See Also
Henri Cordier Et Gaubil, Situation De Holin En Tartarie, Leide, 1893.
In Rubruquis's account of Karakorum there is one passage of great
interest:
"Then master William [Guillaume L'Orfevre] had made for us an
iron to make wafers ... he made also a silver box to put the body of
Christ in, with relics in little cavities made in the sides of the box."
Now M. Marcel Monnier, who is one of the last, if not the last traveller
who visited the region, tells me that he found in the large temple of
Erdeni Tso an iron (the cast bore a Latin cross; had the wafer been
Nestorian, the cross should have been Greek) and a silver box, which are
very likely the objects mentioned by Rubruquis. It is a new proof of the
identity of the sites of Erdeni Tso and Karakorum. - H. C.]
[Illustration: Entrance to the Erdeni Tso Great Temple.]
NOTE 2. - [Mr. Rockhill (Rubruck, 113, note) says: "The earliest date to
which I have been able to trace back the name Tartar is A.D. 732. We find
mention made in a Turkish inscription found on the river Orkhon and
bearing that date, of the Tokuz Tatar, or 'Nine (tribes of) Tatars,' and
of the Otuz Tatar, or 'Thirty (tribes of) Tatars.' It is probable that
these tribes were then living between the Oguz or Uigur Turks on the west,
and the Kitan on the east. (Thomsen, Inscriptions de l'Orkhon, 98, 126,
140.) Mr. Thos. Watters tells me that the Tartars are first mentioned by
the Chinese in the period extending from A.D. 860 to 874; the earliest
mention I have discovered, however, is under date of A.D. 880. (Wu tai
shih, Bk. 4.) We also read in the same work (Bk. 74, 2) that 'The Ta-ta
were a branch of the Mo-ho (the name the Nu-chen Tartars bore during the
Sui and T'ang periods: Ma Tuan-lin, Bk. 327, 5). They first lived to the
north of the Kitan. Later on they were conquered by this people, when they
scattered, a part becoming tributaries of the Kitan, another to the
P'o-hai (a branch of the Mo-ho), while some bands took up their abode in
the Yin Shan in Southern Mongolia, north of the provinces of Chih-li and
Shan-si, and took the name of Ta-ta.' In 981 the Chinese ambassador to
the Prince of Kao-chang (Karakhodjo, some 20 miles south-east of Turfan)
traversed the Ta-ta country. They then seem to have occupied the northern
bend of the Yellow River. He gives the names of some nine tribes of Ta-ta
living on either side of the river. He notes that their neighbours to the
east were Kitan, and that for a long time they had been fighting them after
the occupation of Kan-chou by the Uigurs. (Ma Tuan-lin, Bk. 336, 12-14.)
We may gather from this that these Tartars were already settled along the
Yellow River and the Yin Shan (the valley in which is now the important
frontier mart of Kwei-hua Ch'eng) at the beginning of the ninth century,
for the Uigurs, driven southward by the Kirghiz, first occupied Kan-chou in
north-western Kan-suh, somewhere about A.D. 842."]
NOTE 3. - CHORCHA (Ciorcia) is the Manchu country, whose people were at
that time called by the Chinese Yuche or Niuche, and by the Mongols
Churche, or as it is in Sanang Setzen, Jurchid. The country in
question is several times mentioned by Rashiduddin as Churche. The
founders of the Kin Dynasty, which the Mongols superseded in Northern
China, were of Churche race. [It was part of Nayan's appanage. (See Bk.
II. ch. v.) - H. C.]
NOTE 4. - The idea that a Christian potentate of enormous wealth and power,
and bearing this title, ruled over vast tracts in the far East, was
universal in Europe from the middle of the 12th to the end of the 13th
century, after which time the Asiatic story seems gradually to have died
away, whilst the Royal Presbyter was assigned to a locus in Abyssinia; the
equivocal application of the term India to the East of Asia and the East
of Africa facilitating this transfer. Indeed I have a suspicion, contrary
to the view now generally taken, that the term may from the first have
belonged to the Abyssinian Prince, though circumstances led to its being
applied in another quarter for a time. It appears to me almost certain
that the letter of Pope Alexander III., preserved by R. Hoveden, and
written in 1177 to the Magnificus Rex Indorum, Sacerdotum sanctissimus,
was meant for the King of Abyssinia.
Be that as it may, the inordinate report of Prester John's magnificence
became especially diffused from about the year 1165, when a letter full of
the most extravagant details was circulated, which purported to have been
addressed by this potentate to the Greek Emperor Manuel, the Roman Emperor
Frederick, the Pope, and other Christian sovereigns. By the circulation of
this letter, glaring fiction as it is, the idea of this Christian
Conqueror was planted deep in the mind of Europe, and twined itself round
every rumour of revolution in further Asia. Even when the din of the
conquests of Chinghiz began to be audible in the West, he was invested
with the character of a Christian King, and more or less confounded with
the mysterious Prester John.
The first notice of a conquering Asiatic potentate so styled had been
brought to Europe by the Syrian Bishop of Gabala (Jibal, south of
Laodicea in Northern Syria), who came, in 1145, to lay various grievances
before Pope Eugene III. He reported that not long before a certain John,
inhabiting the extreme East, king and Nestorian priest, and claiming
descent from the Three Wise Kings, had made war on the Samiard Kings of
the Medes and Persians, and had taken Ecbatana their capital.
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