them a bishop, in the 11th century Sbaryeshu‘ III (1057–1072) ordained one bishop for the islands of the Indian see and another for Socotra;[1] Marco Polo speaks of Christians in Socotra and of "an archbishop who is not in subjection to the Pope of Rome, but to a Patriarch who resides in the city of Baghdad."[2] Marco Polo, the valiant Venetian traveller of the 13th century, is our witness for many outlying Nestorian missions. Again, a certain Kyriakos (so-called), Bishop of Socotra, was present at the ordination of Yaballâhâ III at Bagdad in 1282.[3] From Khorasan and India Nestorian missionaries pushed north and east. In the strangest and most inaccessible places Marco Polo found flourishing Nestorian communities. At Samarcand they had a church, of which he tells how its central column was upheld miraculously; he says that a brother of the Grand Khan was a Christian convert.[4] Near there is the province of Karkan, whose inhabitants are "for the most part Mahometans, with some Nestorian Christians."[5] At Kashkar the Nestorians have their own churches.[6] So Christianity spread into Tartary and Turkestan, at Balkh and Herat. In all these places in the 12th and 13th centuries we hear of Nestorian bishops who obeyed the Patriarch at Bagdad. A specially curious case is that of the land of Tenduch or Tenduk, just south of Lake Baikal. Its capital was the city Karakorum. Since the 11th century there was so flourishing a Nestorian Church here that the country and the Government were Christian. The prince was named Owang or Unk Khan. He was a Christian. The name seems to have been a hereditary one, passing from one sovereign to another. Owang is not unlike Ioannes. So through the Middle Ages in Europe grew up a wonderful legend of that distant Christian prince. By a natural exaggeration they made this head of a Christian com-
- ↑ Lequien: Or. Christ. ii. 1141.
- ↑ William Marsden's translation, chap. xxxv. (ed. by Thomas Wright, G. Newnes, 1904, p. 371). But these people may possibly have been Jacobites, as the Portuguese thought, when they came (ib., note) On the other hand, there are many authorities besides Marco Polo for their connection with the Nestorian Patriarch. Did they fluctuate from one sect to the other, like the people of Malabar?
- ↑ Avril: La Chaldée chrétienne, p. 16.
- ↑ Marco Polo, chap. xxxi. (ed. cit. p. 84).
- ↑ Chap. xxxii. (p. 85).
- ↑ Chap. xxx. (p. 83).
