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Title
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Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire 1453-1923
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Creator
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Charles A. Frazee
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Date
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1983
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Description
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Frazee situates the naming issue inside a concrete 19th-century history of the Church of the East and the emerging Chaldean Catholic hierarchy. He recounts the Roman attempt to stabilize the Mosul area by recognizing Yuhanna Hormizd as Chaldean catholicos in Mosul while approving Rabban Hormizd monastery’s constitution under Jibra’il Denbo. Tensions followed: Bishop Yusuf Audo of Mosul was shifted to Al-‘Amadiyah; two apostolic visitors were dispatched to reconcile factions; and in May 1832 Denbo and two companions were cut down by Kurdish raiders. Rome then kept a close watch by establishing a permanent Latin apostolic vicarage in Mosul. When Patriarch Yuhanna resigned shortly before his death on 16 August 1838, the synod chose Niqula Zaya, whom Rome confirmed in April 1840, though he insisted on residing in his Persian see.
Within that setting, Frazee describes how the ethnonym “Assyrian” entered Western usage. In 1820 James Rich of the British East India Company proclaimed he had discovered “Assyrian Christians,” and Europeans adopted the label for the Church of the East—eventually some community members did so too. Frazee calls this an unfortunate addition to the already misleading Catholic title “Chaldean,” producing a pair of confusing names for related but distinct bodies. He notes the influx of British and American missionaries who distributed Bibles and catechisms and tried to explain doctrine to local audiences. One consequence he judges positive was new public attention to the vulnerability of these Christians to Kurdish depredations. He cites the American Presbyterian Eli Smith’s encounter at Khosrowa with a Chaldean bishop, an elderly man in a long Kurdish cape, green turban, and ragged sheepskin pelisse, whose poverty was striking despite a Roman education and some familiarity with the West.
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire 1453–1923, Charles A. Frazee, 1983, p. 297.
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archive.org
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Contributor
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https://archive.org/details/catholicssultans0000fraz/page/n7/mode/2up
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Subject
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Church History
