The Emperor Frederick also proposed that the expedition should be postponed until, with the rallied forces of his empire, he might give it better assurance of success. Pope and emperor revived their strifes, and Italy was turned into pandemonium. A few of the more ardent managed to escape the entanglements at home for more honorable adventures in the East. The King of Navarre, the dukes of Brittany and Burgundy, reached Syria (August, 1239) and performed exploits sufficient to more thoroughly enrage, but not to awe, the Moslems. In 1240 Richard of Cornwall, with a band of English, sailing in spite of the Pope’s prohibition, landed at Acre, made several raids through Turkish territory, and returned, having gained nothing but a continuance of the truce with the sultan. CHAPTER XLII. BETWEEN THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH CRUSADES—THE TARTARS—THE CARISMIAN INVASION. By a strange providence the sacred places of Palestine were destined to fall for a while into other hands than any of the former great contestants, Christian, Saracen, or Turk. The most astounding events of the thirteenth century were in connection with the great Tartar irruption. The Mogul hosts under Genghis Khan, or “king of kings,” had broken eastward across the Great Wall of China, and poured a tide of desolation over that ancient empire. As the bloody waves returned, they moved with undiminished force westward and southward, flooding all Turkestan, and all lands to the borders of India and the Persian Gulf. These armies, numbering seven hundred thousand warriors, courageous, remorseless, and cruel as tigers, were met by five hundred thousand under Mohammed, Sultan of Carismia. But even this latter tremendous host could not withstand the impact of the Tartars. Under Octai, son of Genghis Khan, they crossed the Volga and conquered vast sections of Russia, laying Moscow and Kiew in ashes. Poland fell next. Even the Baltic monumented the fury of the Tartars with a circle of ruined towers and devastated country which marked its shores. Matthew Paris describes the terror these Tartars inspired even in England, where they were thought to be “a people of monstrous shape, drinking blood warm from the veins of their victims, eating raw flesh, even of human beings, mounted upon enormous horses, which fed upon leaves and trees.” Their home was presumed to be the Caspian Mountains, the tops of which God had united and thus shut them in, until now they were let loose to be the scourge of mankind. The extreme terror spread by the rumor of their coming was such that the herring fisheries off Yarmouth were abandoned, lest the sailors should be caught by these monsters, who could sweep the waves with their ox-hide boats. Their skill in swimming was of such renown that the lone fisherman of Friesland was alert lest he should “catch a Tartar.”