Mandaean

Mandaean communities in southern Mesopotamia attracted the attention of European missionaries in the sixteenth century. Portuguese Jesuits encountered Mandaeans near the Strait of Hormuz in 1559 and called them Christians of Saint John. The name reflected their reverence for John the Baptist, although they followed their own religious tradition.

In Basra, Carmelite missionaries used the same name during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Across the border in Iran, Mandaeans suffered persecution under Qajar rule in the 1780s.