Indian Christianity

HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN INDIA : M. M. NINAN
A page of The Travels of Marco Polo. and the Handwritten notes by Christopher Columbus on the
Latin edition of Marco Polo's Le livre des merveilles
1323
French Dominican friar Jordanus Catalani de Severac arrives in Kollam (Quilon).
Two letters from Jordanus are found in a MS. in the national library at Paris (in 1839,—Bibliothèque
du Roi—MS. No. 5,006, p. 182), entitled Liber de ætatibus, etc. The first of these is dated from Caga,
12th October, 1321. In his second letter, dated in January, 1324, Jordanus relates how he had
started from Tabriz to go to Cathay, but embarked first for Columbum with four Franciscan
missionaries, and how they were driven by a storm to Tana, in India, where they were received by
the Nestorians. From these letters we learn that he travelled , to the extreme south of the Indian
peninsula, especially to Columbum, Quilon (Kollam) in Travancore. Jordanus' words may imply that
he had already started a mission there before October 1321.
1329
The erection of the first Roman Catholic Diocese in India, in the state of Kerala, being the Diocese of
Quilon (or Kollam); re-erected on September 1, 1886. Pope John XXII (in captivity in Avignon) made
Quilon as the first Diocese in the whole of Indies, as suffragan to the Archdiocese of Sultany in
Persia, through the decree Romanus Pontifix. French Dominican friar Jordanus Catalani de Severac
is appointed as the first Bishop of Quilon.
1490-1503
East Syrian mission to India: two Chaldean bishops, John and Thomas, in Kerala. Between 1490
and 1503 the Church of the East responded to the request of a mission to Mesopotamia from the
East Syrian Christians of the Malabar Coast of India for bishops to be sent out to them. In 1490 two
Christians from Malabar arrived in Gazarta to petition the patriarch Shemʿon IV (Basidi) to consecrate
a bishop for their church. Two monks of the monastery of Mar Awgin were consecrated bishops and
were sent to India. Shemʿon IV died in 1497, to be followed by the short-reigned Shemʿon V, who
died in 1502. His successor Eliya V (1502-03) consecrated three more bishops for India in April 1503.
These bishops sent a report to the patriarch from India in 1504, describing the condition of the East
Syrian church in India and reporting the recent arrival of the Portuguese. Eliya had already died by
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