Though this work is confessedly, as explained in the Introduction, a record of missionary efforts and not a history of persecutions, [3] I have endeavoured to be strictly impartial and to conform to the ideal laid down by the Christian historian [4] who chronicled the successes of the Ottomans and the fall of Constantinople: οὔτε πρὸς χάριν οὔτε πρὸς φθόνον, ἀλλ’ οὐδὲ πρὸς μῖσος ἢ καὶ πρὸς εὔνοιαν συγγράφειν χρεών ἐστι τὸν συγγράφοντα, ἀλλ’ ἱστορίας μόνον καὶ τοῦ μή λήθης βυθῷ παραδοθῆναι, ἣν ὁ χρόνος οἶδε γεννᾶν, τὴν ἱστορίαν. I desire to thank Her Excellency the Princess Barberini; His Excellency the Prince Chigi; the Most Rev. Dr. Paul Goethals, Archbishop of Calcutta; the Right Rev. Fr. Francis Pesci, Bishop of Allahabad; the Rev. S. S. Allnutt, of the Cambridge Mission, Dehli; the Trustees of Dr. Williams’s Library, Gordon Square, London, for the liberal use they have allowed me of their respective libraries. I am under an especial debt of gratitude to James Kennedy, Esq., late of the Bengal Civil Service, who has never ceased to take a kindly interest in my book, though it has almost exemplified the Horatian precept, Nonum prematur in annum; to his profound scholarship and wide reading I have been indebted for much information that would otherwise have remained unknown to me, nor do I owe less to the stimulus of his enthusiastic love of learning and his helpful sympathy. I am also under a debt of gratitude to the kindness of Conte Ugo Balzani, but for whose assistance certain parts of my work would have been impossible to me. To the late Professor Robertson Smith I am indebted for valuable suggestions as to the lines of study on which the history of the North African Church and the condition of the Christians under Muslim rule, should be worked out; the profound regret which all Semitic scholars feel at his loss is to me intensified by the thought that this is the only acknowledgment I am able to make of his generous help and encouragement. I desire also to acknowledge my obligations to Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Khān Bahādur, K.C.S.I., LL.D.; to my learned friend and colleague, Shamsu-l ʻUlamāʼ Mawlawī Muḥammad Shiblī Nuʻmānī, who has assisted me most generously out of the abundance of his knowledge of early Muhammadan history; and to my former pupil, Mawlawī Bahādur ʻAlī, M.A. Lastly, and above all, must I thank my dear wife, but for whom this work would never have emerged out of a chaos of incoherent materials, and whose sympathy and approval are the best reward of my labours. Aligarh, 1896. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION