We saw something of the break-up of the Mongol power, which had extended over nearly the whole of Asia and threatened Europe also, when we were recounting the story of China. The blow that was dealt it at the end of the fourteenth century by the Buddhist monk who became the first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty doubtless helped in its break-up even so far away as its western border. The centre of its power was shattered. It no longer had the strength that comes from unity. The Mongols fell apart into a number of independent tribes. Early in the sixteenth century Russia began to throw off the domination with which those Mongols, or Tartars, always threatened {52} her, and from time to time exercised. She had partly amalgamated with the Tartars, and partly ruled over them, by the middle of that century. The knowledge of Russia began about the same time to be brought to England, by traders who had found their way to Moscow by adventurous voyages round the top of Scandinavia and so on to the White Sea, whereon is the city of Archangel, and so down into the centre and capital of the great country, travelling partly by river and partly overland. A treaty, for the exchange of the products of the two countries, was made, and the English were allowed to build warehouses for storing those goods which they brought in to trade with and those Russian goods which they obtained in return. It is of interest to note that this discovery of Muscovy, as Russia for a long while was called in England, was made by sailors in search of a very different land, namely, China. For there was an idea in the minds of the men of the fifteenth century that a way to China, and all its riches, might be found by sea round the top of Scandinavia and so eastward until China was reached. And so, in fact, some sort of a way was ultimately found through Behring's Straits--the narrow sea-way between the extreme north-east of Asia and the extreme north-west of America. But it is a way so blocked by the ice for so large a part of the year as to be of no practical use, and the discovery of the south-west passage round the Cape took all the interest and zest out of the search for what was called the North-West Passage. Portuguese trading vessels had reached China and Japan before the middle of the century and missionaries of the Order of Jesus, or Jesuits, had introduced Christianity into Japan as they had already brought it to India. Spanish missionaries of the same great monastic order had {53} carried Christianity westward into the New World. Thousands of Indians in Mexico and Peru and other countries conquered by the Spaniards were baptised as Christians. Churches and cathedrals built by the labour of the natives, which cost the Spaniards nothing, began to rise on the sites of the pagan temples. [Sidenote: Cross and Crescent]