GREEK
759
GREEK
yet. In Egypt nine out of every ten of the faithful
declared against the faith of the imperial Court; in
Syria the proportion was not so great. It may be
said that about one-half of the subjects of Justinian
accepted the faith of Chalcedon. Efforts to impose
a heterodox patriarch on Palestine were in vain;
e.xcept in the region of Garza, the monks w^ere
powerful enough to successfully resist the Monophy-
sites. To sum up, then, we find that, as early as the
sixth century, of the Greek patriarchates in the East,
one (Alexandria) had lost nearly all its subjects, an-
other (Antioch) retained but one-half, while the third
(Jerusalem) was too inconsiderable ever to dispute
the primacy with Constantinople. The latter thus
became the only real Greek patriarchate, to which
the other three, sm-named Melchites (Imperialists),
looked for favours and protection against Monophysite
competition and later against the threatening domina-
tion of the Ai-abs.
This leads us to a consideration of the second cause that completely ruined the hopes of the three Greek Churches of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, namely, Islam. It came from Arabia and spread like an oil-stain over Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Per- sia, and finally Egypt. It even made great efforts to cross the Taurus range and enter the Greek world, but in this was everywhere defeated. For the moment its conquests were limited to provinces where the coun- try folk had remained for the most part aloof from Hellenic speech and civilization. Thus the Syrian Jacobites gladly welcomed the Arab conquerors as their brethren in race and in speech, and, it would seem, often aided them in their conquests. Their complaisance towards the new regime brought them many favours not shown to the Slelchites, who, be- cause of their origin, or at least because of their rela- tions with foreign Byzantium, were everywhere watched, hunted down, and proscribed. Without the help of Constantinople and Rome, from whom they begged help and assistance, it is very probable that these Melchite Churches would have disappeared. At the very time when the great Arab invasion and the spread of Islam was taking place, Byzantium was emerging from a disastrous war with Persia which had almost brought about the ruin of the Christian power, and its emperor w"as occupied in rallying the various Monophysite Churches to the official Church by means of the ad caphmdiim formula of one will and one energy in Christ. The attempt failed owing to the splendid resistance set afoot by St. Sophronius of Jerusalem and St. Maximus of Constantinople ; its net result was a fresh loss for the Melchite Patriarchate of Antioch, from W'hich the monks of the convent of St. Maro on the Orontes seceded, to found, with the aid of the vil- lagers of Syria and the Lebanon, the Maronite Church, IMonothelite in doctrine, but which at a later date ac- cepted Catholicism.
The growing weakness of the three eastern patri- archates and of the Archbishopric of Cyprus, whose titular had for a while to take refuge in Cyzicus, soon forced them to seek the moral and material support of Constantinople. It was eagerly granted, and Con- stantinople, thus freed from a rival m the East, turned its attention towards Rome in the West. As we have seen, the civil diocese of Thrace w-as the only one in Europe subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople; the provinces of Achaia, Macedonia, Thessalia, Epirus (old and new), which formed the civil dioceses of Mace- donia, Dacia, and Pannonia, were included in the Pa- triarchate of Rome. Over these remote provinces the pope exercised his spiritual supremacy through the Bishop of Thessalonica, appointed vicar .-Vjjostolic about 3S0, and the Bishop of Justiniana Prima (Uskub), appointed in 535. Until the eighth century this arrangement worked without much opposition on the part of Constantinople, and the ecclesiastical provmces of lUyricum were considered as forming
part of the Roman Patriarchate. The Emperor Leo
III, the Isaurian, seems to have been the first to inter-
fere with the custom, when, in 73.3, after his excom-
munication by the pope, he increased the tribute from
Calabria and Sicily, confiscated the patrimony of the
Roman Church in those regions, and aimed a blow at
the authority of the pope by depriving him of the
obedience of lUyricum and Southern Italy, which were
thenceforth attached to the Patriarchate of Constanti-
nople. Such, at least, is the usual interpretation of an
obscure text in the Chronicle of Theophanes (Hubert
in "Revue Historique" (1899), I, 21-22); it is con-
firmed by an observation of the Armenian ecclesiastic
Basil, who, in the ninth century, speaking of the
metropolitan cities of Illyricum and Italy, asserts that
they had been made subject to the authority of Con-
stantinople "because the pope of ancient Rome had
fallen into the hands of the Barbarians" (Georgii
Cyprii Descriptio Orbis Romani, ed. Gelzer, p. 27).
The popes protested against thLs high-handed robbery,
but no attention was paid to their protests, and since
about 733 Illyricum has been attached to the Byzan-
tine Patriarchate. In this way it gained about one
hundred bishoprics, nor was this all : starting with the
principle that no bishopric in the Byzantine Em-
pii-e could be in any way dependent on an outside
patriarch, the Iconoclast emperors took away from
the Patriarch of Antioch, on the plea that he was a
subject of the Arab caliphs, the twenty-four episcopal
sees of Byzantine Isauria, and from the pope of Rome
the fifteen Greek bishoprics in Southern Italy. Con-
sequently, the jiu'isdiction of the Patriarch of Con-
stantinople became co-extensive with the limits of the
Byzantine Empire.
Besides thLs increase of jurisdiction, the establish- ment of a permanent synod (<riJro5os ivb-qiioma) and the addition to his title of the adjective (Ecumenical rapidly placed the Patriarch of Byzantium in the front rank. The permanent synod dates most prob- ably from the patriarchate of Nestorius (381-97). It was a sort of ecclesiastical tribunal permanently in session at Constantinople, made up, as a rule, of many bishops whom business or ambition had called to the capital; the patriarch himself presided over the tri- bunal. It attended to the solution of all ecclesiastical affairs submitted to the judgment of the emperor, so that the Patriarch of Constantinople, as its president, became ex officio arbiter between the Court and the bishops of the empire; it was a privileged position due to the very force of circumstances, and in the last resort it subjected all the great metropolitans, and even the patriarchs, of the East, to the judicial au- thority of the Byzantine Bishop. The ninth and seventeenth canons of Chalcedon confirmed and con- solidated this state of things, and the insertion of those canons in the Civil Code gave them thenceforward equal authority with any other imperial decrees. The title (Ecumenical was granted for the first time at the Robber Council of Ephesus (449) to the Patriarch Dioscurus of Alexandria, and at the time it looked like a dangerous innovation, and was repudiated at the Council of Chalcedon. Soon afterwards we find it applied to Popes St. Leo I, Hormisdas, and Amipitus, and to the Patriarchs of Constantinople, John 11 (518- 520), Epiphanius (520-535), Anthimus (536), Menas (536-552). It was in 588, on the occasion of a coun- cil, that the Patriarch John VI, surnamed the Fa.ster, seems to have restricted the use of the honorary title to his own see. This gave rise to a fresh quarrel with Rome, which saw therein a new evidence of ambition. Pope Pelagius II annulled the acts of this council and his successor, St. Gregory- the Great (.590-604), began a lengtliy correspondence on the matter with the By- zantine Patriarchs John IV and t^riacus, but nothing ever came of it. The popes went on protesting, but the Byzantine patriarchs, supported by the Court, the bishops, and the clergy, also by the other Greek patri-
