Around 1510, the Italian merchant Ludovico di Varthema was accompanied in southeast Asia by two Christian guides from "Sarnau" (probably Shahr-i Naw, the Persian name for Ayutthaya). They told him that there were many Christians in Sarnau, even "great lords", that they were white men and that they owed their allegiance to the Great Khan of Cathay. Varthema also recorded that the King of Pegu employed 1,000 Christians soldiers recruited from the Ayutthaya Kingdom and that they wrote their script from right to left. Although it is probable that these accounts are exaggerated to impress westerners, it is possible that these first Christians in Thailand were the descendants of Nestorians who fled China after the fall of the Yuan Dynasty in 1368. They would have most likely used the Syriac script.