Page:Islam, Turkey, and Armenia, and How They Happened.djvu/85

Rh whole of Asia Minor was left to the mercy of the merciless Seljoukian Tartars, who, as most bigoted Mohametans, scourged the country for 200 years.

Genghis Khan, the Mongolian invader, early in the thirteenth century, dealt comparatively better with the Armenians, which the Mohametans attributed to the influence of his wife, who was a Christian. But after the overthrow of his temporary dominion the Armenians suffered more from the vengeance of the Egyptian caliphate. The exact cause of this vengeance was the hospitality the Armenians showed to the Crusaders, sheltering and feeding them a whole winter on their way to the Holy Land to recover it from the hands of Mohametans. The cruelties of Timourlane, the Tartar, devastated Armenia at the close of the fourteenth century; his bloody soldiers being tired of killing, buried many Armenians alive, or drove them into the rivers, and many children and women together were drowned. In 1605 Shah Abbas, of Persia, forcibly transplanted 12,000 Armenian families to his country as slaves to serve the good pleasure of the Mohametan Persians. From that time on the Armenians have suffered continuous and severer persecutions from the Kurds and the Turks, the description of which is given in subsequent chapters.

Armenia, owing to its geographical situation, has always been the battlefield of the eastern and western invasions. Her importance in the history of civilization and the Christian church was that, she being at the frontier of Christendom, has done much in