The Church of the East — the Schism of 1552

By the sixteenth century the patriarchate of the Church of the East — once a communion that had reached as far as China — had contracted to the mountains and plains of Mesopotamia, and its highest office had become hereditary, passing from uncle to nephew inside a single family. In 1552 a party opposed to that arrangement elected a monastery superior, Yohannan Sulaqa, and sent him to Rome. He made a profession of faith there, was consecrated patriarch in 1553, returned home, and was arrested and killed in 1555. The line he had begun continued anyway, and from that point the ancient communion has carried two rival patriarchates — a division that has never fully healed.