At first the Russians had only very vague notions as to who this terrible enemy was.  The old chronicler remarks briefly:  “For our sins unknown peoples have appeared.  No one knows who they are or whence they have come, or to what race and faith they belong.  They are commonly called Tartars, but some call them Tauermen, and others Petchenegs.  Who they really are is known only to God, and perhaps to wise men deeply read in books.”  Some of these “wise men deeply read in books” supposed them to be the idolatrous Moabites who had in Old Testament times harassed God’s chosen people, whilst others thought that they must be the descendants of the men whom Gideon had driven out, of whom a revered saint had prophesied that they would come in the latter days and conquer the whole earth, from the East even unto the Euphrates, and from the Tigris even unto the Black Sea.

We are now happily in a position to dispense with such vague ethnographical speculations.  From the accounts of several European travellers who visited Tartary about that time, and from the writings of various Oriental historians, we know a great deal about these barbarians who conquered Russia and frightened the Western nations.

The vast region lying to the east of Russia, from the basin of the Volga to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, was inhabited then, as it is still, by numerous Tartar and Mongol tribes.  These two terms are often regarded as identical and interchangeable, but they ought, I think, to be distinguished.  From the ethnographic, the linguistic, and the religious point of view they differ widely from each other.  The Kazan Tartars, the Bashkirs, the Kirghiz, in a word, all the tribes in the country stretching latitudinally from the Volga to Kashgar, and longitudinally from the Persian frontier, the Hindu Kush and the Northern Himalaya, to a line drawn east and west through the middle of Siberia, belong to the Tartar group; whereas those further eastward, occupying Mongolia and Manchuria, are Mongol in the stricter sense of the term.

A very little experience enables the traveller to distinguish between the two.  Both of them have the well-known characteristics of the Northern Asiatic—­the broad flat face, yellow skin, small, obliquely set eyes, high cheekbones, thin, straggling beard; but these traits are more strongly marked, more exaggerated, if we may use such an expression, in the Mongol than in the Tartar.  Thus the Mongol is, according to our conceptions, by far the uglier of the two, and the man of Tartar race, when seen beside him, appears almost European by comparison.  The distinction is confirmed by a study of their languages.  All the Tartar languages are closely allied, so that a person of average linguistic talent who has mastered one of them, whether it be the rude Turki of Central Asia or the highly polished Turkish of Stambul, can easily acquire any of the others; whereas even an extensive acquaintance with the Tartar dialects will