GOVERNMENT OF ARABIA. 127 



picable successors of Omar and Ali, was long a prey 

 to every daring adventurer who had the courage to 

 seize it. For a hundred years it was ruled by Hoo- 

 laku and his descendants, whose fortunes may be 

 said to have ended with the weak and indolent Abu 

 Seyd (A. D. 1356) ; for the few princes that succeed- 

 ed him were mere pageants, whom the nobles of the 

 court elevated or cast down as suited the purposes 

 of their ambition. From an obscure adventurer, Is- 

 mael, at the age of eighteen, became sole monarch of 

 the country (A. D. 1502), and founder of the Suffa- 

 vean 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 stroyed and superseded the temporal power of the 

 caliphs, was itself doomed to experience the same fate 

 from the fierce Tartars, who, bursting in swarms 

 from their immeasurable steppes, and rolling on- 

 ward like a resistless torrent, overthrew in one 

 common ruin the thrones of the principal dynas- 

 ties of the East. The renowned Timur, or Ta- 

 merlane, 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 king- 

 dom 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 whole 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 hos- 

 tile nations yielded in succession to his arms, and 

 his name was pronounced with terror from the 



