110 CIVIL HISTORY AND 



venturer, Ismael, at the age of eighteen, became 

 sole monarch of the comitry (A. D. 1502), and founder 

 of the Suflfavean dynasty, which continued to hold 

 the reins of government till the beginning of the last 

 century. 



The empire of the great Zingis, which had de- 

 stroyed and superseded the temporal power of the 

 cahphs, was itself doomed to experience the same 

 fate from the fierce Tartars, who, bursting in swarms 

 from their immeasurable steppes, and rolhng on- 

 ward like a resistless torrent, overthrew in one 

 common ruin the thrones of the principal dynasties 

 of the East. The renowned Timur, or Tamerlane, 

 who as chief of one of these tribes had ascended 

 the throne of Zagatai in 1370, was the leader of 

 those barbarous invaders. A fertile kingdom of 

 500 miles in length and as many in breadth might 

 have satisfied a man of ordinary ambition ; but this 

 Alexander of the Desert aspired to the conquest 

 and monarchy of the wiiole world : and before his 

 death he had the rare fortune to place twenty-seven 

 crowns on his head. With an army occupying a 

 space of thirteen miles from wing to wing he left 

 his capital of Samarcand. The hostile nations 

 yielded in succession to his arms, and his name 

 was pronounced with terror from the Ganges to 

 the distant wilds of Siberia. " Penetrating to the 

 " regions of perpetual daylight," he made himself 

 master of the Russian capital of Moscow ; where 

 the astonished IMoslems found themselves for the 

 first time relieved from the obligations of evening 

 prayer. Everyv»^here his course was tracked by 

 desolation and blood. At Ispahan, Bagdad, and two 

 other places on the road to Delhi, pyramids of human 

 sculls, amounting to 70,000, 90,000, and 100,000 

 respectively, were raised as the barbarous monu- 

 ments of his triumphs. The battle of Angora (A. D. 

 1402) has immortalized the glory of Timur and the 

 defeat of his rival Bajazet, the fourth of the Ottoman 



