fficient to
overwhelm them with stones. But when Holagou touched the phantom, it
instantly vanished into smoke. After a siege of two months, Bagdad
was stormed and sacked by the Moguls; [* and their savage commander
pronounced the death of the caliph Mostasem, the last of the temporal
successors of Mahomet; whose noble kinsmen, of the race of Abbas, had
reigned in Asia above five hundred years. Whatever might be the designs
of the conqueror, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina [26] were protected
by the Arabian desert; but the Moguls spread beyond the Tigris and
Euphrates, pillaged Aleppo and Damascus, and threatened to join the
Franks in the deliverance of Jerusalem. Egypt was lost, had she been
defended only by her feeble offspring; but the Mamalukes had breathed in
their infancy the keenness of a Scythian air: equal in valor, superior
in discipline, they met the Moguls in many a well-fought field; and
drove back the stream of hostility to the eastward of the Euphrates. [261]
But it overflowed with resistless violence the kingdoms of Armenia [262]
and Anatolia, of which the former was possessed by the Christians, and
the latter by the Turks. The sultans of Iconium opposed some resistance
to the Mogul arms, till Azzadin sought a refuge among the Greeks of
Constantinople, and his feeble successors, the last of the Seljukian
dynasty, were finally extirpated by the khans of Persia. [263]

[Footnote 231: See the curious account of the expedition of Holagou,
translated from the Chinese, by M. Abel Remusat, Melanges Asiat. 2d ser.
tom. i. p. 171.--M.]

[Footnote 24: All that can be known of the Assassins of Persia and Syria
is poured from the copious, and even profuse, erudition of M. Falconet,
in two _Memoires_ read before the Academy of Inscriptions, (tom. xvii.
p. 127--170.) * Note: Von Hammer's History of the Assassins has now
thrown Falconet's Dissertation into the shade.--M.]

[Footnote 25: The Ismaelians of Syria, 40,000 Assassins, had acquired
or founded ten castles in the hills above Tortosa. About the year 1280,
they were extirpated by the Mamalukes.]

[Footnote 251: Compare Von Hammer, Geschichte der Assassinen, p. 283, 307.
Wilken, Geschichte der Kreuzzuege, vol. vii. p. 406. Price, Chronological
Retrospect, vol. ii. p. 217--223.--M.]

[Footnote 26: As a proof of the ignorance of the Chinese in foreign
transactions, I must observe, that some of their historians extend the
conquest of Zingis himself to Medina