Dioceses of the Church of the East, 1318–1552

When the monks Bar Sawma and Marcos (the future patriarch Yahballaha III) arrived in Mesopotamia from China in the late 1270s, they visited several East Syriac monasteries and churches: They arrived in Baghdad, and from there they went to the great church of Kokhe, and to the monastery of Mar Mari the apostle, and received a blessing from the relics of that country.

And from there they turned back and came to the country of Beth Garmaï, and they received blessings from the shrine of Mar Ezekiel, which was full of helps and healings.

Again, with the exception of ʿIlam (whose metropolitan, Joseph, was present in his capacity of 'designated successor' (natar kursya) all the dioceses represented were in northern Mesopotamia.

Although little is known of the circumstances of the demise of the East Syriac dioceses in Central Asia (which may never have fully recovered from the destruction caused by the Mongols a century earlier), it may have been due to a combination of persecution, disease, and isolation.

The surviving evidence from Central Asia, including a large number of dated graves, indicates that the crisis for the East Syriac church occurred in the 1340s rather than the 1390s.

[2] The last tombstones in two East Syriac cemeteries discovered in Mongolia around the end of the nineteenth century date from 1342, and several commemorate deaths during a plague in 1338.

In the chaos which followed the death of the Ilkhan Abu Saʿid in 1335, it may have been unable to send out fresh bishops to Central Asia, and without leaders of their own, the absorption of these communities by Islam was inevitable.

Although East Syriac communities disappeared from several villages in the Nisibis and Mosul districts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, patterns of settlement seem generally to have persisted without radical disturbance.

[7] The disappearance of so many old dioceses was probably a consequence of the introduction of hereditary succession in the middle of the fifteenth century by the Patriarch Shemʿon IV, which eventually resulted in a shortage of bishops in the Church of the East.

The Patriarch Shemʿon VII Ishoʿyahb is said to have entrusted the administration of some vacant dioceses to laymen, and to have consecrated two nephews as metropolitans, aged twelve and fifteen respectively, presumably because no older relatives were available.

By then, Nisibis was little more than a village and the future of East Syriac Christianity in the region lay with the Chaldean communities recently established in the towns of Amid and Mardin.

The date of his death is not known, but according to a list of metropolitans of Nisibis compiled in the second half of the fourteenth century, his immediate successors were Mikha'il, ʿAbdishoʿ, Yahballaha and Ishoʿyahb.

The metropolitan Yohannan Bar Yak, who flourished at an unknown date in the fourteenth century, was the author of several verses preserved in a manuscript in the Mardin collection.

In the fifteenth century, the writer Ishoʿyahb Bar Mqaddam, one of the few known East Syriac authors at this period, is mentioned as metropolitan of Erbil in 1443 and 1452, and may have taken the name Thomas.

[14] An elderly bishop named Yohannan, perhaps the same man, was killed at Atel on 6 June 1512 with 40 other persons, including Christian priests and deacons, by the soldiers of Muhammad Bek.

To distinguish these converts from their recalcitrant Nestorian brethren, Pope Eugene IV christened them 'Chaldeans', because they used the Chaldean language (as Syriac was then called in western Europe).

This community was dispersed within a few decades of the town's capture by the Turks in 1571, but a fine fourteenth-century Nestorian church, built in Provençal style by the wealthy merchant prince Francis Lakhas, can still be seen in Famagusta.