But the insecurity of the Nestorians under Mongol rule was shown by another adventure of Yaballâhâ III. In 1295 he was seized by a vicious governor, tortured, and only released when he had paid 20,000 dinars to his persecutor.
These years of comparative ease and splendour under the Mongols are the last rays of light in the story of the Nestorians. We come now to a frightful storm and then dark night for many centuries.
The storm is the work of that appalling person the lame Timur. Timur Leng was a rebel Mongol chieftain. In the 14th century he rose against the Prince of the House of Jengiz, and swept with his wild hordes like a hurricane over Asia. He set up his throne at Samarcand, having crushed Turks and Mongols, having devastated Syria, Persia, India and China, and died there in 1405.[1] Timur finally broke the Nestorian Church. Their missions went to pieces, countless numbers of Nestorians were massacred or apostatized.
Fleeing from total destruction, the Patriarch, with a feeble remnant, took refuge in the Highlands of Kurdistan. So we come to the last act of their story. Since the 14th century, the Nestorians remain a tiny handful of families in Kurdistan and the plain of Mesopotamia. They were almost forgotten by Europe till Western travellers rediscovered them in the 19th century. There is not much to chronicle from this last period.
After the storm of Timur Leng had passed, the modern states of Turkey and Persia appear. The Ottoman Turks had already entered the scene in the 13th century, and Persia became an independent state in the 15th (pp. 27–28). So the Nestorians found themselves on the frontier of these two Moslem countries. That is so still. They live around the frontier, some on one side and some on the other. The Patriarch lived for a long time at Mosul, sometime at Margâ, east of Lake Urmi (in Persia); now he[2] has lived for about a century at the village Ḳudshanīs, in the mountains on the Turkish side.
