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The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]». Краткое содержание книги:
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 01
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 02 / (From the Rise of Greece to the Christian Era)
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 04
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 05 / (From Charlemagne to Frederick Barbarossa)
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 06 / (From Barbarossa to Dante)
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 08 / The Later Renaissance: from Gutenberg to the Reformation
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 09
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 10
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 13
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 14
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 17
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 21 / The Recent Days (1910-1914)
At length, on March 6, 1204, the Saucy Castle fell. Its fall opened the way for a French advance upon Rouen; but before taking this further step Philip deemed it politic to let the Pope's envoy, the Abbot of Casamario, complete his mission by going to speak with John. The abbot was received at a great council in London at the end of March; the result was his return to France early in April, in company with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the bishops of Norwich and Ely, and the earls of Pembroke and Leicester, all charged with a commission "to sound the French King, and treat with him about terms of peace." On the French King's side the negotiation was a mere form; to whatever conditions the envoys proposed, he always found some objection; and his own demands were such as John's representatives dared not attempt to lay before their sovereign—Arthur's restoration, or, if he were dead, the surrender of his sister Eleanor, and the cession to Philip, as her suzerain and guardian, of the whole Continental dominions of the Angevin house.
Finally, Philip dropped the mask altogether, and made a direct offer, not to John, but to John's Norman subjects, including the two lay ambassadors. All those, he said, who within a year and a day would come to him and do him homage for their lands should receive confirmation of their tenure from him. Hereupon the two English earls, after consulting together, gave him five hundred marks each, on the express understanding that he was to leave them unmolested in the enjoyment of their Norman lands for a twelvemonth and a day, and that at the expiration of that time they would come and do homage for those lands to him, if John had not meanwhile regained possession of the duchy. Neither William the Marshal nor his colleague had any thought of betraying or deserting John; as the Marshal's biographer says, they "did not wish to be false"; and when they reached England they seem to have frankly told John what they had done, and to have received no blame for it.
The return of the English embassy was followed by a letter from the commandant of Rouen—John's "trusty and well-beloved" Peter of Préaux—informing the English King that "all the castles and towns from Bayeux to Anet" had promised Philip that they would surrender to him as soon as he was master of Rouen, an event which, Peter plainly hinted, was not likely to be long delayed. This information about the western towns was probably incorrect, for it was on Western Normandy that Philip made his next attack. John meanwhile had in January imposed a scutage of two marks and a half per shield throughout England, and, in addition, a tax of a seventh of movables, which, though it fell upon all classes alike, the clergy included, he is said to have demanded expressly on the ground of the barons' desertion of him in Normandy.
The hire of a mercenary force was of course the object to which the proceeds of both these taxes were destined; but they took time to collect and John soon fell back upon a readier, though less trustworthy, resource, and summoned the feudal host of England to meet him at Portsmouth, seemingly in the first week of May. It gathered, however, so slowly that he was obliged to give up the expedition. Philip was about this time besieging Falaise; he won it, and went on in triumph to receive the surrender of Domfront, Séez, Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, Coutances, Barfleur, and Cherbourg. He was then joined by John's late ally, the Count of Boulogne, as well as by Guy of Thouars, the widower of Constance of Brittany; and these two, their forces swelled by a troop of mercenaries who had transferred their services from John to Philip after the surrender of Falaise, completed the conquest of Southwestern Normandy, while the French King at last set his face toward Rouen. He was not called upon to besiege it, nor even to threaten it with a siege. On June 1, 1204, Peter de Préaux made in his own name, and in the names of the commandants of Arques and Verneuil, a truce with Philip, promising that these two fortresses and Rouen should surrender if not succored within thirty days. The three castellans sent notice of this arrangement to John, who, powerless and penniless as he was, scornfully bade them "look for no help from him, but do whatsoever seemed to them best." It seemed to them best not even to wait for the expiration of the truce; Rouen surrendered on June 24th, and in a few days Arques and Verneuil followed its example.
Thus did Normandy forsake—as Anjou and Maine had already forsaken[37]—the heir of its ancient rulers for the King of the French.
FOUNDING OF THE MONGOL EMPIRE BY GENGHIS KHAN
A.D. 1203
HENRY H. HOWORTH
The origin and early history of the Mongols are very obscure, but from Chinese annals we learn of the existence of the race, from the sixth to the ninth century, in regions around the north of the great desert of Gobi and Lake Baikal in Eastern Asia. The name Mongol is derived from the word mong, meaning "brave" or "bold." Chinese accounts show that it was given to the Mongol race long before the time of Genghis Khan. It is conjectured that the Mongols were at first one tribe of a great confederacy whose name was probably extended to the whole when the power of the imperial house which governed it gained the supremacy. The Mongol khans are traced up to the old royal race of the Turks, who from a very early period were masters of the Mongolian desert and its borderland. Here from time immemorial the Mongols "had made their home, leading a miserable nomadic life in the midst of a wild and barren country, unrecognized by their neighbors, and their very name unknown centuries after their kinsmen, the Turks, had been exercising an all-powerful influence over the destinies of Western Asia."
But at the beginning of the thirteenth century arose among
them a chief, Genghis Khan, the "very mighty ruler," whose
prowess was destined to lead the Mongolian hordes to the
conquest of a vast empire, extending over China and from
India through Persia and into Russia.
Who and what this mighty ruler was, and by what achievements he advanced to lay the foundations of his empire, are told by Howorth, not only with an authoritative fidelity to history, but with a literary art that is no less faithful in its appreciation of oriental character and custom.
Among the men who have influenced the history of the world Genghis Khan holds a foremost place. Popularly he is mentioned with Attila and with Timur as one of the "scourges of God," one of those terrible conquerors whose march across the page of history is figured by the simile of a swarm of locusts, or a fire in a Canadian forest; but this is doing gross injustice to Genghis Khan. Not only was he a conqueror, a general whose consummate ability made him overthrow every barrier that must intervene between the chief of a small barbarous tribe of an obscure race and the throne of Asia, and this with a rapidity and uniform success that can only be compared to the triumphant march of Alexander, but he was far more than a conqueror. Alexander, Napoleon, and Timur were all more or less his equals in the art of war. But the colossal powers they created were merely hills of sand, that crumbled to pieces as soon as they were dead.
With Genghis Khan matters were very different: he organized the empire which he had conquered so that it long survived and greatly thrived after he was gone. In every detail of social and political economy he was a creator; his laws and his administrative rules are equally admirable and astounding to the student. Justice, tolerance, discipline—virtues that make up the modern ideal of a state—were taught and practised at his court. And when we remember that he was born and educated in the desert, and that he had neither the sages of Greece nor of Rome to instruct him, that unlike Charlemagne and Alfred he could not draw his lessons from a past whose evening glow was still visible in the horizon, we are tempted to treat as exaggerated the history of his times, and to be sceptical of so much political insight having been born of such unpromising materials.