Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/433

421 CHRISTIANITY ECLIPSED IN HIGH ASIA. 421 tians to slavery. Tamerlane passed on like a devas- tating scourge ; cold, cruel, imperturbable, lie was accessible to no sentiment of pity or commiseration ; and after having laid waste thousands of towns, and destroyed an incalculable number of men, he left a great part of Asia a desert, covered with human bones and blood-stained ruins. In consequence of the convulsions occasioned by the wars of Tamerlane, and the overthrow of the Mongol dynasty in China, Catholicism was rapidly declining, and there were, especially among the Tartars, very few Christians left. Some Franciscan missionaries who had escaped the massacres, struggled to keep alive a spark of faith, amidst ashes and ruins, and even hoped, by zeal and care, to kindle it once more to a flame. In 1391, they sent Royer of England and Ambrose of Sienna to the sovereign pontiff, to beg him once more to send preachers of the gospel to the Tartars ; and they obtained permission to take back with them twenty- four Franciscans, but what was the fate of these new apostles was never known, nor even whether they ever reached the goal of their mission. In 1414, a daughter of a certain Tartar prince was brought to the West, and, it is said, brought up in a Christian manner by Joanna Queen of Naples.* It is even asserted that she afterwards took the veil, and passed the rest of her life in a monastery, but history tells us nothing more that is in any way connected with the affairs of Christianity in High Asia at this period. The frequent communications that had, during the middle ages, subsisted between the East and the West,
 * Bergeron, Traite des Tartares.