The Church of the East — Timur's Catastrophe and the Hakkari Remnant

For centuries the Church of the East had been the most geographically extensive church on earth, with metropolitan provinces running from Baghdad across Central Asia to India and China. It ended within a lifetime. When the patriarch Yahballaha III — a monk born far to the east among the Öngüd — died in 1317, the Mongol rulers of Persia had already turned to Islam and made Christians a persecuted minority in Mesopotamia. Then Timur's campaigns between the 1380s and 1405 destroyed the lowland dioceses outright, along with much of the population that had sustained them. What survived did so by geography: communities in the Hakkari mountains and around Lake Van and Urmia, where the patriarchate relocated and where, over the fifteenth century, the office became hereditary within a single family, passing from uncle to nephew. The one province Timur never reached was the community on the Malabar coast of India, which went on receiving bishops from a patriarch who now governed from a mountain village.