This state of France and Europe completely destroyed all the hopes of the Greek emperor. After passing two years in Paris, without obtaining anything, he determined to leave the West, and having embarked at Venice, he stopped in the Peloponnesus, where he waited patiently till Fortune should herself take charge of the entire ruin or the deliverance of his empire. This deliverance, which could no longer be expected from the Christian powers, arrived all at once by means of a people still more barbarous than the Turks, whose conquests made the entire East tremble. Tamerlane, or Timour, from the bosom of civil wars, had been elevated to the throne of the Moguls, and revived in the north of Asia the formidable empire of Gengishan. History is scarcely able to follow this new conqueror in his gigantic expeditions. The imagination is terrified at the rapidity with which, to make use of an expression of Timour himself, he carried “the destroying wind of desolation” from Zagathaï to the Indus, and from the Indus to the icy deserts of Siberia. Such was the scourge that Heaven sent to destroy the menacing pride of Bajazet. The historians of the times are not agreed as to the motives which armed the leader of the Moguls against the Ottoman emperor; some attribute Tamerlane’s determination to the complaints of the Mussulman princes of Asia Minor, whom the sultan of the Turks had driven from their states; others, faithful to the spirit of their age, and seeking the causes of great events in celestial phenomena, explain the invasion of the Tartars by the appearance of a comet, which was visible during two months to affrighted Asia. Disdaining marvellous explanations, we will confine ourselves to saying that peace could not last between two men urged on by the same ambition, and who were not likely to pardon each other for having at the same time entertained the thought of conquering the world. Their character, as well as their policy, is plainly enough indicated in the violent threats they reciprocally addressed to each other before hostilities, and which became the signal for the most sanguinary catastrophes.