428 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
III. FOR THE MONGOLS. — D'OnsoN : Hist, des Mongols, Paris, 1824. — PI. II. HOWORTH : Hist, of the Mongols, 3 vols., London, 1876-1880. — ABBE Hue : Le Christianisme en Chine, en Tartare et en Thibet, Paris, 1857. — KULB : Gesdi. der Missionsreisen nach der Mongolei wcihrend des ISten und 14ten Jahrhunderts, 3 vols., Regensb., 1860. — COL. HENRY YULE : Travels and Life of Marco Polo, London, 1871 ; Rev. ed. by H. CORDIER, New York, 1903. — R. K. DOUGLAS (Prof, of Chinese in King's Col., London): Life of Jenyhiz Khan. — GIBBON, chaps. XLVII., LXIV. ; RANKE, VIII. 417-455 ; and arts. RUBRUQUIS, Mongolen, etc., in Herzog, Wetzer-Welte.
THE missionary operations of this period display little of the zeal of the great missionary age of Augustine, Columba, and Boniface, and less of achievement. The explanation is to be found in the ambitions which controlled the mediaeval church and in the dangers by which Europe was threatened from without. In the conquest of sacred localities, the Cru sades offered a substitute for the conversion of non-Christian peoples. The effort of the papacy to gain supreme control over all mundane affairs in Western Christendom, also filled the eye of the Church. These two movements almost drained her religious energies to the full. On the other hand the Mongols, or Tartars, breaking forth from Central Asia with the fierceness of evening wolves, filled all Europe with dread, and one of the chief concerns of the thirteenth century was to check their advance into the central part of the continent. The heretical sects in Southern France threatened the unity of the Church and also demanded a share of attention which might otherwise have been given to efforts for the conversion of the heathen.
Two new agencies come into view, the commercial trader and the colonist, corresponding in this century to the ships and trains of modern commerce and the labors of the geo graphical explorer in Africa and other countries. Along the shores of the Baltic, at times, and in Asia the tradesman and the explorer went in advance of the missionary or along the same routes. And in the effort to subdue the barbarous tribes of Northeastern Germany to the rules of Christen dom, the sword and colonization played as large a part as spiritual measures.
§ 74. MISSIONS IN NORTHEASTERN GERMANY. 429
The missionary history of the age has three chapters, — among the pagan peoples of Northeastern Germany and along the Baltic as far as Riga, among the Mohammedans of North ern Africa, and among the Mongols in Central and Eastern Asia. The chief missionaries whose names have survived are Otto of Bamberg and Vicelinus who labored in Northeastern Europe, Rubruquis, and John of Monte Corvino who travelled through Asia, Francis d'Assisi and Raymundus Lullus who preached in Africa.
The treatment which the Jews received at the hand of the Church also properly belongs here.
§ 74. Missions in Northeastern Germany.
At the beginning of this period the Wends,1 who were of Slavic origin, were the ruling population in the provinces along the Baltic from Liibeck to Riga with elements in the territory now covered by Pommerania, Brandenburg inter mingled, and parts of Saxony, which were neither German nor Slavic but Lithuanian.2 Charlemagne did not attempt conquest beyond the river Elbe. The bishoprics of Wiirzburg, Mainz, Halberstadt, Verden, and Bremen-Hamburg, bordering on the territories of these tribes, had done little or nothing for their conversion. Under Otto I. Havelberg, Meissen, Merseburg, and other dioceses were established to prosecute this work. At the synod of Ravenna, 967, Otto made the premature boast that the Wends had been con verted.
The only personality that looms out above the monoto nous level of Wendish history is Gottschalk, who was con verted in England and bound together a number of tribes in an extensive empire. He was interested in the conversion
1 See § 60. Tacitus calls the Wends Venedi, a name which seems to come from the Slavonic voda, or the Lithuanian wandu, meaning "water," and referring to the low and often marshy lands they occupied.
2 The two translations of Luther's catechism, 1545, 1561, into the language of this people seem to point to their Lithuanian origin, Tschackert in Herzog, XVI. 26.