| mighty feats of arms, such wide conquests, as Genghis Khan, as Timour the Limper, as Bajazet, Selim and Amurath, as Baber and Akbar. |
| The rise of the Mongol power under Genghis Khan was unheralded and unforeseen, and it took the world as completely by surprise as the rise of the Arab power six centuries before. When the thirteenth century opened Genghis Khan was merely one among a number of other obscure Mongol chiefs and neither he nor his tribe had any reputation whatever outside of the barren plains of Central Asia, where they and their fellow-barbarians lived on horseback among their flocks and herds. Neither in civilized nor semi-civilized Europe, nor in civilized nor semi-civilized Asia, was he known or feared, any more, for instance, than the civilized world of today knows or fears the Senoussi, or any obscure black mahdi in the region south of the Sahara. At the moment, Europe had lost fear of aggression from either Asia or Africa. In Spain the power of the Moors had just been reduced to insignificance. The crusading spirit, it is true, had been thoroughly discredited by the wicked Fourth Crusade, when the Franks and Venetians took Constantinople and destroyed the old bulwark of Europe against the Infidel. But in the crusade in which he himself lost his life the Emperor Barbarossa had completely broken the power of the Seljouk Turks in Asia-Minor, and tho Jerusalem had been lost it was about to be regained by that strange and brilliant man, the Emperor Frederick II, "the wonder of the world." The Slavs of Russia were organized into a kind of loose confederacy, and were slowly extending themselves eastward, making settlements like Moscow in the midst of various Finnish |
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