Christian Communities, Central Asia, 600–1500
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prior to the advent of Islam, Syriac Christianity spread into eastern Khurasan, Bactria, and Sogdiana; Herat, Merv, and Samarkand were all important cities that received metropolitan bishops. Even after the Muslim conquest of Central Asia and subsequent Islamization, Christianity continued to spread among the Sogdians and various Turkic groups, including the Qarluqs and later the Keraits or Onguts. As early as the eighth or ninth century, Christianity was established in the Uyghur Kingdom of Turfan, as testified by manuscript fragments found there. Various sources indicate that there were Christian communities around the Tarim Basin from the tenth to twelfth centuries, with Kashgar the site of a metropolitan bishop. Also in the twelfth century, we hear of Christianity among the Qipchaq Turks. Under the Mongols, Christianity flourished again, thanks to marriage alliances established with the Keraits and Onguts. Besides those who married Mongol rulers, other Christians held positions of influence in the court administration or military and a Turkic monk was even elected patriarch Yahballaha III of the Church of the East. Marco Polo and other sources give valuable information on Christian communities under the Mongols, as do hundreds of gravestones from the time. The end of medieval Christianity in Central Asia seems to coincide with the conversion of Mongol rulers to Islam in the early fourteenth century. By the fifteenth century it had likely all but disappeared, apart from relics of Christian worship, perhaps no longer understood by those who maintained them.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.060 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".