no other country"; and Nicolo Conti calls the
Chinese _Interiores Indi_, which Mr. Winter Jones misrenders "natives of
Central India."[1] St. Epiphanius (end of 4th century) says _India_ was
formerly divided into nine kingdoms, viz., those of the (1) _Alabastri_,
(2) _Homeritae_, (3) _Azumiti_, and _Dulites_, (4) _Bugaei_, (5) _Taiani_,
(6) _Isabeni_, and so on, several of which are manifestly provinces
subject to Abyssinia.[2] Roger Bacon speaks of the "Ethiopes de Nubia et
ultimi illi _qui vocantur Indi, propter approximationem ad Indiam_." The
term _India Minor_ is applied to some Ethiopic region in a letter which
Matthew Paris gives under 1237. And this confusion which prevailed more or
less till the 16th century was at the bottom of that other confusion,
whatever be its exact history, between Prester John in remote Asia, and
Prester John in Abyssinia. In fact the narrative by Damian de Goes of the
Embassy from the King of Abyssinia to Portugal in 1513, which was printed
at Antwerp in 1532, bears the title "_Legatio Magni_ Indorum
_Imperatoris_," etc. (_Ludolf, Comment._ p. 2 and 75-76; _Epiph. de
Gemmis_, etc., p. 15; _R. Bacon, Opus Majus_, p. 148; _Matt. Paris_, p.
372.)
Wadding gives a letter from the Pope (Alex. II.) under date 3rd Sept.
1329, addressed to the _Emperor of Ethiopia_, to inform him of the
appointment of a Bishop of Diagorgan. As this place is the capital of a
district near Tabriz (Dehi-Khorkhan) the papal geography looks a little
hazy.
NOTE 2.--The allegation against the Abyssinian Christians, sometimes
extended to the whole Jacobite Church, that they accompanied the rite of
Baptism by branding with a hot iron on the face, is pretty old and
persistent.
The letter quoted from Matt. Paris in the preceding note relates of the
Jacobite Christians "who occupy the kingdoms between Nubia and India,"
that some of them brand the foreheads of their children before Baptism
with a hot iron (p. 302). A quaint Low-German account of the East, in a
MS. of the 14th century, tells of the Christians of India that when a
Bishop ordains a priest he fires him with a sharp and hot iron from the
forehead down the nose, and the scar of this wound abides till the day of
his death. And this they do for a token that the Holy Ghost came on the
Apostles with fire. Frescobaldi says those called the Christians of the
Girdle were the sect which baptized by branding on the head and temples.
Clavijo says there is such a sec
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