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518 merchant Cosmas, who was surnamed Indicopleustes on account of the fame of his voyage in the Indian seas early in the sixth century. He wrote a curious book, full of strange fancies, entitled Universal Christian Topography. In this work Cosmas states that he found a church with clergy and a congregation in Ceylon, and also Christians "in the land called Malabar, where the pepper grows." At Caliana—the coast country south of Bombay—there was a bishop who held his appointment from Persia. Returning to Ceylon, Cosmas adds, "The island hath also a church of Persian Christians who have settled there from Persia, and a deacon, and all the apparatus of public worship." If this is correct, we must regard the Malabar Church as in the first place consisting of refugees from persecution in Persia, like the Huguenots in England and the Pilgrim Fathers in America. But the Ceylon refugees never appear to have associated with the natives, and consequently their Church melted away and in course of time disappeared. Cosmas was himself a Nestorian and a friend of the catholicos in Persia. He would therefore look on the co-religionists whom he had discovered to his surprise in these remote parts with peculiar interest. The Persian navigators who came into communication with the Malabar coast travelled further and carried the gospel to the Coromandel coast, and so were brought into contact with the great empire of the Pallavas.

While satisfactory documentary evidence of the origin of Christianity in these parts is lacking, this is partly made up for by the irrefragable testimony of monuments. In the year 1547 a cross with an inscription in Pahlavi, the language of the Persian Empire at the time of the Sassanian dynasty, was found on the hill now known as St. Thomas's Mount at Mailapore, the chief town of this district. The date assigned to it is the seventh or at latest the eighth century. There is a similar cross with the same inscription in a church at Cottayam in North