The Mongols were an important stock of Central Asia. In their original home, south of Lake Baikal, they were ahamanists, and even when Genghis Khan was preparing for his great invasion, Christianity seems to have numbered no converts among them, though it had been brought by Nestorian missionaries to their neighbors the Keraits and Uigurs. These latter tribes had been among the first to affiliate with the Mongols, and the resultant matrimonial alliance between Mongols and Keraits exercised considerable in fluence on the treatment of Christians in many parts of the Mongol empire. The expeditions of Genghis Khan, moreover, brought his people into contact with the Lamaists, Confucians, and Taoists of China and with the Mohammedans of Turkestan and Persia, as well as with scattered but well-organized and influential communities of Nestorian, Jacobite, and Greek Christians; while still further westward, in Armenia, Georgia, and Russia, entire nations had long professed the Christian faith. The Mongol empire was essentially political, not religious. Genghis Khan himself, like his grandsons Mangu and Kublai, is reported to have held that there was one God, but that creeds and rituals were immaterial.
So long as such views prevailed, the priests and monks of the various creeds of the East were able to worship freely and were even welcomed for their prayers and blessings. Mohammedan mullahs, Buddhist bonzes, and Nestorian priests were al most entirely untaxed and were exempt from mili tary service. Khan Kuyuk (1246-48) permitted a Christian chapel with daily services near his tent, while Mangu (1251-59), together with his son and daughter, fasted with the Christians and kissed the crucifix. Yet all this marked no real conversion, and it was frequently the case that a khan, after being brought up as a Christian, renounced this faith for the religion which happened at the time to be in the ascendent. The treatment of religions other than the one professed by the khan varied according to his disposition and the conditions of the time.
In the ancient Mongolian capital Karakorum, where the monk Rubruk spent Easter, 1254, there were twelve temples, two mosques, and a church with Nestorian clergy. The fame of Kuyuk as a friend of the Christians attracted to the capital monks from Asia Minor, Syria, Bag dad, and Russia, while Christians of various nations were brought thither as prisoners of war. A like policy of toleration was pursued by Kublai at Peking after 1264, when he showed equal favor to priests of all religions. Rubruk reports that Nestorians resided in fifteen cities of Cathay and that they had a bishop in "Begin" (probably Singan-fu); while Marco Polo, who resided in the country in 1275-92, records a church at Kinsai (Hang-chau), three at Kenchu (the capital of Kan-su), and two at Chingiansu, built by Barghis in 1278. When the Venetian brothers Niccolo and Massio Polo were about to return home from Khanbaligh (Peking), the great khan requested that the pope send a hundred scholars to China to give instruction and to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity to other religions. The pope accordingly sent the Franciscan John of Montecorvino (q.v.), and as a result three churches were built in Peking between 1299 and 1307. In a letter of 1305 John complained of the antagonism of the Nestoriam, but lauded Khan Togan Temur (1294-1307). In 1307 John was consecrated archbishop of Khanbaligh in recognition of his conversions in the East, which were estimated at between 5,000 and 6,000, and suffragan sees were erected. In 1342 a second papal legate appeared in Peking in the person of the Franciscan Giovanni de Marignola, who three or four years after was able to report a cathedral and several churches in Peking, and three churches in Chuan-chi-fu. With the fall of the Mongols, however, Christian missions in China came to an abrupt end, and all traces of them vanished with the accession of the Ming dynasty.
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