They also adopted some aspects of Dyophysitism of Theodore of Mopsuestia, often inaccurately referred as Nestorianism, in accordance with theology of the Church of the East.

Although India was supplied with bishops from the Middle East, the effective control lay in the hands of an indigenous priest known as Arkkadiyakkon or Archdeacon.

However, the Portuguese ascendancy was formalised at the Synod of Diamper in 1599, which effectively suppressed the historic East Syriac metropolitan province of India.

By the end of the Sassanian period the Christians of India had accepted the leadership of the church of Fars, which also claimed Saint Thomas as its founder.

According to the fourteenth-century writer ʿAbdishoʿ of Nisibis, the patriarch Sliba-zkha (714–28) created metropolitan provinces for Herat, Samarqand, India and China.

An alternative, and perhaps more likely, possibility, is that Sliba-zkha consecrated a metropolitan for India, perhaps in response to an appeal from the Indian Christians, to fill the place of the bishop sent there by Ishoʿyahb half a century earlier.

[14] A few decades later, according to the sixteenth-century Portuguese writer Diogo do Couto, the Malabar church sent a delegation to Mesopotamia to ask for new bishops to be sent out to them.

The catholicus thereupon consecrated a metropolitan named Yohannan for India, and two suffragan bishops, one of whom, 'Mar Dua', was appointed to the island of Soqotra, and the other, Thomas, to 'Masin', traditionally identified with southern China.

[17] In the 1320s the anonymous biographer of the patriarch Yahballaha III and his friend Rabban Bar Sauma praised the achievement of the Church of the East in converting 'the Indians, Chinese and Turks'.

[19] At the end of the fifteenth century the Church of the East responded to a request by the Saint Thomas Christians for bishops to be sent out to them.

In 1490 (or more probably, as has been suggested by Heleen Murre-van den Berg, 1499), two Christians from Malabar arrived in Gazarta to petition the Nestorian patriarch to consecrate a bishop for their church.

[23] Proceeding to Cochin they lost Bishop Ambrose; the others travelled through Malabar for two and a half years on foot, visiting every church and detached settlement.

But on the way he succeeded in escaping at Mozambique, found his way back to Mesopotamia, and went straight to Mar Abdisho IV the Chaldean Patriarch, having realized from the Indian experience that unless he secured a nomination from him it would be difficult to establish himself in Malabar.

But all the orders which he had received had been conferred in the independent Eastern church, and were therefore from the strict Roman point of view invalid.

[29][30] Mar Abraham was detained in a convent, but escaped and entered Malabar and there he directed his faithful in defiance of the Portuguese until his death.

In Surat he met the Capuchin Francesco Maria, who had been his confessor years earlier in Amid, and received a letter signed by 30 priests and 10 deacons of the Malabar Chaldeans, imploring him to come to them and offering to pay his travelling expenses.

Shemʿon went on to play an important part in the struggle between the Vatican and the Portuguese authorities over ecclesiastical privilege in India.

The Latin bishops had refused to consecrate him, and it may have been specifically with this aim in mind that the Sacred Congregation had sent Shemʿon to India.

[34] The Mosul patriarchs also attempted to reassert their control over the Syriac Christians of India around the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The metropolitan Gabriel of the Urmia diocese of Ardishai was sent to India in 1704 by the Nestorian patriarch Eliya XI Marogin (1700–22).

Doubtless appreciating the difficulties he was likely to encounter as a Nestorian, Gabriel made a Catholic profession of faith in the presence of the Chaldean patriarch Joseph I at Amid before he set off on his journey.

When he arrived in India he was obliged to make a further profession of faith and to swear a solemn pledge of allegiance to the Portuguese ecclesiastical authorities.

Ignoring these undertakings, Gabriel proceeded to offer a lively opposition to the Jacobite metropolitan Thomas IV.

[33] The Chaldean Catholic Church, in the nineteenth century, sent two Metropolitans, Thoma Rokkos and Elias Mellus to India to restore their former jurisdiction there.