Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/105

 74 the time of the Mongol ascendency, large numbers of that people settled in the country and became, from a military point of view, the dominant race, it is scarcely surprising that the western foreigners should have given the whole of the region the name of Moghulistan, just as they had previously, when the Kara Khitai were supreme there, called the same territory Kara Khitai. It was the name that the Mongols themselves affected and were (at that time, at any rate) proud of, while it was also that with which their fame and their most cherished traditions were associated. Their mode of procedure, and the result they unconsciously attained, are paralleled in European history by the instance of the Franks in Gaul. During the third century, the Franks were still a loose confederacy of Germanic tribes living beyond the right bank of the Rhine. By degrees, under the Merovingians, they began to invade the country on the left bank. As the Roman power declined, their own increased till, in the fifth century, they had extended it over the whole of northern Gaul. Here they adapted themselves to the conditions of their new territory, and gradually spread over the entire surface of what is now France, Their numbers were so small that they were overlaid by the large Gallic population, yet the new-comers succeeded eventually in imposing their name on the larger nation, and originated the names of France and French, which entirely displaced those of the ancient inhabitants.

But Moghulistan was not the only name the new land of the Mongols acquired, for in many books of the fourteenth and