Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 1.djvu/223

Rh turbulent spirit of the monks, and the opposition which they had raised to Mutran Hanna, fearing lest his authority might be thwarted in the same way, would most gladly have abolished the conventual brotherhood.

I shall now endeavour to elicit some of the secret motives which led the See of Rome to appoint Mutran Zeyya to the vacant Patriarchate.18 In the first place, by so doing they got rid of the hereditary succession, and thus deprived the Beit-ool-Ab of that traditional importance which gave them a degree of influence among the people not likely to be exerted in favour of Papal encroachment. Secondly, Mar Zeyya was an élève of the Propaganda, and therefore a promising instrument for carrying out their designs. Thirdly, he was a Persian by birth, and consequently could lay claim to the protection of any of the foreign consuls in Turkey. The importance of this last consideration I must explain more in detail. Hitherto the community styling themselves "Chaldeans," had not been recognized by the Ottoman Porte. Mutran Hanna, like most of his predecessors, had received an imperial firman acknowledging him to be Patriarch of the Nestorians, which document the Romanists carefully secured on his death, and this was the only political sanction which Mar Zeyya possessed for exercising patriarchal jurisdiction over the Chaldeans. But this warrant was found to be of little value in the frequent appeals which the affairs of the community obliged him to make before the Turkish authorities; for, in the first place, it was not in his own name; and, secondly, it granted certain rights and privileges, not to a Chaldean, but to a Nestorian Patriarch, which he was not. To supply this deficiency, as also to carry out the designs of Rome towards the Chaldean community, which was now completely under her control, since the abrogation of the law of succession in the Beit-ool-Ab, the French government was solicited to appoint a consul to Mosul, for the express purpose of extending the benefit of her assumed protectorate over the further proceedings of the Latin missionaries. I say that this was the only conceivable ground of the appointment being made, since France has not the shadow of commercial interest in these parts whereupon to establish the necessity of such a measure. Through the intervention of the society of