As for myself, I was specially glad to be in this famous old city, for it is located on the Tigris which I was almost as eager to see as the Euphrates. The names of both of these celebrated rivers had ever been associated in my mind from my earliest youth and, seeing their tawny waters for the first time, they evoked many pleasant memories of boyhood days when I loved to picture to myself the remarkable peoples who dwelt in the fertile land bounded by these two great waterways, peoples whose marvelous achievements impressed me more then than did, in maturer years, the matchless deeds of those incomparable men who dwelt on the banks of the Nile and the Tiber. But my chief reason for rejoicing on our arrival at Mosul was that I there had a rare opportunity to complete observations which, during the greater part of our journey, I had been making on the condition and influence of what are known as the Eastern Churches. I do not speak of an “Eastern Church,” about which so much has been written, for such an organization, as contradistinguished from a Western Church, is mere fiction. The noted Venetian traveler, Marco Polo, in writing of the inhabitants of Mosul, declares: There is a kind of people called Arabi and these worship Mohammed.[318] Then there is another description of people who are called Nestorian and Jacobite Christians. These have a Patriarch whom they call the Jatolic [he means Catholic] and this Patriarch creates Archbishops and Abbots and Prelates of all other degrees and sends them into every quarter, as to India, to Baudas [Bagdad] or to Cathay, just as the Pope of Rome does in Latin countries. For you must know that though there is a very great number of Christians in those countries, they are all Jacobites and Nestorians; Christians, indeed, but not in the fashion enjoined by the Pope of Rome, for they come short in several points of the faith.[319] Nearly five and a half centuries after the illustrious Venetian traveler had dictated these lines, the erudite historian and Orientalist, von Hammer-Purgstall, referring to the inhabitants of the terraced city of Mardin, located between Edessa and Mosul, wrote: “There Sunnis and Shias, Catholic and Schismatic Armenians, Jacobites, Nestorians, Chaldæans, Sun, Fire, Calf and Devil worshipers dwell one over the head of the other.”[320] These two quotations from writers who lived in such widely separated periods give one a fair idea of what has long been the religious affiliations of the greater part of the population of Mesopotamia and what, with slight changes, they are still to-day. Dismissing the Moslems and Pagans just mentioned as without the purview of this chapter, a few pages on the different Christian bodies above-mentioned will aid the reader to form an intelligent estimate of the present condition of some of these Churches of the East and of their relations to one another.