CONDITION OF THE SOUDAN 287 Tamerlane, chief of that other branch of the Tartars which is best known to history as the Moguls, was the representative, though not the legitimate descendant, of the heirs of Genghis Khan. He frankly aspired to conquer the world, and he had conquered Persia, Tartary, and India, when, hearing on the banks of the Ganges of the conquests of Bajazet in Europe, he resolved to march against the rival of his military glory. The Mogul and Ottoman conquests already touched each other in the neighbourhood of Erzeroum and the Euphrates. Tamerlane's first move was to attack Syria, which was still subject to Egypt. Aleppo, Damascus, and Bagdad fell to his arms amid awful massacres. Ibn Khaldun relates the interview he had with him outside the walls of Damascus, in 140 1.

But the Mamelukes defended their territory with vigour, and the losses and fatigues of the campaign caused Tamerlane to turn from Egypt and Palestine, and concentrate his forces upon the Ottoman Empire. At the battle of Ancyra, in Anatolia, Bajazet was overthrown and taken prisoner, in 1402, and while the Mogul armies advanced to the Asiatic shores of the Sea of Marmora, Bajazet himself died in captivity. Thus, in 1403, Tamerlane held Asia from the Ganges to the Mediterranean. But the Ottoman Turks held one passage into Europe at the Hellespont, and the Christians of Constantinople held the other at the Bosphorus. Bajazet's successor, Suleiman, and the Greek Emperor, both agreed to pay tribute to Tamerlane on the condition that his armies did not pass the Straits. Egypt also agreed to pay him tribute, with a similar condition that he should not pass into Africa. How long these compositions with superior force, on the part of rich, weak nations, would have held good, cannot be known. Tamerlane died in 1405. After his death the Mogul Empire gradually sank beneath the processes of time and war, till it lost itself in the sham splendour of the throne of Delhi.

The empire of the Turks, on the contrary, recovered