A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The arrival of the Muslims proved terminal for the Sassanians. Within a decade in the 640s, the three-centuries-old empire was in ruins. Yazdgerd III, last ruling Sassanian shah, defeated and murdered, was buried not with Zoroastrian rites but by a bishop of the Church of the East; his son and heir fled all the way to China. There he was treated with respect, and one of his acts was to found the second monastery for Dyophysite Christianity to be sited in the capital, Chang’an.53 Yet this royal favour had all come all too late for the Church of the East. Now Christianity everywhere faced the consequences of the new prophecy from Arabia – consequences which are still unravelling in our own time.