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The Church of Antioch played a central role in the first three ecumenical councils that shaped the doctrine and structure of the Orthodox Church. After the split over Chalcedon a struggle developed within the Church for the control of the patriarchate, with the Roman emperors generally favoring those in favor of Chalcedon, but occasionally also supporting those who opposed it. In 518 the anti-Chalcedon patriarch, St. [[Severus of Antioch]], was exiled from the city and never returned. Since then the patriarchs of the Syriac Orthodox Church have changed the seat of their patriarchate several times. Aleppo, Malatya, Diyarbakir, Mardin, and Homs all served as seats of the Patriarchs of Antioch, who only moved to Damascus in 1959.
Despite its glorious past the Syriac Orthodox Church is today a small remnant of what it once was due to the persecution of the East Romans in the 500s and 600s that was followed by the arrival of Islam, the atrocities of the Crusaders in the 1000s and 1100s, the depredations of the Mongols, and the genocides conducted under the Ottoman Turks and Kurds in the late 1800s and early 1900s in the heartlands of the Church in upper Mesopotamia (known as the Sayfo or Sword). Despite all of this the Church has continued to produce great scholars, theologians, and saints through the centuries, among them Sts. [[Jacob of Edessa ]] and [[Gregory of Ebroyo ]] ('Bar Hebraeus').
==Church Worldwide Today==
