page_title: Dioceses of the Church of the East to 1318
section_title: Arabia, Persia and Central Asia
hierarchical_section_title: Dioceses of the Church of the East to 1318 / Mongol period / Exterior provinces / Arabia, Persia and Central Asia
caption_attribution_description: Nestorian Tombstone Issyk Kul 1312.
context_page_description: At the height of its power, in the 10th century AD, the dioceses of the Church of the East numbered well over a hundred and stretched from Egypt to China. These dioceses were organised into six interior provinces in Mesopotamia, in the Church's Iraqi heartland, and a dozen or more second-rank exterior provinces. Most of the exterior provinces were located in Iran, Central Asia, India and China, testifying to the Church's remarkable eastern expansion in the Middle Ages. A number of East Syriac dioceses were also established in the towns of the eastern Mediterranean, in Palestine, Syria, Cilicia and Egypt.
context_section_description: By the end of the 13th century Christianity was also declining in the exterior provinces.  Between the 7th and 14th centuries Christianity gradually disappeared in Arabia and Persia.  There were at least five dioceses in northern Arabia in the 7th century and nine in Fars at the end of the 9th century, only one of which (the isolated island of Soqotra) survived into the 14th century.  There were perhaps twenty East Syriac dioceses in Media, Tabaristan, Khorasan and Segestan at the end of the 9th century, only one of which (Tus in Khorasan) survived into the 13th century.
  The East Syriac communities in Central Asia disappeared during the 14th century.  Continual warfare eventually made it impossible for the Church of the East to send bishops to minister to its far-flung congregations.  The blame for the destruction of the Christian communities east of Iraq has often been thrown upon the Turco-Mongol leader Timur, whose campaigns during the 1390s spread havoc throughout Persia and Central Asia.  There is no reason to doubt that Timur was responsible for the destruction of certain Christian communities, but in much of central Asia Christianity had died out decades earlier.  The surviving evidence, including a large number of dated graves, indicates that the crisis for the Church of the East occurred in the 1340s rather than the 1390s.  Few Christian graves have been found later than the 1340s, indicating that the isolated East Syriac communities in Central Asia, weakened by warfare, plague and lack of leadership, converted to Islam around the middle of the 14th century.
caption: East Syriac tombstone of 1312 from Issyk Kul, with Uighur inscription
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