This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
By the end of the thirteenth century, the Church of the East was the most geographically extensive Christian communion anywhere in the world, with roughly two hundred bishoprics stretching from the Mediterranean to India and China, the same church whose mission had reached the Tang court centuries before. The campaigns of the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur across the final decades of the fourteenth century broke that reach almost entirely.
Timur's armies carried the violence directly to the church's own communities. Nestorian congregations across Central Asia, Persia and Mesopotamia were massacred, forcibly converted or scattered as the campaigns advanced, and by Timur's own death in 1405 only around seven of the church's former two hundred bishoprics still functioned, a collapse of more than nine in every ten.
The communities that survived regrouped in two places far apart from each other: mainly in the mountains of Kurdistan, between the upper reaches of the Tigris, and separately, much further away, along India's Malabar Coast. What this changed for Christianity's spread was the effective end of the Church of the East as a geographically vast communion: the once multi continental church that had carried the faith from Sasanian Persia to Tang China seven centuries earlier never again held anything close to its former extent, surviving only in isolated remnants rather than as the connected network it had been.