Oxford history of the christian church

2. Ecclesiastical organization within the various Latin conquests.

(i) Greece and the Cyclades.

Most of the Byzantine bishops in the conquered lands shared the views expressed in the capital. Innocent's instructions were that bishops already consecrated were to be left undisturbed provided that they swore obedience to the papacy (which of course included the Latin metropolitans and Patriarch). The full Latin rite with unction was not to be insisted on for those already consecrated. When the Latin archbishop of Athens tried to impose this on the Greek Theodore of Euboea (who had submitted to Rome) he lost his case. But very few of the Greek prelates accepted papal primacy of jurisdiction. Most left their sees and either went to Byzantine centres, such as Nicaea and Epirus, or they drifted from place to place in comparative poverty, like the former archbishop of Athens, Michael Choniates, who wandered round and then lived for some years near Athens on the rather bleak island of Kea (which was in Greek hands). The archbishop of Patras seems for a time to have taken refuge in the inaccessible monastery of Megaspelaion high up in a steep ravine in the hills south of the gulf of Corinth. The metropolitans of Crete, Mitylene, and others went to Nicaea. Those in the Latin kingdom of Thessalonica were best off due to the proGreek policy of its rulers.

As the piecemeal occupation of central and southern Greece and the islands proceeded the Latins had to deal with the disturbed conditions created by the rift between the two branches of the Christian Church. At the higher level of diocesan organization this meant the appointment of Latin metropolitans and suffragans in the deserted sees and to some extent the rearrangement of the dio ceses. ¹² It meant making provision for the western religious orders who came flooding in, finding out where Greek monasteries had been deserted or could be taken over by the Latins and which Greek abbots had promised obedience to Rome, if only by lip-service, ascertaining where cathedral chapters could be filled with Latin nominees. Generally the Greek monasteries were left unharassed. For instance the former archbishop of Athens corresponded freely with houses in his old diocese, Kaisariani and St John the Hunter, both on the slopes of Mount Hymettus. But the deserted monastery of Daphni outside Athens was taken by the Cistercians, an order for which the lord of Athens, Otto de la Roche, had a special devotion. The canons regular of the Templars went to the metropolitan church in Athens, the famous Panagia Atheniotissa, the Parthenon of ancient Greece, and now the Latin cathedral of Notre Dame, following (so Innocent III hoped) the usages and customs of Notre Dame of Paris. ¹³

It is clear that one crucial point in the early days of the ecclesiastical settlement was revenue and church property. From the very outset of the conquest this had been in dispute between the crusaders and the Church and it recurs again and again in Innocent's vast correspondence. In Romania church property had been secularized and for the most part restoration was virtually impossible. Further, some important sources of revenue were out of reach of the Latins. Hagia Sophia, for instance, had drawn considerable revenue from its properties in a region between Smyrna and Prinobaris, known for this reason as 'Hagiosophitike chora' and this was now part of the kingdom of Nicaea. ¹⁴ Whether the funds were simply taken over by the Byzantine Patriarch of Constantinople in Nicaea is not clear. With the establishment of a dual and often mutually hostile ecclesiastical system there must have been many instances of this kind.

The Greeks in what was now Latin territory were hardly in a position to protest at the wholesale plundering of ecclesiastical property but the Latin Church could do so. It was agreed by the Latins that some compensation should be made for the wholesale seizure in the first days of victory. A carefully worked-out procedure was laid down. The laity in Romania were to hand over to the Latin Church one-fifteenth of their property outside Constantinople and the same proportion in any lands not yet conquered. Laity were to pay the customary annual Latin tithe. Monasteries within and without the capital were to belong to the Church, presumably with their scattered and often wealthy property, though to ensure this must have meant endless work for the threeman commission set up to settle their disputes. This attempt to compensate and stabilize was agreed in March 1206 between the Church (the legate find Patriarch) ¹⁵ and the acting moderator Henry of Flanders (his brother Baldwin I had been captured by the Bulgarians in April 1205). It was subsequently modified, substituting one-twelfth, and then one-eleventh, for the one-fifteenth.

In the kingdom of Thessalonica and in the territory north of Corinth a different arrangement was made. At the Parlement of Ravennica in 1210 it was agreed, and it was possible, to restore church property. Churchmen were to be free from lay jurisdiction and impositions. But whether Latin or Greek they were to pay the acrosticon (crustica), the Byzantine land tax. The sons of ecclesiastics were subject to feudal military service unless they were ordained, and there were various regulations to meet the contingency of nonpayment of the acrosticon. This concordat laid down what became the general practice in the feudalized Latin principalities. ¹⁶

