But even before Christianity--and this is a fact of which the immense significance has never been observed, which has not even been correctly interpreted as _mission_ effort--the Pagan Church had won for the Syncretic Cult the greater part of the population of North Africa, Spain, Gaul, Britain, and the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Of the Druidism that Cæsar had found in Gaul, little remained extant by the time of Constantine. The assimilation of indigenous local gods under the names of the great Magian divinities of the Cult-Church (and especially Mithras-Sol-Jupiter) from the second century on, was essentially a process of conquest, and the same is true of the later emperor-worship.[458] The missionary efforts of Christianity here would have been less successful than they were if the other cult-Church--its near relative--had not preceded it. But the latter’s propaganda was by no means limited to barbarian fields; even in the fifth century the missionary Asclepiodotus converted Aphrodisias, a Carian city, from Christianity to Paganism. The Jews, as has been shown already, directed missionary effort on a large scale towards the East and the South. Through southern Arabia they drove into the heart of Africa, possibly even before the birth of Christ, while on the side of the East their presence in China is demonstrable, even in the second century. To the north the realm of the Khazars[459] and its capital, Astrakhan, later went over to Judaism. From this area came the Mongols of Jewish religion who advanced into the heart of Germany and were defeated, along with the Hungarians, in the battle of the Lechfeld in 955. Jewish scholars of the Spanish-Moorish universities petitioned the Byzantine Emperor (in A.D. 1000) for safe-conduct for an embassy that was to ask the Khazars whether they were the Lost Tribes of Israel. From the Tigris, Mazdaists and Manichæans penetrated the empires on either hand, Roman and Chinese, to their utmost frontiers. Persian, as the Mithras cult, invaded Britain; Manichæism had by 400 become a danger to Greek Christianity, and there were Manichæan sects in southern France as late as the Crusades[460]; but the two religions drove eastwards as well, along the Great Wall of China (where the great polyglot inscription of Kara Balgassun testifies to the introduction of the Manichæan faith in the Oigur realm) and even to Shantung. Persian fire-temples arose in the interior of China, and from 700 Persian expressions are found in Chinese astrological writings.