Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/267

255 ABHORRENCE OF THE TARTAR ALLIANCE IN EUROPE. 255 the town, suffered no damage, but remained in safety in the church where their patriarch Machicha had assembled them. After the victory Houlagou received Machicha in a friendly manner, and assigned him as a residence one of the Caliph's palaces on the Tigris, and the patriarch built there a spacious and beautiful church. The Tartars seemed at this time in some measure to make common cause with the Christians in these coun- tries, the bond between them being of course their common hatred of the Mussulmans. But the political interest which tended thus to unite nations so dis- similar in manners and religion did not exist in the North of Europe, and in Russia, Poland, and Hungary, where they were as hostile as ever; and the Christian princes, who had found themselves compelled to submit and to serve in the Mongol armies, were regarded with the same horror as the Mongols themselves. Whilst the Christians did not object in the South to profit by the alliances which some of the princes, the King of Armenia, for instance, had entered into with the Tartar generals, they regarded with detestation, as deserters from the Christian name, those who in the North had done the same thing — perhaps only with the view of preserving their people from the misfortune of an unequal and hopeless struggle. This was because in the North the troops demanded by the Mongols as auxiliaries, having no Mussulmans to fight, would infallibly have had to turn their arms against their own countrymen and fellow Christians. Thus, in 1254, when Livonia and Poland appeared to be threatened, and the Pope wished to guard from in- vasion the countries where the establishment of Chris-