und within the wide range of this dreadful tempest were
swept off in the same manner, nor did Muhammadan communities fare
better. After the taking of Baghdad, every Tartar soldier was ordered
to cut off and bring away the head of one or more prisoners, because
some of the Tartar soldiers had been killed in the attack; 'and they
spared', says the historian, 'neither old men of fourscore, nor young
children of eight years of age; no quarter was given either to rich
or poor, and the number of dead was so great that they could not be
counted; towers were made of their heads to serve as an example to
posterity.' Ninety thousand were murdered in cold blood, and one
hundred and twenty pyramids were made of the heads for trophies.
Damascus, Nice, Aleppo, Sebaste,[52] and all the other rich and
populous cities of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Georgia, then
the most civilized region of the world, shared in the same fate; all
were reduced to ruins, and their people, without regard to religion,
age, or sex, barbarously and brutally murdered.

In the beginning of 1405, this man recollected that, among the many
millions of unbelieving Christians and Hindoos 'whose souls he had
sent to the abyss of hell', there were many Muhammadans, who had no
doubt whatever in the divine origin or co-eternal existence of the
Koran; and, as their death might, perhaps, not have been altogether
pleasing to his God and his prophet, he determined to appease them
both by undertaking the murder of some two hundred millions of
industrious and unoffending Chinese; among whom there was little
chance of finding one man who had ever even _heard of the Koran_--
much less believed in its divinity and co-eternity--or of its
interpreter, Muhammad. At the head of between two and three hundred
thousand well-mounted Tartars and their followers, he departed from
his capital of Samarkand on the 8th of January, 1405, and crossed the
Jaxartes[53] on the ice. In the words of his _judicious_ historian,
'he thus _generously_ undertook the conquest of China, which was
inhabited only by unbelievers that by so good a work he might atone
for what had been done amiss in other wars, in which the blood of so
many of the faithful had been shed'.

'As all my vast conquests', said Timur himself,[54] 'have caused the
destruction of a good many of the faithful, I am resolved to perform
some good action, to atone for the crimes of my past life; and to
make war upon the infidels, an