over the lands that Mohammed and his successors had won by the sword. In the year 1258, Hulaku Khan, the nephew of Genghis Khan, took Bagdad, and put an end to the caliphate in that city. He was the son of a Christian mother and he had a Christian wife. Indeed, he entered into negotiations with the pope and with the kings of France and England with a view to an alliance against the Saracens. Several of his successors publicly professed themselves as Christians; others stood for Islam. Their power rapidly declined. Meanwhile, although the Nestorians were now very numerous, their moral influence was weakened and their church life degenerated. This unsatisfactory state of affairs continued for nearly a hundred and fifty years. We are now at the end of the fourteenth century—a time of overwhelming calamities. Another wave of invasion from the steppes of Asia next appeared, led by the dreadful Timour, who seized and sacked Bagdad, Aleppo, and Damascus about the year 1400. He presented himself as a champion of Islam with a policy very different from the Tartar khans of Bagdad; for Timour savagely attacked the Syrian Christians, many of whom he captured, while those who succeeded in escaping fled to the inaccessible mountains of Kurdistan. It was the break-up of the ancient Syrian Church that had had so large a share in the history of Mesopotamia and wide areas farther north and east for a thousand years. The Nestorians still lingered on; they have remained to the present day; but they have never recovered their ancient power and prestige.[1]
A curious account of the Nestorians is given by Albiruni, a Mohammedan writer who lived at Khiva between a.d. 973 and 1048. He contrasts them with the Catholic party on account of their superior intellectual activity, saying, "Nestorius instigated people to examine for themselves, and to use the instruments of logic and analogy in meeting their opponents."[2] This author
- ↑ See Asseman, tome iv. p. 138 ff.
- ↑ Chronology of Ancient Nations, translated by E. Sachau (Oriental Translation Fund, 1879), p. 306.
