running tremendous risks in opposing a Power whose rulers openly boasted that they were lords over the whole earth; yet he never swerved from the line he had taken up of meeting arrogance with pride. In 1276, Kublai sent an ambassador to Kamakura. Tokimune caused him to be led out to Tatsu no Kuchi (the same spot that had witnessed the attempted execution of Nichiren), and there beheaded him. Two others, who came on the same errand, were beheaded at Hakata in Kyushu, as soon as ever they landed on Japanese soil. Further hostilities were now unavoidable. In 1279, Tokimune ordered the Daimyos of Kyushu and the West to prepare to resist a hostile invasion. In 1281, an Armada, carrying 100,000 Mongols and 10,000 Koreans, appeared off Dazaifu in Kyushu, having ravaged the island of Iki on the way. The invaders landed at Goryu-san in Hizen, where they met with a strenuous resistance. At the end of a week's fighting, neither army could claim to have gained much advantage. Then came one of those terrible storms that from time to time visit the shores of Japan; the invaders were obliged to look to the safety of their ships; they were literally "between the Devil and the deep sea," and, being in that awkward predicament, were practically annihilated. Of all the mediaeval nations of Asia and Europe that were obliged to face those terrible conquerors in the heyday of their power, Japan was the only one that scored a complete victory. It was also probably the only one that absolutely refused to be cowed by Tartar bluster.

But we must not forget that our present concern with the Mongol invasion of Japan is its bearing on the religious history of that country.

We mentioned in a previous chapter that Nichiren expounded a system of millenarianism very similar to that which the Franciscan Abbot Joachim advocated in his

[paragraph continues] Commentaries on the Book of Revelation, between 1170 and 1200, A.D. Abbot Joachim's work enjoyed a very great reputation during those last years of the twelfth century. Is it possible that these two sets of Apocalyptic speculations can in any sense have had a common source or origin?

First, I would mention the fact that Abbot Joachim travelled in the East as a young man, before commencing his work on the Apocalypse. It is quite possible that he may have there gathered the ideas which he afterwards put into definite literary form in his books.