Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/144

132 CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA, ETC. the whole known world, was from tins time completely constituted. It had been created by one man, the un- known chief of a nomadic tribe, in less time than is usually required to found and people a single city. Never before, from a beginning so insignificant, did power rise in so short a time to such a gigantic height. We have thought it necessary to dwell a little on the origin and progress of the Mongol supremacy in Upper Asia, in order to render more intelligible the political and religious relations of the sovereign pontiffs, Chris- tian princes, and more especially of the kings of France, with the successors of Tchinguiz-Khan, in the thirteenth century. Europe and Asia were then convulsed by tremendous wars, which seemed in a measure to bring all empires into what we may call a state of fusion. There is nothing in the annals of the human race to be compared with the sudden and sweeping revolutions of that period, by which nations were often brought to- gether, who had been previously almost ignorant of each other's existence, and separated by the entire breadth of our continent. We must be acquainted with these events, in order to appreciate their influence on the propagation of the Christian faith in Upper Asia, and on the progress of European civilisation. As early as 1221, six years before the death of Tchin- guiz-Khan, two Tartar generals, who had received orders to proceed to the conquest of Media, attacked the Geor- gians as they passed, but obtained no very decisive ad- vantage over them.. It was under these circumstances that Christians saw the Mongols for the first time, and fought against them. In the following year, the Tartar generals led their troops across the Caucasus mountains, and en- tered the country of some tribes of nomadic Turks, called