Nestorian Persians, Mar Sapor and Mar Perog, the former of whom has been identified with the Sapor to whom the grant of land was made as recorded in the copperplate. The Syrian Christians were now important people in Malabar, both socially and politically. But before long their Church declined in missionary fervour and religious vitality. It has never developed any intellectual energy or made any contribution to theology.
When Cheraman Perumal, the last emperor of Kerala, became a Mohammedan and died while on a visit to Arabia, the country came under Mussulman rule. We now reach an almost blank period of five hundred years in the history of the Syrian Church in India, during which, however, the Christians were so powerful that at one time they had their own kings. Subsequently they came under the government of Cochin. By this time the Church had become spiritually torpid. The ceremonies were duly performed. As far as we can see, they were the chief functions of religion. Meanwhile the Christians lived as a superior close caste, so completely had their old missionary zeal died out. They even came to imitate the Hindoos in caste regulations of diet and avoidance of pollution.
The next period in the history of Christianity in India is that of the Roman Catholic missions which resulted from the great religious revival in the Western Church during the thirteenth century, and were carried on by those wonderful democratic missionary bodies, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. During the years 1321 to 1323, Jordanus, a Frenchman of the Dominican order, the author of the Mirabilia, was in Malabar. Thence he wrote a circular letter to his brethren of the two orders of Friars, commending India as a sphere for missionary activity. Nothing is more interesting in this story than the combination abroad of the orders the members of which were rivals at home. Jordanus the Dominican was accompanied by four Franciscans when he embarked for Quilon. A storm drove them on the island of Salsette, near Tana, where they were kindly received by the Nestorian Christians. Describing
