the Sea of Aral, which I have pointed out as the first of
the passages by which the shepherds of Tartary came down upon the South.
Such were the allies, with which Heraclius succeeded in utterly
overthrowing and breaking up the Persian power; and thus, strange to
say, the greatest of all the enemies of the Church among the nations of
the earth, the Turk, began his career in Christian history by
cooeperating with a Christian Emperor in the recovery of the Holy Cross,
of which a pagan, the ally of Russia, had got possession. The religious
aspect, however, of this first era of their history, seems to have
passed away without improvement; what they gained was a temporal
advantage, a settlement in Georgia and its neighbourhood, which they
have held from that day to this.

This horde of Turks, the Chozars, was nomad and pagan; it consisted of
mounted shepherds, surrounded with their flocks, living in tents and
waggons. In the course of the following centuries, under the shadow of
their more civilized brethren, other similar hordes were introduced,
nomad and pagan still; they might indeed happen sometimes to pass down
from the east of the Caspian as well as from the west, hastening to the
south straight from Turkistan along the coast of the Aral;--either road
would lead them down to the position which the Chozars were the first to
occupy in Georgia and Armenia,--but still there would be but one step in
their journey between their old native sheep-walk and horse-path and the
fair region into which they came. It was a sudden Tartar descent,
accompanied with no national change of habits, and promising no
permanent stability. Nor would they have remained there, I suppose, as
they did remain, were it not that they have been protected, as they were
originally introduced, by neighbouring states which have made use of
them. There, however, in matter of fact, they remain to this day, the
successors of the Chozars, in Armenia, in Syria, in Asia Minor, even as
far west as the coast of the Archipelago and its maritime cities and
ports, being pretty much what they were a thousand years ago, except
that they have taken up the loose profession of Mahometanism, and have
given up some of the extreme peculiarities of their Tartar state, such
as their attachment to horse-flesh and mares' milk. These are the
Turcomans.

3.

The writer in the Universal History divides them into eastern and
western. Of the Eastern, with which we are not concer