nded to supplications. Twenty
ambassadors were sent by them to Italy, France, and England; and it
was no fault of theirs that the fire of the holy wars was not
rekindled, and extended over Europe and Asia. These diplomatic
attempts, the recital of which forms, so to speak, an epilogue to the
transmarine expeditions, scarcely noticed by those who have written
their history, and, indeed, unknown to most of them, would deserve,
perhaps, our fixed attention. We should have to collect facts,
resolve difficulties, and place in a clear point of view the
political system to which the negociations with the Tartars belong.
Specialties of this class could not be appreciated, whilst they were
considered isolately, and without examining them one with another.
We might doubt, with Voltaire and De Guignes, that a king of the
Tartars had met Saint Louis with offers of service. This fact might
seem not tenable, and its recital paradoxical. Yet such scepticism
would be unreasonable, after we had seen that the Mongols had acted
upon that principle for fifty years; and when we are assured, by
reading contemporary writings, and by the inspection of original
monuments, that this conduct was natural on their part, that it
entered into their views, that it conformed to their interests, and
that it is explained by the common rules of reason and policy.

"The series of events which are connected with these negociations
serves to complete the history of the Crusades; but the part they may
have had in the great moral revolution, which soon followed the
relations which they occasioned between people hitherto unknown to
each other, are facts of an importance more general and still more
worthy of our particular attention. Two systems of civilization had
become established at the two extremities of the ancient continent,
as the effect of independent causes, without communication, and
consequently without mutual influence. All at once the events of war
and political combinations bring into contact these two great bodies,
long strangers to each other. The formal interviews of ambassadors
are not the only occasions which brought them together. Other
occasions more private, but also more efficacious, were established
by imperceptible, but innumerable ramifications, by the travels of a
host of individuals, attr