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Rh effected until the eighteenth century. After Saladin's capture of Beirut (1191) thousands of Maronites migrated to Cyprus, where two thousand of their descendants still live, but those who stayed developed into what may be con- sidered the national church of Lebanon. This church still retains its Syriac liturgy and its non-celibate priesthood, despite its ties to Rome. The 1952 census gives the number of Maronites in Lebanon as 377,544, more than any other religious body in that republic. Recent Maronite emigrants have carried their rite into Italy, France, North and South America, Australia and other parts of the civilized world.

The Armenian and Jacobite communities in the crusad- ing period likewise entered into closer friendly relations than ever before with the Latins, but the rapprochement led to no union. Both of these churches, like the Coptic, are in- dependent descendants of the Monophysite rite. The triumph of the church of the Syrians over those of Armenia, Egypt and Ethiopia was another conspicuous achievement of Syrian society and culture. All three used their respective vernaculars in their liturgies and survived primarily as vehicles of national spirit reacting against foreign domina- tion. The Jacobite remnant in Syria and Lebanon, who prefer to be designated as Old Syrian, have a patriarchal seat at Horns. Those of them who in recent times joined the Roman Catholic Church form the Syrian Catholic church with its patriarchal seat in Lebanon. The Armenian Orthodox church has a similar Uniat offshoot.

The East Syrian church — called Nestorian by Roman Catholics as a stigma of heresy in contradistinction to those of its members who joined Rome as Uniats and became exclusively known as Chaldaeans — was not active in medieval Syria, as its patriarch had moved to Baghdad in 762 and its unparalleled missionary efforts had been directed eastward into Central Asia, India and China. Their cultured traces are still visible in the Syriac characters in which Mongol and Manchu were written and in the technique and Rh