Sassanian period The bishop David of
Maishan, who flourished
c.285, during the reign of the bishop
Papa of Seleucia-Ctesiphon (
c.280–315), left his seat to evangelise India. The Nestorian monk
Cosmas Indicopleustes, who visited the Christians of India around the middle of the 6th century, mentioned three distinct areas of Christian settlement in India: in northwest India, around the trading port of Calliana near
Mumbai, from which brass, sisam logs and cloth were exported; along the
Malabar coast in southern India 'in the land called Male, where the pepper grows' and
Sri Lanka (Sielediva). By the end of the Sassanian period the Christians of India had accepted the leadership of the church of
Fars, which also claimed Saint Thomas as its founder. Cosmas noted that the Christians of Calliana had a bishop appointed from Fars, while the Christians of the Malabar coast and Ceylon had priests and deacons but not bishops. The connection with Fars went back at least as far as the late 5th century, when the metropolitan
Maʿna of Rev Ardashir sent copies of his Syriac translations of Greek devotional works to India for the use of the Indian clergy.
Umayyad period The patriarch
Ishoʿyahb III (649–59) raised India to the status of a metropolitan province, probably because of the unsatisfactory oversight of the metropolitan
Shemʿon of Fars. A number of letters from Ishoʿyahb to Shemʿon have survived, in one of which Ishoʿyahb complained that Shemʿon had refused to consecrate a bishop for 'Kalnah' (the 'Calliana' of Cosmas Indicopleustes), because the Indian Christians had offended him in some way. According to the fourteenth-century writer ʿAbdishoʿ of Nisibis, the patriarch
Sliba-zkha (714–28) created metropolitan provinces for Herat, Samarqand, India and China. If ʿAbdishoʿ is right, India's status as a metropolitan province must have lapsed shortly after it was created by Ishoʿyahb III. An alternative, and perhaps more likely, possibility, is that Sliba-zkha consecrated a metropolitan for India, perhaps in response to an appeal from the Indian Christians, to fill the place of the bishop sent there by Ishoʿyahb half a century earlier.
Abbasid period After several centuries of intermittent dependence on the Persian-speaking metropolitans of Fars, who also boasted of their descent from the apostle Thomas, the Saint Thomas Christians of India were again brought under the authority of the patriarchs of Seleucia-Ctesiphon towards the end of the eighth century. The patriarch
Timothy I, who was determined to break the power of the bishops of
Rev Ardashir, definitively detached India from the province of Fars and made it a separate metropolitan province. There is also a tradition in the Indian church that two 'Syrian' bishops, Shapur and Peroz, were sent to Quilon from Mesopotamia in 823, the year of Timothy's death. They were accompanied by 'the famous man Sabrishoʿ', perhaps a metropolitan consecrated by Timothy for India. This tradition was recorded by Mattai Veticutel in the following words: In the year 823, East Syriac fathers again came, Mar Shapur and Mar Peroz, accompanied by the famous man Sabrishoʿ. They came to the town of Quilon, went to the king Shakirbirti, and asked for lands. The king gave them as much land as they wished. So they too built a church and town in the country of Quilon. Thereafter East Syriac bishops and metropolitans came more often by order of the catholicus, who used to send them. A few decades later, according to the sixteenth-century Portuguese writer Diogo do Couto, the Malabar church sent a delegation to Mesopotamia to ask for new bishops to be sent out to them. Their old bishops (perhaps Shapur and Peroz) were dead, and their church had now only one deacon surviving. The catholicus thereupon consecrated a metropolitan named Yohannan for India, and two suffragan bishops, one of whom, 'Mar Dua', was appointed to the island of Soqotra, and the other, Thomas, to 'Masin', traditionally identified with southern China. Yohannan fixed his metropolitan seat at Cranganore. These events seem to have taken place around 880, perhaps during the patriarchate of
Enosh. Neither India (Beth Hindaye) nor China (Beth Sinaye) are listed as metropolitan provinces of the Church of the East in the detailed list of metropolitan provinces and dioceses drawn up in 893 by
Eliya of Damascus. Eliya's list contains very few errors, and it is possible that neither province had a metropolitan at this period. This is certainly likely in the case of China, in the wake of the expulsion of Christians from the capital
Chang'an by the emperor
Wuzong in 845, though perhaps less so in the case of India.
Seljuq period According to the eleventh-century
Mukhtasar, a detailed list in Arabic of ecclesiastical provinces and dioceses of the Church of the East, the metropolitan province of India had been suppressed 'because it has become impossible to reach it'.
Mongol period At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Indian church was again dependent upon the Church of the East. The dating formula in the colophon to a manuscript copied in June 1301 in the church of Mar Quriaqos in
Cranganore mentions the patriarch
Yahballaha III (whom it curiously describes as Yahballaha V), and the metropolitan Yaʿqob of India. Cranganore, described in this manuscript as 'the royal city', was doubtless the metropolitan seat for India at this time. In the 1320s the anonymous biographer of the patriarch
Yahballaha III and his friend
Rabban Bar Sauma praised the achievement of the Church of the East in converting 'the Indians, Chinese and Turks'. India was listed as one of the Church of the East's 'provinces of the exterior' by the historian ʿAmr in 1348. == Appointment of East Syriac bishops for India, 1490–1503 ==