There followed now a period of centuries when the breeding-place of the Mongol’s wolf-born hordes ran barren. In unchronicled obscurity the skin-clad herdsmen lived out their generation. To the feeble Ouighour confederacy fell the sceptre of the steppes. The old territory of the Hiung-nu khans and the Turkish Supreme King was split into little chief-governed principalities. Manchus and Tung-hus, rallying again, alternately ruled and harried China. Avars and Huns occupied their distant conquests. But in the vast stretch between, the tribes were in a bewitched sleep. The people and the qualities that made the old armies were there; the breed of shaggy ponies which they rode was there; iron reddened the hill-slopes, waiting to be hammered into spears in the Altai forges; China and Europe were as ripe for the spoiling. All that the Mongols needed was a leader. In a quaint chronicle of the Middle Ages we read of how he came. When the French took Antioch from the Turks, one Can Can ruled over the northern region out of which the Turks had originally come. To the old kindred in this hour of need they sent for aid. Can Can was of the Cathayans, a people dwelling among the mountains. In one of the valley stretches lived the Tayman tribe, who were Nestorians. After Can Can’s death a shepherd, who had risen to power among the Taymans, made himself ruler as King John. King John had a brother named Vut. Beyond his pastures some ten or fifteen days’ journey was Mongol; the latter described as a poor and beggarly nation, without governor or law save their soothsayings so detestable to the minds of the Nestorians. Adjoining the Mongols were other poor people called Tatars. When King John died without an heir, Vut became greatly enriched. This aroused naturally the cupidity of his needy neighbors. Among the Mongols was a blacksmith named Cyngis. Ingratiating himself with the Tatars, he pointed out that the lack of a governor left both peoples subject to the oppression of the surrounding tribes. He got himself raised to the double chieftainship, secretly collected an army, and broke suddenly upon Vut. Cyngis sent the Tatars ahead now to open his way, and the people everywhere cried in dismay, “Lo, the Tatars come! the Tatars come!” While the Turks sought aid of their kinsmen for the defense, the French King sent to King John’s reputedly Christian kingdom for help to his crusade. But Cyngis “Temugin,” the Man, had come. As Genghis Khan he was to open up the vastest empire the world has ever seen. In 1200 the young Temugin, in a great battle near Urga, defeated Wang Khan, whom modern research, vindicating the basis of truth in the old Friar William de Rubruquis tales, has shown to have been a Tatar prince of the Nestorian Christian faith, King of the Kitai or Cathayans, in all probability the ruler known to the princes of Europe, through his letters to the Roman Pope, as the Christian potentate of the Orient, Prester John.