Missionaries?

[Koen G]

This Wiki page is full of interesting bits You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I am surprised at how early some entries are.

• 635 – First Christian missionaries (Nestorian monks, including Alopen, from Asia Minor and Persia) arrive in China
  

That's only 140 years after the conversion of Clovis! And 100 years before Boniface felled Odin's oak in Germany. While much of Europe was still pagan, they were building churches in China.



In the later Middle Ages, we have things like:

• 1276 – Ramon Llull opens training center to send missionaries to North Africa
  
• 1291 – Appointment of first indigenous bishop in Finland
  
• 1294 – Franciscan Giovanni di Monte Corvino arrives in China
  
• 1321 – Jordanus, a Dominican friar, arrives in India as the first resident Roman Catholic missionary
  
• 1323 – Franciscans make contacts on Sumatra, Java, and Borneo
  
• 1326 – Chaghatayid Khan Ilchigedai grants permission for a church to be built in Samarkand, Uzbekistan
  
• 1400 – Scriptures translated into Icelandic
  
• 1408 - Spanish Dominican Vincent Ferrer begins a ministry in Italy in which it is said that thousands of Jews and Muslims were won to faith in Christ
  
• 1410 – Bible is translated into Hungarian
  

So I guess if we are looking into contact between Latins and an "exotic" language, missions are a good candidate.