112 CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA, ETC. two hundred thousand individuals were ready to follow his example ; and the patriarch John, in reply, desired the metropolitan of Marou to send to the said king two priests, and two deacons, provided with consecrated vessels to baptize all who were willing to be converted, and teach them the rites of Christianity, and ordered that he should prescribe to them abstinence from meat during Lent, but permit the use of milk, since they stated that they had no other food." Though it may not be possible to assign the causes which brought to a knowledge of the Gospel these numerous populations of High Asia, it is certain that the nation of the Keraites was converted to Chris- tianity in the first year of the eleventh century. On that point Oriental writers are unanimous.* The Nes- torians, as we have more than once remarked, had, even in the preceding ages, propagated the Christian faith amongst the tribes of Tartary. But this splendid con- version of a powerful sovereign, who solemnly received baptism with two hundred thousand of his subjects, was an event that must have created a wonderful sensation in the Christian world. The Nestorians never failed to publish, throughout Asia, their valuable conversions, and to exaggerate greatly their importance, with the design of forwarding their propagandism. Travellers listened to these narratives, added to them a thousand marvels of their own, and then hawked these stories about in their long peregrinations. Such was, in all probability, the origin of the story of Prester John and his Christian Empire, which for above three centuries excited so powerfully the minds of both Eastern and Western nations.
- See d'Ohsson's History of the Mongols, vol. i. p. 48.
