Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/372

360 dead ; I beg them therefore to excuse me, and I salute them all, and especially the minister and custodian of Perouse. All the suffragan bishops created by Clement have died at Khanbalik, I alone remaining. The brothers Nicolas de Bautra, Andrutius d'Assise, and Peter of Castello, died when they first entered the Indies. May your fraternity always be in peace with the Lord."

This letter is dated at Kal-Tong, in January, 1326. Missionaries, in the middle ages, wrote but little. There was at that period no publication like the " An- nates de la Propagation de la Foi," to collect the accounts of the proceedings of the numerous preachers of the Gospel scattered over the face of the earth ; and it is consequently difficult to obtain any correct account of the state of a mission at that time. The few precious fragments of correspondence, however, that have been preserved to us are enough to throw light upon the successful labours of the apostles in the extreme East. Thanks to the religious liberty enjoyed in China and Tartary, Christianity had made great progress there, and journeys into these remote countries were much more frequent than is now supposed. Merchants were drawn thither in pursuit of gain from India and from the Italian republics, and it is not a little curious to learn that a church was built in one of the principal towns of China by an Armenian lady, or to hear Andre de Perouse valuing his imperial subsidy at a hundred gold florins, through the information of Genoese mer- chants.

Zeal for the diffusion of the Gospel, however, attracted even more strangers to Central Asia than the interests