which they still hold fragments. We need now only add that Persia became an independent state in 1499. It had gone through many vicissitudes already, and had suffered cruelly from the Tatars. Meanwhile, the Persians, now all Moslems, except for a poor remnant of persecuted Mazdæans and the (Syrian) Christian Church, had evolved a Moslem heresy of their own which expressed their national feeling. The religion of Persia was Islam in the Shiah[1] form. In 1499 a certain Ismail founded an independent Persian Shiah state, hating and continually fighting the Sunni[2] Turks. That state still exists, though now under a foreign dynasty, the Khajars, founded by Aga Mohammed Khan in 1794.
This brings us to the end of the political history of these parts. It forms the background of all our further story; it is well to keep in mind who were the successive rulers of the Christians with whom we are now concerned.
2. The Church of Edessa
There was, of course, no Nestorian Church before Nestorius (428–431). However, as we shall see, the people who took up his cause and went into schism for it were the extreme Eastern Church round about Edessa and in Persia. Before his time the causes of their separation had already begun to work. Moreover, most of the special characteristics of the later Nestorian sect are really pre-Nestorian; its liturgy, customs, much of its canon law, and so on, come from its old Catholic days. The history of this most Eastern province of the Church is perhaps the least generally known of any part of Christendom. We may, then, begin profitably by an account of the spread of Christianity in these parts, and their story down to the arrival of the heresy which cut them off in the 5th century.
The city of Edessa, capital of the kingdom of Osroene, is the centre from which Christianity spread through East Syria and
- ↑ Šī‘ah, "following "; a group of heresies based on the common idea that ‘Ali ibn Abī Ṭālib was the lawful successor of Mohammed. It has evolved further mystic and pantheist developments.
- ↑ Sunni, a believer in the Sunnah (path = tradition), the name of the majority of Moslems, again divided into sects.
