e subject, or the historian of Justinian,
exhaled his just indignation in the language of complaint and reproach;
and Procopius has confidently affirmed, that in a reign of thirty-two
years, each annual inroad of the Barbarians consumed two hundred
thousand of the inhabitants of the Roman empire. The entire population
of Turkish Europe, which nearly corresponds with the provinces of
Justinian, would perhaps be incapable of supplying six millions of
persons, the result of this incredible estimate.

In the midst of these obscure calamities, Europe felt the shock of
revolution, which first revealed to the world the name and nation of the
Turks. Like Romulus, the founder of that martial people was suckled
by a she-wolf, who afterwards made him the father of a numerous progeny;
and the representation of that animal in the banners of the Turks
preserved the memory, or rather suggested the idea, of a fable, which
was invented, without any mutual intercourse, by the shepherds of Latium
and those of Scythia. At the equal distance of two thousand miles from
the Caspian, the Icy, the Chinese, and the Bengal Seas, a ridge of
mountains is conspicuous, the centre, and perhaps the summit, of Asia;
which, in the language of different nations, has been styled Imaus, and
Caf, and Altai, and the Golden Mountains, and the Girdle of the Earth.
The sides of the hills were productive of minerals; and the iron forges,
for the purpose of war, were exercised by the Turks, the most despised
portion of the slaves of the great khan of the Geougen. But their
servitude could only last till a leader, bold and eloquent, should arise
to persuade his countrymen that the same arms which they forged for
their masters, might become, in their own hands, the instruments of
freedom and victory. They sallied from the mountains; a sceptre was the
reward of his advice; and the annual ceremony, in which a piece of iron
was heated in the fire, and a smith's hammer was successively handled
by the prince and his nobles, recorded for ages the humble profession
and rational pride of the Turkish nation. Bertezena, their first leader,
signalized their valor and his own in successful combats against the
neighboring tribes; but when he presumed to ask in marriage the daughter
of the great khan, the insolent demand of a slave and a mechanic was
contemptuously rejected. The disgrace was expiated by a more noble
alliance with a princess of China; and the decisive battle which