Although many wars have been fought for Christianity, it would be no more right to speak of it, than of Buddhism itself, as a "fighting religion." Mahommedanism, on the contrary, has ever been the great fighting religion of the world. {32} In the eighth century, while the Mahommedans in the West were making themselves dominant in Spain, other armies of the same faith went conquering eastwards through Central Asia to the very borders of China. They conquered, but they did not succeed in establishing any permanent empire. There was no power at their centre to control such an extent of the world's surface. The local princes became practically independent again. But in many parts the Mahommedan religion remained. It failed to make any impression in Tibet, where the Great Llama, as the chief of the Tibetan Buddhists was called, was ruler as well as high priest. In India Mahommedanism established itself the more easily because Buddhism was by that time a waning force in many parts and was being re-absorbed by the older Brahmanism. Spread by its missionaries, called Mullahs, the new creed won its way right through the country to Siam, down the Malay Peninsula and into the islands of the archipelago. It penetrated southward also. We have noted that when the Portuguese came to the western shores of Southern India in 1500 or so they found Sultans, as the heads of Mahommedan states were called, in possession. To these seaports, however, and to the islands it is likely enough that the religion of Mahomet was brought by the Arab traders as much as or more than by any overland route. Of the principalities which gained, or regained, independence after the flood of Moslem conquest had swept from West to East, that which became of greatest importance in the story was the kingdom of Afghanistan. It has been of importance by reason of its geographical position making it "the gate of India," as it has been called. It is the "gate" for such nations as Persia and Russia which might seek to enter India from the west and north. {33} From the kingdom of Afghanistan itself a Moslem army swept again into India about the year A.D. 1000. A confederacy of Hindu princes assembled a force to oppose it, but it is said that this army was entirely demoralised by the sound--the first of its kind that they had heard--of a gun brought by the invaders. The rule of the Moslem Viceroys, under which a large portion of Northern India was administered as the result of this Afghan victory, seems to have been equitable and effective, and in the course of the four centuries that followed a great part of all India became Mahommedan. [Sidenote: Timour, the Tartar]