of the Christians of Persia were willing enough to follow the lead given by Bar-soma, there was a minority opposed to him. Papa, Bishop of B. Lapat, was one of them, and there were other bishops with him. The men of Tagrit, too, and the monks of at least one important monastery (Mar Matai by Mosul) clung to the confession of one "Nature"—or adopted it, in opposition to a man they hated—and some monks, about Seleucia-Ctesiphon were of the same way of thinking.[1]
It is impossible to say how far this minority at the time was Monophysite in doctrine and by conviction, and how far it was merely opposed to Bar-soma, though there is good evidence that its principal bishop, Papa of B. Lapat, acted from the latter of these two motives. Still, here was the root of a Monophysite party in the Church, opposed to the Dyophysite majority. In later days it was to gather strength and to make a bold effort at the capture of the Church itself. Failing in this, it was able to win recognition as a separate melet.
No doubt Bar-soma hoped and expected to be patriarch in place of Babowai, and the prize must have seemed in his grasp when he held the council of B. Lapat in 484. At that very moment, however, it was snatched from him, and the support of much of his power cut from under his feet, by the death of his patron, King Piroz. That sovereign's defeat by the Turks, and his disgraceful homage to their sultan, had of course rankled in his mind; and, oath or no oath, he was resolved to avenge it. Thus he made war against them, and to keep the letter of his bond, made elephants drag in the van of his army the boundary stone that he had sworn that he would never pass. The Turks gathered for battle, and their sultan, like another of his race in another continent, reared the
- ↑ Council of Acacius, Canons I and II.
