Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/290

278 CHEISTIANITY IN CHINA, ETC and concluded a treaty with them, by which they agreed to invade the territories of Abaga every time that he should attack the Egyptians. To counterbalance the effect of this treaty, therefore, the Mongols sought the alliance of the Christians, and Abaga wrote to the Pope a letter that he sent by an ambassador. Several letters had been received at Rome before, purporting to come from this Tartar prince ; but, as they were written in Latin, they could not be supposed to come directly from Abaga, but must have been the work of some of the Christians of the East, acting under his orders, or possibly sometimes without them. However that may have been, this letter of 1267 was written in Mongol, and when it came there was nobody in Rome who could read it, so that the Pope was obliged to get the envoy who brought it, to give him some verbal information of its contents. This explains how the Pope, in his reply to the Tartar prince, came to appear so entirely satisfied of his conversion, and also the supposition that Abaga had shared in the rejoicing at the victory of Charles of Anjou over Manfred. Abaga, according to the testi- mony of Hayton himself, was not a Christian, and the defeat of Manfred, though so interesting a matter to the Holy See, must have been of very small importance to the Khan of Persia. These two points were most likely in- troduced into the letter by the person who undertook the translation of it, in order to render the court of Rome more favourably disposed to the Tartars. Abaga really manifested an intention of proceeding with his father-in-law, Michael Paleologus, to the help of the Christians against the Saracens; and he asked the Pope to point out the route to be taken by the