12 



time they preserved their independence ; until one of them, who ac- 

 cording to the custom of the country had adopted the king 

 of Diamper, died without issue, and the heathen king of 

 Diamper succeeded peaceably to all his rights. After this, 

 in consequence of a similar adoption, they passed under the sove- 

 reignty of the king of Cochin, to whom the greater part of them wer^ 

 subject on the arrival of the Portuguese in India. 



Through the whole of this period, and to the present hour, they 

 are firm in their allegiance to the see of Antioch, from which they 

 profess to have received their ministry. Antioch, one of the four pa« 

 triarchates into which the world was divided, embraced the whole of 

 Asia, the East, and India, Kareix^v cnraaav jr^v Affiav^ Kat AvaroXTjVy 

 avTTjv re rrjv IvSiav* The Catholicos f or Archbishop of Persia 

 was one of his suffragans ; and India together with China 

 was reckoned the XIII. or last diocese subject to the 

 jurisdiction of Persia. In the opening of the 6th century 

 the churches of Persia were entirely in the hands of the 

 Nestorians, who had emigrated beyond the limits of the Roman 

 empire on the triumph of their enemies ; and it was probably early 

 in that century that the christians of St. Thomas received the doc- 

 trines of the council of Ephesus with regard to the two natures of 

 Christ. This faith they retained unshaken on the arrival of the 

 Portuguese; nor could all the arts and persecutionsofMenezes induce 

 them to relinquish it. They were occasionally visited by Jacobite 

 prelates ; but without any change of their national creed before the 

 17th century. At what exact time they received the Monophysite 

 doctrine, preached by Jacobus in the middle of the VI. century, is 

 unknown, but it has so entirely supplanted the opposite heresy 

 that there is not now the slightest trace of Nestorianism in their ritu- 

 al or books, though they are still usually called the Nestoriang 

 of Malabar. 



An opinion has sometimes prevailed that these interesting 

 churches are the descendants of emigrants from Assyria (or rather 

 from Persia) during the persecutions of Justinian. This opinion 

 chiefly rests on a vague assertion of Gibbon, who appears to 

 have mistaken the original authority which he quotes of Cosmos 

 Indicopleustes to which I have already alluded. There is no 

 tradition among themselves of any such numerous emigration, 

 though they look to the cradle of their religion, the see of Antioch, 

 or Babylon with unbounded veneration. Nor is there, as far as I 



* Nilus Doxopatrias apud Allatina. L. 1. c. 9. 166. 

 t A title which first arose in the reign of Justinian. 



