Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/345

Rh This amalgamation of all beliefs was an arrangement perfectly agreeable to the customs of Tchinguiz-Khan, and to the habits of the greater part of the Chinese emperors. Not content, however, with affording refuge and protection to all modes of worship and faith, Kublai-Khan, in a very different spirit from that of most of the sovereigns of the Mantchoo dynasty, received with kindness, in all parts of his vast empire, all strangers, whether from Europe or Asia; and among the travellers thus attracted to China in the thirteenth century, the most celebrated is undoubtedly Marco Polo, whose curious history contains many details descriptive of the state of Christianity in the far East.

Commerce, the grand source of the prosperity of the Venetians, had, about the year 1250, attracted Nicolo and Matteo Polo to Constantinople, and in 1256, they both made their way to the dominions of the Khan of Tartary, who was then encamped on the shores of the Volga. The war, however, which had broken out among these nomadic people, compelled them both to make a precipitate retreat from the States of Barka, where they had been staying, and to pass on to Bokhara on the south-eastern shores of the Caspian Sea. They carried on their trading transactions for three years in these districts, studying meanwhile the language and manners of the Tartars; and they finally joined an embassy bound for China, but it took them more than a year to get to Khanbalik (Pekin) where the Emperor Kublai resided. This sovereign, with his usual courtesy towards strangers, treated them with great distinction. He questioned them much concerning the princes who were reigning in Europe, as well as the manners and customs of the different nations they had visited,