body of Christians—were driven out of Constantinople and compelled to seek homes in distant places. This affords, perhaps, an explanation of the fact that, during the eighth century A. D., many Nestorian Christians were found living in the eastern part of Syria and in Persia; and it seems fair to assume that these Christian communities represented to some extent the direct successors of those Nestorians who had taken refuge in this remote corner of Asia Minor three hundred years earlier. Furthermore, it is highly probable that there were Christian communities in this region several centuries before the Nestorians arrived, for it is believed that the Apostles James and Thomas visited Persia and the northeastern part of Syria in the course of their work as evangelists. It is not known, though, how many of the descendants of these earlier Christians adopted the peculiar beliefs of the Nestorian refugees.
And here it should be stated that the facts which have thus far been mentioned are not the only ones that throw some light upon the relationship subsisting between Christianity and the spread of medical knowledge to Western Europe. Those which remain to be considered are of two kinds, viz., facts relating to the origin of the Arabic Renaissance, and facts which show that the Christian church, from the fourth century onward, was contributing not a little, through the establishment of the great monastic orders, such as the Benedictines, the Dominicans, and the Franciscans, to the preservation if not to the further evolution of Graeco-Roman medical knowledge. I shall reserve for consideration in a later chapter this particular part of the history of medicine; and in the meantime I shall endeavor to describe the events which preceded and rendered possible the active study of Greek medicine on the part of the followers of Mohammed.
So far as history furnishes us with any information on the subject, the Nestorians who lived in Persia, Syria and Mesopotamia were Christians of a remarkably liberal type. They appear to have been an unusually peaceable people, for not only were they kindly disposed toward one another,