Such initial official arrangements needed a good deal of supplementation and in practice inevitably varied from place to place, and in some areas were constantly fluctuating. This was particularly so when territory changed hands, as when the Byzantines won back part of their lost lands. Success of this kind was followed by the immediate displacement of the Latin bishop by a Greek Orthodox ecclesiastic. The Latin bishop then became a titular and made what arrangements he could, often returning to the West. After the Byzantine recapture of Constantinople in 1261 the Latin Patriarch was turned out and eventually assigned in 1314 by Urban V to Venetian Euboea (Negroponte, with his see at Euripos) though also retaining his patriarchal title. Here he was in possession of a secure base until the Turkish occupation in 1470. ¹⁷ It was however in mainland Greece that land most frequently changed hands with inevitable ecclesiastical upheavals in the higher ranks as well as financial problems over rival claims to church property. ¹⁸

Within areas dominated by Latins for all, or most, of the period before the Turkish conquest the measures of control over the Orthodox Church and the unofficially permitted degree of toleration largely depended on the policy of the ruling Latin authority and on local personalities and conditions. The principle of obedience to Rome had to be accepted which normally meant a Latin episcopate since with rare exceptions Greek bishops were not willing to conform, though a few seem to have paid lip-service to this ruling. The Greek rite was permitted with certain modifications, such as confirmation only by bishops, or Latin anointing on consecration. Within the general framework laid down by the papacy, and occasionally more liberally interpreted, as for instance in the more sympathetic approach of Innocent IV, different patterns emerged distinguishing the Peloponnese and Cyclades from the Venetian possessions and from Cyprus. ¹⁹

The greater part of the Peloponnese (Morea) was in the hands of the Burgundian Villehardouin family until it passed to the Angevins in 1278. Here after initial resistance the Greek archons (the leading landowners and imperial officials) were integrated into the lower ranks of the western feudal hierarchy and there was a comparatively peaceful symbiosis since the conquerors needed the co-operation of the native magnates. In the ecclesiastical sphere many of the higher clergy left rather than accept papal primacy. The archbishop of Ochrida, Demetrius Chomatianus, spoke of many churchmen from the Peloponnese who had fled to Epirus ²⁰ and others found a similar refuge in the Byzantine kingdom of Nicaea. But it is unlikely that there was a mass exodus of rural priests (papades) and monks from the villages and monasteries in the hilly regions of the Peloponnese. In fact attempts had to be made to limit the numbers of priests allowed to each group of households served. This was because certain exemptions from exactions were found to tempt men into the priesthood. The ecclesiastical problems recorded in the Peloponnese seem to have been largely disputes between higher members of the hierarchy and secular authorities and were often of a financial nature. It was possible for the more humble papas to follow agelong Orthodox tradition in matters of the Greek rite and everyday usage. In the second half of the fourteenth century the Greek version of the original French Chronicle of the Morea relates how the leaders (archontes) of the Morea obtained from Geoffrey Villehardouin in the previous century the promise that no Frank would force them to change their faith for the faith of the Franks or their custom and laws of the Romans. ²¹ This version was written by a Greek feudatory and its tone is friendly towards the Franks, illustrating the measure of tolerance which obtained and yet at the same time showing that there had been no complete integration, since there was evidently room for a Greek version to be read to an audience of Greek-speaking feudatories. The main barrier here, as elsewhere, was religion. It was extremely rare in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to find evidence of a Greek moving to the Latin rite, though there must have been some Latins who went to Greek churches since in 1322 this practice was fiercely condemned by Pope John XXII, ²² and there are instances during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries of conversions to Orthodoxy (mostly Italian names). ²³

In the Cyclades the islands were occupied by Italian families and here from the first there was little tension. The Latin Duchy of the Archipelago was under Marco Sanudo with his seat in Naxos. The conquerors were popular with the Greek islanders who welcomed protection from pirates and also from rapacious Byzantine taxcollectors and enjoyed growing economic prosperity under the new regime which did not succumb to the Ottomans until the sixteenth century. Their rulers were wisely tolerant in religious matters, though some ecclesiastical property and some local churches were inevitably taken over at the outset such as the small church of Aimamas at Potamia in the interior which after the Ottoman conquest stood crumbling into ruins in the gardens of what is still Latin church property. Oral tradition says that for long years a Greek priest used to go there once a year to say the Divine Liturgy. Under the Latins the capital moved from the interior to the new coastal seaport, the Chora, where on the summit of the steep hill above the harbour Marco Sanudo built the Venetian walled Castro and inside it an attractive little Latin cathedral now served by a priest and still used by the few surviving Roman Catholic families of the island. The original numbers of the conquerors must have been small and largely concentrated in the few splendid Venetian houses built within the Castro walls. Among the innumerable small Byzantine churches scattered over this fertile island there are some with double naves or additions built on in the nature of a small chapel or parecclesion but these appear to date from the postByzantine era ²⁴ and it is impossible to say whether they were shared churches, as sometimes happened in occupied regions elsewhere in the late period.