The greatest direct losses of the Greeks were caused by the two great Mongolian invasions of the years 1241 and 1402, especially the latter under the much-feared Timur. These hordes found their only joy in burning, murdering and pillaging, and poured forth like a plague of locusts “in separate bands over Galatia, Phrygia, Bithynia, Paphlagonia, the coast region of Caria, Lycia and Pamphylia in such a way that it seemed as if the whole Tartar army was billeted in every separate province, so numerous were they.” So says one of the last Byzantine historians (Dukas), who pictures also, in vivid colors, the consequences of this predatory incursion in the words, “Timur left neither living men, nor weeping children, nor barking dogs, nor crowing cocks, but everywhere nothing but the stillness of death.” Thus every one of these three Turkish inundations had in its own way contributed to decimate the Greek population of Asia Minor. Only in two greater districts have compact groups of Greeks of considerable extent preserved their nationality, their speech and, in part, their religion, that is, in Middle Cappadocia, in the interior of eastern Asia Minor, and in Pontus, in the extreme northern coast region; in the former as a relic of the old church settlements and in the latter as the last remains of that latest Greek effort at establishing a state in Asia Minor, the Empire of Trapezus. The Greek population of these two districts can therefore serve to bring clearly before us the Asia Minor Greeks of the Middle Ages, in their physical as well as their linguistic character.