CHAPTER XI
THE CHURCH OF MALABAR
This outlying body of Christians does not demand a lengthy treatment here, for two reasons. In the first place, it is not really a special Church at all. The Christians of Malabar were originally simply one of the many missions throughout Asia founded by the East Syrians or Persians, dependent on the Katholikos of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. They followed their mother-Church into Nestorianism, used the same rite as she did, and were merely a distant portion of the Nestorian Church. Later came relations with the Jacobites. But again the Malabar Christians who submitted to the Jacobite Patriarch became simply Jacobites in India. In no case has Malabar itself anything to justify our reckoning it as a special Church, except its geographical position. Secondly, in its history the only important event is its reunion with Rome under the Portuguese in the 16th century. The majority of these people are still Uniates. The story of that union and account of the Uniates belong to our next volume. Here it will be enough to give an outline of the origin of Christianity in Malabar and some account of the schismatical Christians there.
1. The Foundation of the Church
When the Portuguese fleet under Vasco da Gama sailed into East Indian waters in 1498, the sailors found flourishing Christian communities established along the south-western coast of India,
