These Tartars did not establish themselves on the
ruins of the Hindoos. Their conquests were over the other Mahomedans:
for Tamerlane invaded Hindostan, as he invaded other countries, in the
character of the great reformer of the Mahomedan religion. He came as a
sort of successor to the rights of the Prophet, upon a divine title. He
struck at all the Mahomedan princes who reigned at that time. He
considered them as apostates, or at least as degenerated from the faith,
and as tyrants abusing their power. To facilitate his conquests over
these, he was often obliged to come to a sort of a composition with the
people of the country he invaded. Tamerlane had neither time nor means
nor inclination to dispossess the ancient rajahs of the country.
Your Lordships will observe that I propose nothing more than to give you
an idea of the principles of policy which prevailed in these several
revolutions, and not an history of the furious military achievements of
a barbarous invader. Historians, indeed, are generally very liberal of
their information concerning everything but what we ought to be very
anxious to know. They tell us that India was conquered by Tamerlane, and
conquered in such a year. The year will be found to coincide somewhere,
I believe, with the end of the fourteenth century. Thinking the mere
fact as of little moment, and its chronology as nothing, but thinking
the policy very material, which, indeed, is to be collected only here
and there, in various books written with various views, I shall beg
leave to lay before you a very remarkable circumstance relative to that
policy, and taken from the same book to which I formerly referred, Mr.
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