PC: European "Parsis"

The ancestors of the Indian Parsis lived in the mountains of western Iran for about a century before leaving for India by way of Hormuz, some time between 780 and 950 AD. What if some of them had gone instead to the Byzantine Empire? Could a medieval Christian ruler have conceivably extended them the same tolerance that they received from the Hindu Rajputs in Gujarat? Even if not, could they have eked out a marginal existence like European Jews?

I imagine a TL in which a small number of Zoroastrians spread into Europe after a century in Anatolia and Greece. They settle in an archipelago of cities, where they become involved in finance, banking, and trade. Culturally and genetically, they become heavily Europeanized, while maintaining their distinct religion. They speak a dialect of Pontic Greek, or a "Persian" dialect of the local language, but their magi maintain the study of Avestan for liturgical purposes. They are often a target of repression and violence, but they also obtain protection because of their usefulness to Christian rulers. In other words, they fill the same niche which in OTL was filled by the Jews. I figure they might become known as "Magi", in reference to the most prominent Zoroastrians in the Christian tradition.

Is this plausible? What sort of POD could deliver this result?
 
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I don't think so, honestly.
Jews in Europe had the benefit to having settled long enough, sometimes even before Christianisation, and to be considered as native. The status they recieved since Roman Empire eventually was in their favour and acknowledged up to the XIII century.

Zoroastrians, on the other hand, would be virtually unknown in Europe, except in Byzantium where I'm not sure (litteraly) if remembers of old Persian Wars wouldn't play in their defavour (or, inveresely, if these wouldn't play against a western migration) and didn't benefit of the same background.
Seeing their practices, I suspect they would be as pagans or more likely saracens (virtually a synonymous at this moment).
I doubt the correllation with Zoroastrian Magi would be done, at least not obviously. The Wise Kings were seen as christians (and venerated as Saints) and traditionally depicted as such : Gaspard as Indian, Melchior as Persian, Balthazar as Arabian.

You could, on the other hand, see them assimilated to one particularly, Melchior or more probably Gaspard, this group passing as Indian. Maybe in Ethiopian Church or Egyptian trough the Nestorian communauties, it could work, ending with more or less Zoroastrian communauties in Syria or East Africa.
But I've doubts for Orthodox or Catholic ones.

Admitting that we end with a communauty in Europe proper, you'll need regular exchanges with Persian or Indian communauties to kept them cohesive. Distance and subsequent difficulties are going to make this hard.
 
The Roma remained fairly cohesive, despite the vast distances separating them from their ancestral homeland. The Zoroastrians would have the added advantage of a common religion, a formal priesthood, and a strong taboo against exogamy.
 
The Roma remained fairly cohesive, despite the vast distances separating them from their ancestral homeland. The Zoroastrians would have the added advantage of a common religion, a formal priesthood, and a strong taboo against exogamy.

I'm not sure that a common religion and a distinct piresthood is an added advantage in medieval Europe. It would be actually the complete contrary in a time and place where religion, being the social referent, doesn't really deal that well with newcomers proffessing a new (for the aera) cult really distinct (while Judaism does have cultural and historical roots) from Christianism.

For the Roma people, they were really less cohesive than what you could think, being an agglomerate of different waves from India (temporally and geographically), gathering with them people found along the road in different migrations.
 
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