Mongols

But the fortunes of war were not always on the side of the Tatars, and with the advent of Peter the Great to the Russian throne the power of the Krim Mongols began to decline. In 1696 the tsar, supported by a large Cossack force under Mazeppa, took the field against Selim Girai Khan, and gained such successes that the latter was compelled to cede Azov to him. By a turn of the wheel of fortune the khan had the satisfaction in 1711 of having it re stored to him by treaty ; but this was the last real success that attended the Tatar arms. In 1735 the Russians in their turn in vaded the Crimea, captured the celebrated lines of Perekop, and ravaged Bakhchi-sarai, the capital. In 1783 the Krim, together with the eastern portion of the land of the Nogais, became ab sorbed into the Russian province of Taurida.

The Uzbegs.

The Uzbegs on the destruction of the Golden Horde, assumed an important position on the east of the Caspian sea. The founder of their greatness was the khan Abulkhair, who reigned in the 15th century, and who consolidated a power out of a number of small clans. Shaibani Khan, his grandson, proved himself a worthy successor, and by him Baber (q.v.), the Timurid khan of Ferghana, who afterwards founded the Mogul empire in India, was driven from his ancestral dominions. In 1500 he inflicted a severe defeat on Baber's forces, and captured Samarkand, Herat and Kandahar. By these and other conquests he became possessed of all the country between the Oxus and the Jaxartes, of Ferghana, Khwarizm and Hissar, as well as of the territory of Tashkent from Kashgar to the frontiers of China. In the following year, by a dashing exploit, Baber recovered Samarkand, only to lose it again a few months later. During several succeeding years Shaibani's arms proved victorious in many fields of battle, and but for an indiscreet outrage on the territories of the shah of Persia he might have left behind him a powerful empire. The anger, however, of Shah Ismail roused against him a force before which he was des tined to fall. The two armies met in the neighbourhood of Merv, where, after a desperate encounter, the Uzbegs were completely defeated. Shaibani, with a few followers, sought refuge in a

cattle-pound. But finding no exit on the farther side, the refugees tried to leap their horses over the wall. In this attempt Shaibani was killed ( 5 I a). After this defeat the Uzbegs withdrew across the Oxus and abandoned Khura,san. Farther east the news aroused Baber to renewed activity, and before long he re-occupied Samar kand and the province "beyond the river," which had been domi nated by the Uzbegs for nine years. But though the Uzbegs were defeated they were by no means crushed, and ere long we find their khans reigning, now at Samarkand, and now at Bukhara. As time advanced and European powers began to encroach more and more into Asia, the history of the khanates ceases to be confined to the internecine struggles of rival khans. Even Bukhara was not beyond the reach of Russian ambition and English diplomacy. Several European envoys found their way thither during the first half of the 19th century, and the murder of Stoddart and Conolly in 1842 forms a melancholy episode in British relations with that fanatical capital. With the absorption of the khanate of Bukhara and the capture of Khiva by the Russians the individual history of the Mongol tribes in central Asia comes to an end, and their name has left its imprint only on the dreary stretch of Chinese-owned country from Manchuria to the Altai mountains, and to the equally unattractive country in the neighbourhood of the Koko-nor. The Mongols have become scattered nomads engaged in agriculture and caravan trading, and are now for the most part indistinguish able from the Chinese who surround them everywhere.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-D'Ohsson,

Histoire des Mongols (1834) ; Sir H. Howorth, History of the Mongols (1876, 1878) ; Cahun, Introduction a l'histoire d'Asie; Kohler, Die Entwicklung des Kriegswesens; Strakosch-Grossman, Der Einfall der Mongolen in Mittel-Europa; Ein Beitrag zur somatischen Ethnologie der Mongolen (Jena, 1r2); (for the general reader) Jeremiah Curtin. The Mongols, a history (1908). For a complete list of Mongol tribes and Banners see Whymant, A Mongolian Grammar (appendix) (1926).