Yohannan VII bar Targhal was Patriarch of the Church of the East from 1049 to 1057.
During these riots the Greek Palace, the residence of the Nestorian patriarchs, was twice pillaged.
Brief accounts of Yohannan's patriarchate are given in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of the Jacobite writer Bar Hebraeus (fl.
The following account of Yohannan's patriarchate is given by Bar Hebraeus: After Eliya I, the elderly Yohannan bar Targhal, bishop of Qasr, was consecrated catholicus of the Nestorians at Baghdad, on the third Sunday of the Annunciation, in the eighth month of the Arabs in the year 441 [AD 1049/50].
But six years later troops from Khorasan entered Baghdad, and the eastern suburbs, including the Greek Palace and the patriarchal cell, were plundered.