Following the Mongol invasions and fall of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, the last remaining Christian state in the Middle East, in 1375, the Syriac Orthodox Church fell into a state of disarray, and its adherents were scattered. In 1422, Baselius Simon, Syriac Orthodox Metropolitan bishop of Jerusalem, met with Pope Gabriel V of Alexandria, head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, a fellow miaphysite church, and requested to be consecrated Patriarch of Antioch, as Philoxenus II had died the year before. Baselius told Gabriel of the situation of the church in Syria whereby there were few remaining bishops and Islamic persecution disallowed them from holding a synod to elect a new patriarch.