The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India c5.s3.5

c5.s3.5

In this contact both sides lost and gained by turns, both culturally and demographically, for both strove for expansion through arms and proselytization. The successors of Saladin, who defeated the Christians in the last crusade, were divided by dissensions. By the grace of those disenssions the Latins survived. A new militant Muhammadanism arose with the Mameluke Sultans of Egypt who seized the throne of Cairo in 1250. However, shortly afterwards there was a setback to Muslim power when the Caliph of Baghdad was killed by the Mongols in 1258. On the other hand, the prospect of a great mass conversion of the Mongols, which would have linked a Christian Asia to a Christian Europe and reduced Islam to a small faith, also dwindled and disappeared. The (Mongol) Khanates of Persia turned to Muhammadanism in 1316; by the middle of the fourteenth century Central Asia had gone the same way; in 1368-70 the native dynasty of Mings was on the throne and closing China to foreigners; and the end was a recession of Christianity and an extension of Islam which assumed all the greater dimensions with the growth of the power of the Ottoman Turks But a new hope dawned for the undefeated West; and this new hope was to bring one of the greatest revolutions of history. If the land was shut, why should Christianity not take to the sea? Why should it not navigate to the East, take Muhammadanism in the rear, and as it were, win Jerusalem a *tergo*? This was the thought of the great navigators, who wore the cross on their breasts and believed in all sincerity that they were labouring in the cause of the recovery of the Holy Land, and if Columbus found the Caribbean Islands instead of Cathay, at any rate we may say that the Spaniards who entered into his labours won a continent for Christianity, and that the West, in ways in which it had never dreamed, at last established the balance in its favour.³⁰