Soon after his arrival, Augustine founded the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul, which later became St Augustine's Abbey,[22] on land donated by the king.[36] This foundation has often been claimed as the first Benedictine abbey outside Italy, and that by founding it, Augustine introduced the Rule of St. Benedict into England, but there is no evidence the abbey followed the Benedictine Rule at the time of its foundation.[37] In a letter Gregory wrote to the patriarch of Alexandria in 598, he claimed that more than 10,000 Christians had been baptised; the number may be exaggerated but there is no reason to doubt that a mass conversion took place.[15][28] However, there were probably some Christians already in Kent before Augustine arrived, remnants of the Christians who lived in Britain in the later Roman Empire.[11] Little literary traces remain of them, however.[38] One other effect of the king's conversion by Augustine's mission was that the Frankish influence on the southern kingdoms of Britain was decreased.[39]