From Bokhara he advanced to Samarcande.  This city was strongly fortified, and contained a hundred thousand soldiers within its walls, besides an immense number of elephants trained to fight.  The city was soon taken.  Thirty thousand were slain, and thirty thousand carried into perpetual slavery.  All the adjacent cities soon shared a similar fate.  For three years the armies of Genghis Khan ravaged the whole country between the Aral lake and the Indus, with such fearful devastation that for six hundred years the region did not recover from the calamity.  Mahomet II., pursued by his indefatigable foe, fled to one of the islands of the Caspian Sea, where he perished in paroxysms of rage and despair.

Genghis Khan having thoroughly subdued this whole region, now sent a division of his army, under two of his most distinguished generals, across the Caspian Sea to subjugate the regions on the western shore.  Here, as before, victory accompanied their standards, and, with merciless severity, they swept the whole country to the sea of Azof.  The tidings of their advance, so bloody, so resistless, spread into Russia, exciting universal terror.  The conquerors, elated with success, rushed on over the plains of Russia, and were already pouring down into the valley of the Dnieper.  Mstislaf, prince of Galitch, already so renowned for his warlike exploits, was eager to measure arms with those soldiers, the terror of whose ravages now filled the world.  He hurriedly assembled all the neighboring princes at Kief, and urged immediate and vigorous cooeperation to repel the common foe.  The Russian army was promptly rendezvoused on the banks of the Dnieper, preparatory to its march.  Another large army was collected by the Russian princes who inhabited the valley of the Dniester.  In a thousand barges they descended the river to the Black Sea.  Then entering the Dnieper they ascended the stream to unite with the main army waiting impatiently their arrival.

On the 21st of May, the whole force was put in motion, and after a march of nine days, met the Tartar army on the banks of the river Kalets.  The waving banners and the steeds of the Tartar host, covering the plains as far as the eye could extend, in numbers apparently countless, presented an appalling spectacle.  Many of the Russian leaders were quite in despair; others, young, ardent, inexperienced, were eager for the fight.  The battle immediately commenced, and the combatants fought with all the ferocity which human energies could engender.  But the Russians were, in the end, routed entirely.  The Tartars drove the bleeding fugitives in wild confusion before them back to the Dnieper.  Never before had Russia encountered so frightful a disaster.  The whole army was destroyed.  Not one tenth of their number escaped that field of massacre.  Seven princes, and seventy of the most illustrious nobles were among the slain.  The Tartars followed up their victory with their accustomed inhumanity, and, as if it were their intention to depopulate the country, swept it in all directions, putting the inhabitants indiscriminately to the sword.  They acted upon the maxim which they ever proclaimed, “The conquered can never be the friends of the conquerors; and the death of the one is essential to the safety of the other.”