The Latin and Greek Churches in Former Byzantine Lands Under Latin Rule

chapter 5 The Latin and Greek Churches in former Byzantine Lands under Latin Rule Nicholas Coureas The Latins and the papacy already possessed experience in ruling over Greeks well over a century prior to the Fourth Crusade of 1204 and the resultant conquest of peninsular Greece, Crete, and the Aegean and Ionian Islands. Latin states had been founded in the coastal areas of Syria and Palestine after the successful First Crusade of 1099, while the Normans had conquered southern Italy and Sicily in the second half of the 11th century. Greek churches, mon- asteries and communities existed in all these areas, Sicily had a substantial Greek population and southern Italy, in particular Calabria, was predomi- nantly Greek. In this chapter the establishment of Latin Churches in Cyprus, conquered by the King Richard i of England in 1191 during the Third Crusade, as well as in Constantinople, Thessalonica, Crete, Athens, the Peloponnese and the Aegean and Ionian Islands after 1204 and their relations with their Greek counterparts will be examined and discussed. Salient features of this discussion will be how the papacy regarded the Greek Church, the divergence between theory and practice in the implementation of papal policy towards the Greeks, and how the relations between Latin and Greek Churches exhib- ited strong regional divergences, to some extent attributable to the Latin secular powers ruling over specific Greek lands. The Greeks considered the Roman Catholic Church to be distinct from their own, and the discussion here will regard them as separate institutions. The papacy, however, did not consider the Greek Church to be distinct. Unlike other eastern Christian sects, Jacobites, Copts, Armenians, Maronites and Nestorians which were doctrinally monophysite, miaphysite or monothelite, the Greek Church was Chalcedonian, like the Roman acknowledging two natures of Christ.1 For the papacy the Greek Church presented a jurisdictional obstacle, not a doctrinal one, in that its clergy refused to recognise papal primacy and the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church. This made them schismatics, not heretics, and meant that as insubordinate Roman Catholics they had to be 1 Bernard Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church (London, 1980), p. 159. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�84�04_006 146 Coureas compelled to acknowledge papal jurisdiction, while being allowed to maintain those customs and rites of theirs that did not conflict with the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church they formed part of, a position articulated clearly during the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The fact that the Greeks were considered a part of the Roman Catholic Church also meant that besides jurisdictional submission, the Greek secular church had to have the same bishops as its Latin counterpart, for western canon law prohibited more than one bishop in each diocese.2 The implementation of this policy inevitably meant the abolition of Greek dioceses superceded by Latin ones created after the Latin conquests of lands with Greek populations and the replacement of Greek by Latin bishops in those remaining. How the policies of jurisdictional submission and episcopal restructuring were applied forms the subject of the first section of this paper. The Latin and Greek Secular Churches Cyprus was the second chiefly Greek territory that the Latins conquered from Byzantium after southern Italy. It was conquered by King Richard i of England in 1191, in the course of the Third Crusade, and sold by him first to the Templars, who returned it following an uprising of the Greeks, and then to Guy de Lusignan, the dispossessed king of Jerusalem, who established a French Roman Catholic dynasty which ruled the island for the next 300 years.3 Given that the Latins conquered Cyprus just over a decade before the Fourth Crusade of 1204, resulting in the conquest of Constantinople, much of conti- nental Greece and the Aegean and Ionian Islands and the establishment of Frankish or Venetian dominion there, the establishment of a Latin Church in Cyprus in 1196, under Pope Celestine iii, was a precedent for what followed in Constantinople and Latin Greece after the Fourth Crusade.4 The relations of the Latin secular church with its Greek counterpart on this island shall there- fore be discussed first. Following the Latin conquest of Cyprus Guy de Lusignan encouraged Latin nobles as well as Latin and Syrian burgesses and craftsmen to settle there. For the most part they originated from the territories of Latin Syria conquered and 2 Nicholas Coureas, The Latin Church in Cyprus, 1195–1312 (Aldershot, 1997), p. 261. 3 Peter Edbury, The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades 1191–1374 (Cambridge, 1991; 2nd ed. 1994), pp. 5–9. 4 See Michael Angold, The Fourth Crusade: Event and Context (Harlow, 2003), pp. 129–62; Peter Lock, The Franks in the Aegean, 1204–1500 (Harlow, 1995), pp. 1–8; Nicholas Coureas and Christopher Schabel, eds., The Cartulary of the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom of Nicosia (Nicosia, 1997), nos. 1–4..

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