Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/296

 276 A Short History of The World had conquered the Sung empire. Mangu Elan succeeded Ogdai Khan as Great Khan in 1251, and made his brother Kublai Khan governor of China. In 1280 Kublai Khan had been formally recog- nized Emperor of China, and so founded the Yuan dynasty which lasted until 1368. While the last ruins of the Sung rule were going down in China, another brother of Mangu, Hulagu, was conquering Persia and Syria. The Mongols displayed a bitter animosity to Islam at this time, and not only massacred the population of Bagdad when they captured that city, but set to work to destroy the imme- morial irrigation system which had kept Mesopotamia incessantly prosperous and populous from the early days of Sumeria. From that time until our own Mesopotamia has been a desert of ruins, sustaining only a scanty population. Into Egypt the Mongols never pene- trated ; the Sultan of Egypt completely defeated an army of Hulagu's in Palestine in 1260. After that disaster the tide of Mongol victory ebbed. The domin- ions of the Great Khan fell into a number of separate states. The eastern Mongols became Buddhists, like the Chinese ; the western became Moslim. The Chinese threw oft the rule of the Yuan dynasty in 1368, and set up the native Ming dynasty which flourished from 1368 to 1644. The Russians remained tributary to the Tartar hordes upon the south-east steppes until 1480, when the Grand Duke of Moscow repudiated his allegiance and laid the foundation of modern Russia. In the fourteenth century there was a brief revival of Mongol vigour under Timurlane, a descendant of Jengis Khan. He estab- lished himself in Western Turkestan, assumed the title of Grand Khan in 1369, and conquered from Syria to Delhi. He was the most savage and destructive of all the Mongol conquerors. He established an empire of desolation that did not survive his death. In 1505, how- ever, a descendant of this Timur, an adventurer named Baber, got together an army with guns and swept down upon the plains of India. His grandson Akbar (1556-1605) completed his conquests, and this Mongol (or " Mogul " as the Arabs called it) dynasty ruled in Delhi over the greater part of India until the eighteenth century. One of the consequences of the first great sweep of Mongol con- quest in the thirteenth century was to drive a certain tribe of Turks, the Ottoman Turks, out of Turkestan into Asia Minor. They extended and consolidated their power in Asia Minor, crossed the Dardanelles and conquered Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria, until at