Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 6.djvu/486

SYRIAN CHRISTIAN coercive measures over their subjects, they were soon won over by the stratagems of the subtle Archbishop. Thus supported, he commenced his visitation of the churches, and reduced them in A.D. 1599 by the decrees of the Synod of Diamper (Udayamperūr), a village about ten miles to the south-east of the town of Cochin. The decrees passed by the Synod were reluctantly subscribed to by Archdeacon George and a large number of Kathanars, as the native priests are called; and this practically converted the Malabar Church into a branch of the Roman Church. Literature sustained a very great loss at the hands of Menezes, "for this blind and enthusiastic inquisitor destroyed, like a second Omar, all the books written in the Syrian or Chaldæan language, which could be collected, not only at the Synod of Diamper, but especially during his subsequent circuit; for, as soon as he had entered into a Syrian Church, he ordered all their books and records to be laid before him, which, a few indifferent ones excepted, he committed to the flames, so that at present neither books nor manuscripts are any more to be found amongst the St. Thomé Christians."*

Immediately after the Synod of Diamper, a Jesuit Father, Franciscus Roz, a Spaniard by birth, was appointed Bishop of Angamāli by Pope Clement VIII. The title was soon after changed to that of Archbishop of Cranganūr. By this time, the rule of the Jesuits had become so intolerable to the Syrians that they resolved to have a Bishop from the East, and applied to Babylon, Antioch, Alexandria, and other ecclesiastical head-quarters for a Bishop, as if the ecclesiastical heads who presided over these places professed the same creed.