Such incidents, however, do not afford the slightest excuse for the cruel treatment which the Quakers received in Boston, nor do they go far toward explaining it. Persecution began immediately, before the new-comers had a chance to behave themselves well or ill. Their mere coming to Boston was taken as an act of invasion. It was indeed an attack upon the Puritan theocratic idea. Of all the sectaries of that age of sects, the Quakers were the most aggressive. There were at one time more than four thousand of them in English jails; yet when any of them left England, it was less to escape persecution than to preach their doctrines far and wide over the earth. Their missionaries found their way to Paris, to Vienna; even to Rome, where they testified under the very roof of the Vatican. In this dauntless spirit they came to New England to convert its inhabitants, or at any rate to establish the principle that in whatever community it might please them to stay, there they would stay in spite of judge or hangman. At first they came to Barbadoes, whence two of their number, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher, sailed for Boston. When they landed, on a May morning in 1656, Endicott happened to be away from Boston, but the deputy-governor, Richard Bellingham, was equal to the occasion. He arrested the two women and locked them up in jail, where, for fear they might proclaim their heresies to the crowd gathered outside, the windows were boarded up. There was no law as yet enacted against Quakers, but a council summoned for the occasion pronounced their doctrines blasphemous and devilish. The books which the poor women had with them were seized and publicly burned, and the women themselves were kept in prison half-starved for five weeks until the ship they had come in was ready to return to Barbadoes. Soon after their departure Endicott came home. He found fault with Bellingham's conduct as too gentle; if he had been there he would have had the hussies flogged. [Sidenote: Anne Austin and Mary Fisher] Five years afterward Mary Fisher went to Adrianople and tried to convert the Grand Turk, who treated her with grave courtesy and allowed her to prophesy unmolested. This is one of the numerous incidents that, on a superficial view of history, might be cited in support of the opinion that there has been on the whole more tolerance in the Mussulman than in the Christian world. Rightly interpreted, however, the fact has no such implication. In Massachusetts the preaching of Quaker doctrines might (and did) lead to a revolution; in Turkey it was as harmless as the barking of dogs. Governor Endicott was afraid of Mary Fisher; Mahomet III. was not.