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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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