Ural and advanced into the heart
of the country, pillaging, burning, devastating, and murdering. Nowhere
did they meet with serious resistance. The Princes made no attempt to
combine against the common enemy. Nearly all the principal towns were
laid in ashes, and the inhabitants were killed or carried off as slaves.
Having conquered Russia, they advanced westward, and threw all Europe
into alarm. The panic reached even England, and interrupted, it is said,
for a time the herring fishing on the coast. Western Europe, however,
escaped their ravages. After visiting Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Servia,
and Dalmatia, they retreated to the Lower Volga, and the Russian Princes
were summoned thither to do homage to the victorious Khan.

At first the Russians had only very vague notions as to who this
terrible enemy was. The old chronicler remarks briefly: "For our sins
unknown peoples have appeared. No one knows who they are or whence they
have come, or to what race and faith they belong. They are commonly
called Tartars, but some call them Tauermen, and others Petchenegs. Who
they really are is known only to God, and perhaps to wise men deeply
read in books." Some of these "wise men deeply read in books" supposed
them to be the idolatrous Moabites who had in Old Testament times
harassed God's chosen people, whilst others thought that they must be
the descendants of the men whom Gideon had driven out, of whom a revered
saint had prophesied that they would come in the latter days and conquer
the whole earth, from the East even unto the Euphrates, and from the
Tigris even unto the Black Sea.

We are now happily in a position to dispense with such vague
ethnographical speculations. From the accounts of several European
travellers who visited Tartary about that time, and from the writings of
various Oriental historians, we know a great deal about these barbarians
who conquered Russia and frightened the Western nations.

The vast region lying to the east of Russia, from the basin of the Volga
to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, was inhabited then, as it is still,
by numerous Tartar and Mongol tribes. These two terms are often regarded
as identical and interchangeable, but they ought, I think, to be
distinguished. From the ethnographic, the linguistic, and the religious
point of view they differ widely from each other. The Kazan Tartars,
the Bashkirs, the Kirghiz, in a word, all the tribes in the country
stretching latitudinally fro