The Reformation Era · 1599-1665 · Malabar Coast
St. Thomas Christians under Portuguese Pressure - Diamper & the Coonan Cross
Not yet available
There's no built conversation for this tradition here yet.
About This Movement
The Christians of the Malabar coast traced their church to the apostle Thomas and had for centuries received their bishops from the Church of the East, worshipping in Syriac. The Portuguese found this puzzling and then intolerable, and in 1599 Archbishop Aleixo de Menezes convened a synod at Diamper that placed the community under Latin jurisdiction, revised its liturgy, and ordered its Syriac books corrected or burned. Half a century of resentment came to a head on 3 January 1653, when a crowd gathered at a stone cross in Mattancherry, tied ropes to it and swore they would no longer obey the Jesuits. The Coonan Cross Oath, so called because the cross was said to have bent under the strain.
Sources
- The Synod of Diamper acta (1599): Eng. trans. Michael Geddes (1694); critical ed. Scaria Zacharia, The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Diamper 1599 (Kottayam, 1994) (primary) — Hostile to the tradition it absorbed: the decrees Latinize the community and condemn its East Syriac books, many of which were burned or corrected under the synod's own orders — which is why the earlier record is so thin. The community's practices survive mainly as a list of things condemned.
- Gouvea, Jornada of Archbishop Menezes (1606; Eng. trans. Malekandathil, 2003) (primary) — The fullest contemporary description of the community, but written by its conqueror's own chronicler.
- The community's own layer: surviving Kerala Syriac manuscripts (HMML digitization), the East Syriac liturgical and canonical tradition, palm-leaf (ola) records, transmitted memory of the copper-plate privileges (primary) — The inside voice, fragmentary because the synod burned so many of its books — that destruction is itself part of the evidence. Largely uncatalogued and untranslated.
- The Coonan Cross oath (1653): community tradition of the oath's wording, contemporary Carmelite and Jesuit reports of the revolt, correspondence around Mar Thoma I's consecration (primary) — The oath's text is preserved only through tradition, in variant forms, and the surviving reports come from pens sympathetic to the mission side. This event marks the origin of today's division among Kerala's churches.
- Frykenberg, Christianity in India (OUP, 2008), relevant chapters, with Istvan Perczel's Kerala Syriac manuscript studies (secondary) — Perczel's manuscript discoveries have directly revised the earlier picture of how thin the sources are.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 5; vol. 6, ch. 30 (Zupanov & Hsia) (reference) — Volume 5 has no chapter dedicated to the St Thomas Christians; the closest is chapter 22 (O'Mahony, on Syriac Christianity, though it focuses on the modern period). Zupanov is a specialist on the Malabar missions.