Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/147

 116 gain permanency for themselves, repelled all intercourse with civilised nations, and were the means only of intensifying the barbarism of their people. For a time, towards the end of the fourteenth century and the early part of the fifteenth, the ascendency of Timur and his immediate descendants proved, to some extent, an agency for the preservation of order, and perhaps prevented the tide of nomad misrule from overwhelming the whole of the best parts of Central Asia. Except for this check, it is probable that the relapse into barbarism would have been even more lasting than it was, and would have had more far-reaching results. But the times of Timur and Ulugh Beg were stormy ones, and had little of the steadying influences of those of the Mongols. Being Musulman rulers, the advance of Islam, and the intolerance that always goes hand in hand with that system of religion and government, was encouraged, so that as soon as the secular authority of the Timuri began to weaken, the religious element grew stronger and came to the front. Saints and religious pretenders increased in numbers, and nothing is more clear in Mirza Haidar's history than the influence they gained in all political affairs. Each Khan and Chief, besides many of the leading Amirs, he tells us, retained at their headquarters one or more of these advisers; and he shows how in his own case, and in that of his master, Said Khan, they gained an altogether inordinate degree of control over their patrons. Even such barbarous tyrants as Abá Bakr of Kashghar, and the most blood-thirsty of the Uzbeg chiefs, seem to have honoured them with superstitious reverence, and to have accepted their guidance. It was in deference, apparently, to the teachings of this class, and under the pretence of religious zeal, that all the worst deeds of these potentates were done—that plundering expeditions assumed the name of holy wars, that murders, prompted in reality by fear or revenge, were committed under priestly sanction, and that wholesale slavery was carried on as a meritorious measure of conversion from infidelity.

Under such conditions as these Central Asia must have been impenetrable to European travellers, whether missionaries or merchants, while it is impossible to imagine that any European monarch would depute envoys to such rulers as Shaibani Khan or Mirza Abá Bakr, as they had done to the Mongol Khákáns and to Timur. Even when these personages had disappeared, Uzbegs, Uzbeg-Kazáks, and Kirghiz, acting under chiefs whose,