While the expatriated Armenians were cruelly treated by the Turks, who were growing in power and increasing in numbers at the expense of the Christians in western and central Asia Minor, those still in Armenia proper received one of the severest calamities ever inflicted upon humanity. The executor of this terrible infliction was the famous Mongolian savage and warrior, Lenk Temur, commonly called Tamerlane (Temur the lame). He made himself the master of an empire extending from the great wall of China to Moscow and to the Mediterranean, having Samarcand his capital. He marched with an immense army against the Persians and in a short time subdued them. He subjugated Bagdad, plundered Aleppo (Hallep), burned down the greater part of Damascus and wrested Syria from the Mameluke Sultan. From the city of Van to the city of Sebastia (Sivas), from one end to the other of Armenia, no city, town or village of any size escaped the notice of the rapacious potentate; he reduced them all to ruinous heaps and ashes. The foreign rulers of the different parts of Armenia had no power whatever, to withstand the terrible army of Temur, which covered the land like an army of locusts. A Kurd, chief by the name of Kara (black) Yusuf, who was assuming control over the Sasoun district and southern part of Armenia, fled from the face of Temur into the mountain fastnesses, where with some of his subjects he wandered until the calamity was past. The city of Van, after a feeble resistance surrendered; the youths were carried as captives, the rest were massacred in various forms. The inhabitants of Sivas surrendered on his solemn promise that “no soldier of his will lift up the sword on them.” He was true to the letter, but not to the spirit of his promise. Four thousand soldiers were roasted to death, and as many were buried alive, and thousands of the very young and old whose hands and feet were tied, were thrown together and trampled under the hoofs of the horses. The spot upon which this barbarous mode of massacre took place, to this day, bears the name of Sev Hokher, signifying in the Armenian language the “Black Plains.” He then marched to meet the Ottoman ruler Bajazet I. Bajazet may deserve a word or two before we hand him over to the tender mercies of Temur--his three predecessors had borne the title of _emir_, commander, but Bajazet changed it for that of Sultan. He was the first also to set the example of fratricide in the royal family, for he caused his only brother to be put to death. The Mohammedan historian trying to justify him, says, “remembering the text of the Koran, that disturbance is worse than execution.” Sigismund of Hungary, with his allies, “a body of French and German knightly auxiliaries, endeavored to cope with the fiery Turk, but was defeated with terrible loss in the battle of Nicopolis in 1396.”