Church. In the first place, they were Roman Catholics, with whose religious position the Greeks had no sympathy, having lively memories of the intrigues of the Jesuits and the attempts of the Uniats to capture the orthodox Church. Then the patriarch of Constantinople was a functionary under the Turkish government, and therefore officially bound to be opposed to the Venetian aggression. Nevertheless, Morosini, the able Venetian leader, contrived to establish such good order that a number of Greeks were drawn from the Turkish provinces in the north to share in the growing prosperity of the Morea. Even Mohammedans also yielded to the temptation, and some of them joined the Greek Church, without any interference on the part of the authorities.
The Venetians established the only liberal Roman Catholic government of the age. They left the Greeks free to practise their religious rites. In this respect the policy of Venice was wholly different from that of Rome and the Jesuits, by whom hitherto the Latin Church had been represented in the East. The Venetians restored to the Roman Catholics the churches which the Turks had converted into mosques; but the chief of these churches had been built by the Franks at the time of the Crusades or later. They did not permit the pope to interfere with the Greek Church, and they allowed it to retain all the powers and privileges it had possessed under the sultan. But the situation was awkward, because all the Greek bishops in the Morea were nominees of the patriarch of Constanstinople, who also appointed the abbots of many of the monasteries. The Venetians would not permit an exarch of the patriarch to live in the Morea or any patriarchal missive to be published by the clergy, and they invited the Greek communes to elect their own bishops. This can hardly be regarded as ecclesiastical tyranny; it was a political necessity, and, considering the odious position of the patriarch, a necessity not unwelcome to patriotic Greeks. The Roman Catholic priests, who of course were now free to enter the Morea, were men of higher character, better education, and more
