whom we reckoned are dead or in slavery.”  The Tartars invaded Hungary, gave battle to the Poles in Liegnitz in Silesia, had their progress a long while arrested by the courageous defence of Olmutz in Moravia, by the Tcheque voievode Yaroslaff, and stopped finally, learning that a large army, commanded by the King of Bohemia and the dukes of Austria and Carinthia, was approaching.  The news of the death of Oktai, second Emperor of all the Tartars, in China, recalled Batu from the West, and during the long march from Germany his army necessarily diminished in number.

The Tartars were no longer in the vast plains of Asia and Eastern Europe, but in a broken hilly country, bristling with fortresses, defended by a population more dense and a chivalry more numerous than those in Russia.

To sum up, all the fury of the Mongol tempest spent itself on the Slavonic race.  It was the Russians who fought at the Kalka, at Kolomna, at the Sit; the Poles and Silesians at Liegnitz; the Bohemians and Moravians at Olmutz.  The Germans suffered nothing from the invasion of the Mongols but the fear of it.  It exhausted itself principally on those plains of Russia which seem a continuation of the steppes of Asia.  Only in Russian history did the invasion produce great results.

Batu built on one of the arms of the Lower Volga a city called Sarai (the Castle), which became the capital of a powerful Tartar empire, the “Golden Horde,” extending from the Ural and Caspian to the mouth of the Danube.  The Golden Horde was formed not only of Tartar-Mongols or Nogais, who even now survive in the Northern Crimea, but particularly of the remains of ancient nomads, such as the Patzinaks and Polovtsi, whose descendants seem to be the present Kalmucks and Bashkirs; of Turkish tribes tending to become sedentary, like the Tartars of Astrakhan in the present day; and of the Finnish populations already established in the country, and which mixed with the invaders.

Oktai, Kuluk, and Mangu, the first three successors of Genghis Khan, elected by all the Mongol princes, took the title of “great khans,” and the Golden Horde recognized their authority; but under his fourth successor, Kublai, who usurped the throne and established himself in China, this bond of vassalage was broken.  The Golden Horde became an independent state, 1260.  United and powerful under the terrible Batu, who died in 1255, it fell to pieces under his successors; but in the fourteenth century the khan Uzbeck reunited it anew, and gave the Horde a second period of prosperity.  The Tartars, who were pagans when they entered Russia, embraced, about 1272, the faith of Islam, and became its most formidable apostles.