St Thomas Christians, 1300-1517

On the pepper coast of south-west India there had been Christians for longer than anyone could document, who traced their founding to the apostle Thomas, worshipped in Syriac, and belonged to the Church of the East, receiving their bishops from its patriarch far away in Mesopotamia. In this window they come into focus. A Syriac manuscript copied at Cranganore in 1301 — the oldest dated Syriac manuscript from India — names the patriarch Yahballaha III in its colophon, showing the link intact. Socially the community was no marginal minority but an established, high-status trading group with privileges from Hindu rulers and a headman of its own. By the late fifteenth century, with the church's Mesopotamian heartland shattered, the connection had to be actively maintained. A delegation travelled to the patriarch around 1490 asking for bishops, and the bishops who came back wrote home in 1504 describing the community — and the arrival of Portuguese ships.