Damascus, Nice, Aleppo, Sebaste,[52] and all the other rich and
populous cities of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Georgia, then
the most civilized region of the world, shared in the same fate; all
were reduced to ruins, and their people, without regard to religion,
age, or sex, barbarously and brutally murdered.
In the beginning of 1405, this man recollected that, among the many
millions of unbelieving Christians and Hindoos 'whose souls he had
sent to the abyss of hell', there were many Muhammadans, who had no
doubt whatever in the divine origin or co-eternal existence of the
Koran; and, as their death might, perhaps, not have been altogether
pleasing to his God and his prophet, he determined to appease them
both by undertaking the murder of some two hundred millions of
industrious and unoffending Chinese; among whom there was little
chance of finding one man who had ever even _heard of the Koran_--
much less believed in its divinity and co-eternity--or of its
interpreter, Muhammad. At the head of between two and three hundred
thousand well-mounted Tartars and their followers, he departed from
his capital of Samarkand on the 8th of January, 1405, and crossed the
Jaxartes[53] on the ice.
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