ns and
others who are not converted would say: "What has moved you to be baptised
and to take up the faith of Christ? What powers or miracles have you
witnessed on His part?" (You know the Idolaters here say that their
wonders are performed by the sanctity and power of their idols.) Well, I
should not know what answer to make; so they would only be confirmed in
their errors, and the Idolaters, who are adepts in such surprising arts,
would easily compass my death. But now you shall go to your Pope, and pray
him on my part to send hither an hundred men skilled in your law, who
shall be capable of rebuking the practices of the Idolaters to their
faces, and of telling them that they too know how to do such things but
will not, because they are done by the help of the devil and other evil
spirits, and shall so control the Idolaters that these shall have no power
to perform such things in their presence. When we shall witness this we
will denounce the Idolaters and their religion, and then I will receive
baptism; and when I shall have been baptised, then all my barons and
chiefs shall be baptised also, and their followers shall do the like, and
thus in the end there will be more Christians here than exist in your part
of the world!'

"And if the Pope, as was said in the beginning of this book, had sent men
fit to preach our religion, the Grand Kaan would have turned Christian;
for it is an undoubted fact that he greatly desired to do so."

In the simultaneous patronage of different religions, Kublai followed the
practice of his house. Thus Rubruquis writes of his predecessor Mangku
Kaan: "It is his custom, on such days as his diviners tell him to be
festivals, or any of the Nestorian priests declare to be holydays, to hold
a court. On these occasions the Christian priests enter first with their
paraphernalia, and pray for him, and bless his cup. They retire, and then
come the Saracen priests and do likewise; the priests of the Idolaters
follow. He all the while believes in none of them, though they all follow
his court as flies follow honey. He bestows his gifts on all of them, each
party believes itself to be his favourite, and all prophesy smooth things
to him." Abulfaragius calls Kublai "a just prince and a wise, who loved
Christians and honoured physicians of learning, whatsoever their nation."

There is a good deal in Kublai that reminds us of the greatest prince of
that other great Mongol house, Akbar. And if we truste