towne on our part aboue 50. men of warre, whom, together with 20. cros-bowes, the captaine had left in garrison. All these, out of certeine high places, beholding the enemies vaste armie, and abhorring the beastly crueltie of Antichrist his complices, signified foorthwith vnto their gouernour, the hideous lamentations of his Christian subiects, who suddenly being surprised in all the prouince adioyning, without any difference or respect of condition, fortune, sexe, or age, were by manifolde cruelties, all of them destroyed with whose carkeises, the Tartarian chieftains, and their brutish and sauage followers, glutting themselues, as with delicious cates, left nothing for vultures but the bare bones. And a strange thing it is to consider, that the greedie and rauenous vultures disdeined to praye vpon any of the reliques, which remained. Olde, and deformed women they gaue, as it were for dayly sustenance, vnto their Canibals; the beautifull deuoured they not, but smothered them lamenting and scritching, with forced and vnnaturall rauishments. Like barbarous miscreants, they quelled virgins vnto death, and cutting off their tender paps to present for deinties vnto their magistrates, they engorged themselues with their bodies.

Howbeit, their spials in the meane time discrying from the top of an highe mountaine the Duke of Austria, the king of Bohemia, the Patriarch of Aquileia, the Duke of Carinthia, and (as some report) the Earle of Baden, with a mightie power, and in battell aray, approching towards them, that accursed crew immediately vanished, and all those Tartarian vagabonds retired themselues into the distressed and vanquished land of Hungarie who as they came suddenly, so they departed also on the sudden which their celeritie caused all men to stand in horrour and astonishment of them.

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