Patriarchate
Because the manner of his succession was resented by most of the Chaldean hierarchy, Nicholas I Zayʿa had throughout his short reign limited control over his bishops. He began by directing Joseph Audo to leave Amid for ʿAmadiya, so that he could properly administer his metropolitan province, but eventually agreed to let him reside at Alqosh. He also, like his predecessor, had to reckon with the intransigence of the monks of the monastery of Rabban Hormizd, and friends of the patriarch said later that he would have closed down the monastery if he had dared. Instead he permitted 45 elderly monks, including the priest Mikha'il, to retire to lay life. This indirect approach so reduced the number of monks that the monastery thereafter lost much of its former influence.
In 1843, after the Nestorian patriarch Shemʿon XVII Abraham (1820–61) declined to join a Kurdish expedition against ʿAmadiya, the Kurdish emirs Nurallah Khan and Bedr Khan Beg attacked the mountain Nestorians of the Hakkari region of eastern Turkey, with the connivance of the Ottoman authorities. The Kurds invaded the Tiyari, Walto and Dez districts, sacking the Nestorian town of Ashitha and burning most of the villages. About 10,000 men out of a total population of about 50,000 in these three districts were killed, and many women and children were carried off by the Kurds as captives. Mar Shemʿon's elderly mother was raped and then beheaded, and her murderers threw the corpse into the Zab. Those who survived the massacre, including the patriarch himself, took refuge in Mosul.
The Kurdish attack on the mountain Nestorians had indirect consequences for the Chaldean Church. Early in 1843 an attempt by Zayʿa to reform the church calendar by adopting the Western date for Easter aroused strong resentment among the Mosul Chaldeans, and provoked a movement, in which the Anglican missionary George Percy Badger was implicated, to depose him and replace him with Yohannan Hormizd's nephew Eliya. Eliya was unwilling to challenge the patriarch's authority, and Zayʿa's opponents turned instead to the Nestorian patriarch Shemʿon XVII Abraham, then a refugee in Mosul, urging him to lay claim to the patriarchate himself. Zayʿa and the French missionaries who supported him complained vigorously to the Turkish authorities, and wrote to the British embassy in Constantinople to protest at Badger's interference. The Turkish government was initially reluctant to intervene, because of Zayʿa's ambiguous status as a Persian national, and Zayʿa finally took his cause to Constantinople, where through the influence of the French embassy he obtained a firman recognising the Chaldean church as a separate millet and acknowledging him as patriarch. The Anglican mission was withdrawn from Mosul, and Badger returned to England in disgrace.
After his return from Constantinople in 1845, Zayʿa did what he could to undermine the influence of the old patriarchal family. Mar Eliya was not allowed to exercise his episcopal functions, and the monks of the monastery of Rabban Hormizd were encouraged to claim a number of strips of property around Alqosh which may once have belonged to the monastery but had for years been considered as possessions of the patriarchal family. The French consul supported these claims, and the disputed lands were awarded to the monastery. According to Badger, 'two hundred and fifty persons were deprived of their patrimony and reduced to beggary through this joint agency.' Badger persuaded the British consul to intervene, and part of the property was eventually restored to its previous owners.
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