The Golden Horde ruled the Caucasus, a large part of Russia,
and a piece of Siberia. Tartars held sway in Persia, Georgia,
Armenia, and a part of Asia Minor. When the great Mangu Khan
died in 1259, one empire lay spread across Asia and Europe,
from the Yellow River to the Danube. There had been nothing
like it in the world before, and there was nothing like it
again, until the Russian Empire of modern times. By 1268 it
was beginning to split up into the four kingdoms of China,
central Asia, Russia, and Persia, but still it was one
people. Now, the attitude of the West to the Tartars at this
time was very interesting. At first it feared them as a new
scourge of God, like Attila and his Huns; they overran
Poland, ravaged Hungary, and seemed about to break like a
great flood upon the West, and overwhelm it utterly. Then the
tide rolled back. Gradually the West lost its first
stupefaction and terror and began to look hopefully towards
the Tartars as a possible ally against its age-old foe, the
Moslem. The Christians of the West knew that the Tartars had
laid the Moslem power low through the length and breadth of
Asia, and they knew too, that the Tartars had no very sharply
defined faith and were curious of all beliefs that came their
way. Gradually the West became convinced that the Tartars
might be converted to Christianity, and fight side by side
beneath the Cross against the hated Crescent. There grew up
the strange legend of Prester John, a Christian priest-king,
ruling somewhere in the heart of Asia; and indeed little
groups of Nestorian Christians did still survive in eastern
Asia at this time.[14] Embassies began to pass between Tartar
khans and western monarchs, and there began also a great
series of missions of Franciscan friars to Tartary, men who