In the century after Tamerlane’s death the Hordes split up once more, Ivan the Great of Moscow, having consolidated many neighboring princedoms, with the nominal consent of his Tatar overlord, at length seized the opportunity to refuse the payment of tribute. The Mongol Khan had no longer the power to compel it at the sword’s point, and without a battle the Tatar supremacy was covertly relinquished. In 1480 the long servitude of Russia to the alien invader was ended. From this time the Mongol nomads appear hardly at all in history. They withdrew gradually to their Asian steppes, leaving in Turkey, in the Crimea, and in India, the kingdoms of their offshoot tribes. Russia and China still felt the raids of the horsemen, for the khans of the Golden Horde were yet not to be despised. Fernan Hendez Pinto, the shipwrecked Portuguese of the generation after Vasco da Gama, was in China in 1542 when Tatars came down and besieged it. He saw “an emperor called Caran whose seigniorie confineth within the mountains of Gen Halidan, a nation which the naturals call Moscoby, of whom we saw some in this citie [of Tuymican], ruddie, of big stature, with shoes and furred clothes, having some Latin words, but seeming rather, for aught we observed, idolaters than Christians. “To the ambassador of that Prince Caran, better entertainment was given than to all the rest. He brought with him one hundred and twenty men of his guard, with arrows and gilded quivers, all clothed in chamois-skins, murrie and green. After whom followed twelve men of high giantlike stature, leading great greyhounds, in chains and collars of silver.” When Yermak cleared the way to Sibir, and opened the path that was to lead to the Pacific, the Mongols were pushed south. Russians still had Tatars all along their frontier, but these were pressed steadily back as the Slavic race advanced eastward. The Tatar domains were restricted soon to the steppe country and Mongolia. After Yermak’s time the Mongol power sank. It fell further when the Manchus established their dynasty in Peking in 1644. So low had its estate become that even the old fighting instinct was gone,--all the passionate desire for independence that has been the Mongols’ birthright since the dawn of history. How had it vanished? Christianity had not come. Buddhism had come, and it was the tolling of the knell for freedom.