BASED ON WESTERN DATA GENESIS AI - The “CHURCH OF THE EAST”. For centuries, they were likely the largest congregation of Christianity. While they never anathematised Nestorius, they never adopted his teachings, and in turn his teachings were not “Nestorianism” themselves. From the 7th to the 13th centuries, they formed the majority in Syria and Iraq (as the Copts did in Egypt), and they spread eastwards. Although they did not proselytize Moslems, they proselytized everybody else, and were supported by the caliphate as a valued elite class. During the Mongol era, it seemed that the khans might even permanently convert to Christianity under the Church of the East. For several years, the Middle East was ruled by “NESTORIAN MONGOLS”. After Tamerlane, coupled with a similar clamping down on foreign influences in the post-Mongol Ming dynasty of China, the Church of the East was confined to the Levant and the “St. Thomas Christians” in INDIA. It was only in the years of the Great War, when the nationalist, nominally constitutional “young Turks” triumvirate deposed the Sultan and butchered 100s of thousands of Arab Christians, that these communities were diminished to the tiny percentages we know today. The St. Thomas Christians have splintered, with a faction uniting with the Catholic Portuguese and the other returning to the Antiochene Patriarchate.
One of the pretexts of the First Crusade in 1095 AD was the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher by the Mad Caliph of the Fatimid dynasty, who was a Shia Muslim in 1009 AD. The Sunni Caliphs actually protected the Church. The Sunnis retook Jerusalem in 1071 AD. Then the Shia Fatimids retook the city in 1098 AD and massacred the Sunni Muslims. Then the crusaders arrived and massacred the Jews and Muslims in 1099 AD. Sunni Muslim Saladin deposed the Fatimid Caliphate in 1171 AD. He reconquered Jerusalem in 1187 AD. He made a deal with King Richard I the Lionheart of England to protect Christian pilgrims between the port of Jaffa and Jerusalem
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