Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/150

138 138 CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA, ETC. submission to the Church of Rome, and promises to unite Georgia to it in Catholic unity. Gregory the Ninth replies, that he mourns deeply for the evils suffered by Georgia, but that it is out of his power to send any help to it at present, since the Em- peror, Frederick the Second, has just raised a tempest within the Church, and that it has also been attacked in all directions, in Syria by the Saracens, in Spain by the Moors, in Italy and Germany by false Christians, that is to say, partisans of the emperor. He praises the Queen for her intention of bringing back Georgia to the unity of the Faith ; and in order to favour this pious design, he will send her some monks of the order of St. Dominic, to evangelise the country. Rhouzoudan would have greatly preferred his sending her soldiers, and she appears in the sequel to have attached but little value to the Holy Father's spiritual consolations, as she re- nounced Christianity, and became a Mahometan.* Whilst the Mongols were thus keeping Georgia in terror of their arms, they were menacing the North still more alarmingly for the Christians. After having sacked the southern part of Russia, they inarched in 1240 upon Kiew, a town which, for three centuries, had been the metropolis of Russia, and which its commerce with the empire of Byzantium, with the Dnieper, and the Black Sea, rendered very nourishing. It was soon invested by the Tartars, but the inhabitants trusted to the deep waters of the river Dnieper for opposing an insur- mountable barrier, to the Tartar cavalry. They were deceived, however. These barbarians had no need of bridges or boats to cross rivers ; they constructed, ac- cording to their practice, with boughs of trees, covered
 * Aboulfarajre.