Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/332

320 His messengers came to Paris, and renewed to the King of France their former proposals of alliance; they then went to England, and endeavoured to come to an understanding with Edward I.

But while Gazan was thus offering his alliance to the sovereigns of the West, the circumstances that might have rendered it valuable to them were considerably altered. A great victory gained by the Mussulmans had obliged the Mongols and the King of Armenia to retire across the Euphrates,—a misfortune which is said to have afflicted Gazan so much, as to cause the malady of which he died in the year 1302.

At the same epoch, there died also at Pekin the great Kublai-Khan, Emperor of the Chinese and Oriental Tartars. Kublai was indisputably the sovereign of the most enormous empire that the annals of the world have ever made known: it comprehended the whole of China, Corea, Thibet, Tonquin, and Cochin China, a great part of India beyond the Ganges; many islands of the Indian Ocean; and the whole north of the continent of Asia, from the Pacific to the Dnieper. Persia, also, was a feudatory of his throne; its sovereigns, the successors of Houlagou, receiving their investiture from the Emperor of China, and as the dominions of these great vassals extended to the Mediterranean and the frontiers of the Greek Empire, it may be said that the whole of Asia was subject to the laws of the great Khan, who had chosen Pekin as the central seat of his government. What was the empire of Alexander the Great, or of the Romans, or even of Tchinguiz-Khan, compared with that of Kublai? And yet this astonishing potentate is scarcely known at all among us, and our most learned histories hardly say a word about him!