horseback, marched incredible distances and overthrew whatever opposed them. They struck down the Russians at a blow and trampled the land into bloody mire beneath their horses’ feet. They crushed the Magyars in a single battle and drew a broad red furrow straight across Hungary, driving the Hungarian King in panic flight from his realm. They overran Poland and destroyed the banded knighthood of North Germany in Silesia. Western Europe could have made no adequate defense; but fortunately by this time the Mongol attack had spent itself, simply because the distance from the central point had become so great. It was no Christian or European military power which first by force set bounds to the Mongol conquests; but the Turkish Mamelukes of Egypt in the West, and in the East, some two score years later, the armies of Japan. In a couple of generations the Mongols as a whole became Buddhists in the East and Moslems in the West; and in the West the true Mongols gradually disappeared, being lost among the Turkish tribes whom they had conquered and led to victory. It was these Turkish tribes, known as Tartars, who for over two centuries kept Russia in a servitude so terrible, so bloody, so abject, as to leave deep permanent marks on the national character. The Russians did not finally throw off this squalid yoke until thirty years after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, the power of the Tartars waning as that of the Ottomans approached its zenith. Poland was now rising high. Its vast territory extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It was far more important than Muscovy. In the “Itinerary” of that widely travelled Elizabethan, Fynes Morrison, we learn that the Turks dreaded the Polish armies more than those of Germany, or of any other nation; this was after the Hungarians had been conquered.