Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 1.djvu/311

Rh of the plains, which makes their settlement in the mountains consequent upon the tyranny and oppression exercised towards the Christians of Media and Persia by the sanguinary Tatars.—"After the fall of the Caliphs, the power of the Chaldean [Nestorian] Patriarch in the East rapidly declined. The sect endured persecution from the Tatar sovereigns, and had to contend against even more formidable rivals in the [Roman] Catholic missionaries, who now began to spread themselves over Asia. The first great persecution of the Chaldeans [Nestorians] appears to have taken place during the reign of Kassan, the son of Arghoun, the grandson of Hulaku. But it is to the merciless Tamerlane that their reduction to a few wanderers in the provinces of Assyria must be attributed. He followed them with relentless fury, destroyed their churches, and put to the sword all who were unable to escape to the almost inaccessible fastnesses of the Coordish mountains." This would bring down the arrival of the Nestorian colonies in Coordistan to the middle of the fourteenth century, and I am strongly inclined to believe that previous to that period there were no Christians inhabiting that district. Had it been otherwise we should certainly find some account of them in the more ancient histories of this sect; but among the many catalogues of Nestorian bishoprics still extant there is not one mentioned which answers to any of those now existing in Coordistan proper. Moreover there are no architectural or other monumental records in the mountains which argue in their behalf a greater antiquity of residence than the period generally assigned to them. From the 14th century we may reckon the decay of the literature of the Nestorians, and this circumstance, while it goes to establish that era as the true date of their flight into Coordistan, accounts also for the fact that no author of any repute is known to have sprung up among them.

Thus thrown into the centre of Coordistan, which at that time we can conceive to have been but thinly populated, their own prowess, added to the natural strength of the mountain fastnesses which they occupied, would soon gain for the Nestorians the respect if not the fear of the Coordish tribes. The country