376 THE DECLINE AND FALL [Chap, xlii from the art of divination. Their unwritten laws were rigorous and impartial : theft was punished by a tenfold restitution ; adultery, treason, and murder, with death ; and no chastise- ment could be inflicted too severe for the rare and inexpiable guilt of cowardice. As the subject nations marched under the standard of the Turks, their cavalry, both men and horses, were proudly computed by millions ; one of their effective armies consisted of four hundred thousand soldiers, and in less than fifty years they were connected in peace and war with the Romans, the Persians, and the Chinese. In their northern limits, some vestige may be discovered of the form and situa- tion of Kamtchatka, of a people of hunters and fishermen, whose sledges were drawn by dogs, and whose habitations were buried in the earth. The Turks were ignorant of astronomy ; but the observation taken by some learned Chinese, with a gnomon of eight feet, fixes the royal camp in the latitude of forty-nine degrees, and marks their extreme progress within three, or at [After ad. least ten, degrees of the polar circle. 31 Among their southern conquests, the most splendid was that of the Nephtalites or white Huns, a polite and war-like people, who possessed the commercial cities of Bochara and Samarcand, who had van- quished the Persian monarch, and carried their victorious arms along the banks, and perhaps to the mouth, of the Indus. On the side of the west, the Turkish cavalry advanced to the lake Maeotis. They passed that lake on the ice. The khan, who dwelt at the foot of mount Altai, issued his commands for the siege of Bosphorus, 32 a city, the voluntary subject of Rome, and whose princes had formerly been the friends of Athens. 33 To the east, the Turks invaded China, as often as the vigour of the government was relaxed ; and I am taught to read in the history of the times, that they mowed down their patient enemies like hemp or grass ; and that the mandarins applauded the wisdom of an emperor who repulsed these Barbarians with 31 Visdelou, p. 141, 151. The fact, though it strictly belongs to a subordinate and successive tribe, may be introduced here. 32 Prooopius, Persic 1. i. o. 12; 1. ii. c. 3. Peyssonnel (Observations sur les Peuples Barbares, p. 99, 100) defines the distance between Cafla and the old Bos- phorus at xvi long Tartar leagues. 33 See in a Memoir of M. de Boze (M£m. de l'Academie des Inscriptions, torn, vi. p. 549-565), the ancient kings and medals of the Cimmerian Bosphorus ; and the gratitude of Athens, in the Oration of Demosthenes against Leptines (in Reiske, Orator. Greea. torn. i. p. 466, 467).
