Mongol Invasions Of Europe

Northern Advocate, 5 September 1941, Page 8

Mongol Invasions Of Europe

“Civis” writes as follows in “Passing Notes” in the “Otogo Daily Times”: ‘‘Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus “Even the good Homer sometimes nods.” More than one cable-reader and broadcast-listener has been vaguely exercised in mind by Mr Churchill’s broadcast references to Mongol invasions in 16th century. Referring to the savagery of Nazi methods he said: “Since the Mongol invasion of Europe in the sixteenth century there never has been methodical merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale.” To which Mongol invasion of Europe did he refer? And to what Mongol invasion of the “sixteenth” century? The gigantic inundations of Hunno-Tartaro-Mongols whose record of demoniac slaughter still makes the modern blood run cold were those of Attila, Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame—Attila in the fifth century, Genghis Khan in the twelfth, Timur in the fourteenth. Each of these was greeted in turn by affrighted Europe with the names of “Scourge of God,” “Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse,” “Death Escorting Hell.” Of these, Attila was the first and the worst. His Huns were said to be “the offspring of Scythian witches mated with the demons of the desert.”

Compared with them even the Barbarian Goths and Vandals were noble Athenian warriors. Even in dbath Attila continued his butcheries —the slaves who dug his grave were massacred over his corpse. While Latin tradition made Attila a spectre and a monster, in mediaeval German romances he became almost a hero; the ogre was transformed into the patriarchal Etzel, the savage was idealised into an Agamemnon of the Iliad or a Charlemagne of the Song of Roland. From the East again, in the twelfth Genghis Khan century, icame Genghis Khan, who set out to conquer the world from his capital of Kara-Koram in distant China. His method was wholesale massacres. From 1211 to 1223, over 18,000,000 men, 1 women and children perished at his hands in China alone. He conquered a greater portion of the world’s surface than was ever subdued by a single man. He organised an intelligence service and an espionage system which kept him well informed on the internal affairs of his projected victims. He intrigued with the discontented and seduced by fair promises. He usfcd forced labour to manufacture his engines of war.

Truly the modern world does not invent; it imitates. The successors of Genghis reduced Russia to dependence and pushed their devastations as far as Moravia and Silesia. In the fourteenth century Tamerlane —Timur the Lame —raged over the world from the Great Wall of China to the centre of Russia, and to the Nile and the Mediterranean, uniting in his person the sovereignties of 27 kingdoms. This he no doubt proclaimed to be his “New Order.” His pleasant custom was to construct pyramids of the heads of his slaughtered victims. On the ruins of Bagdad he piled up a pyramid of 90,000. At the sack of Smyrna the number of, slain was not sufficient to satisfy his eye, and he increased the height of the pyramid by alternate layers of mud. In like manner he treated the citizens of Aleppo, Damascus and other cities of Syria. Was Timur’s invasion of the fourteenth century in Mr Churchill’s mind?