been placed under a ban by Nerses Katholikos, under which name he is probably alluding to Nerses III. (640-661). [195] He represents them as joining hands with certain refugees from the Albanian Church (Eastern Caucasus) who were opposed to the use of images. There is at least a family resemblance between these sectaries of the eighth century and those who, under the name of Thonraki (Thonraketzi), suffered persecution in the tenth and eleventh centuries at the hands of the Armenian State Church. Their fiercest adversary, Gregory Magistros, who in the middle of the eleventh century carried fire and sword into their mountain retreats, alludes to them as having imbibed the poison of Paul of Samosata, and adds the important statement that their proximate founder was one Sembat, and that for 170 years they had been continuously admonished and anathematised by successive patriarchs and bishops of Armenia as well as of Albania. [196] Their seats in Armenia were in the radial mountain mass of the Ala Dagh (Thonrak), in Sasun, south of Mush, and in the neighbourhood of Khinis, whence were derived the band who were the object of perhaps the latest persecution, that of 1837-45. It was on this occasion that the documentary proof of their professions was wrested from them and taken to Edgmiatsin. It is the book entitled the Key of Truth. The plain of Khinis contained members of this sect into quite recent times; but they suffered severely owing to the customary powers possessed by the heads of the Gregorian community in Turkey to inflict corporal punishment upon members of their own flock. The sectaries were not recognised by the Government as an independent religion. Not many years ago the remnant came over to the American missionaries and embraced the Protestant faith.