It by cutting up the bodies of the slain in presence of their
prisoners, and roasting them! But Levchine relates an act on the part of
the Kirghiz Kazaks which was no jest. They drank the blood of their victim
if they did not eat his flesh.
There is some reason to believe that cannibalism was in the Middle Ages
generally a less strange and unwonted horror than we should at first blush
imagine, and especially that it was an idea tolerably familiar in China.
M. Bazin, in the second part of Chine Moderne, p. 461, after sketching a
Chinese drama of the Mongol era ("The Devotion of Chao-li"), the plot of
which turns on the acts of a body of cannibals, quotes several other
passages from Chinese authors which indicate this. Nor is this wonderful
in the age that had experienced the horrors of the Mongol wars.
That was no doubt a fable which Carpini heard in the camp of the Great
Kaan, that in one of the Mongol sieges in Cathay, when the army was
without food, one man in ten of their own force was sacrificed to feed the
remainder.[8] But we are told in sober history that the force of Tului in
Honan, in 1231-1232, was reduced to such straits as to eat grass and human
flesh. At the siege of the Kin capital Kaifongfu, in 1233, the besieged
were reduced to the like extremity; and the same occurred the same year at
the siege of Tsaichau; and in 1262, when the rebel general Litan was
besieged in Tsinanfu. The Taiping wars the other day revived the same
horrors in all their magnitude. And savage acts of the same kind by the
Chinese and their Turk partisans in the defence of Kashgar were related to
Mr. Shaw.
Probably, however, nothing of the kind in history equals what Abdallatif,
a sober and scientific physician, describes as having occurred before his
own eyes in the great Egyptian famine of A.H. 597 (1200). The horrid
details fill a chapter of some length, and we need not quote from them.
Nor was Christendom without the rumour of such barbarities. The story of
King Richard's banquet in presence of Saladin's ambassadors on the head of
a Saracen curried (for so it surely was), -
"soden full hastily
With powder and with spysory,
And with saffron of good colour" -
fable as it is, is told with a zest that makes one shudder; but the tale
in the Chanson d'Antioche, of how the licentious bands of ragamuffins,
who hung on the army of the First Crusade, and were known as the
Tafurs,[9] ate the Turks whom they killed at the siege, looks very like
an abominable truth, corroborated as it is by the prose chronicle of worse
deeds at the ensuing siege of Marrha:
