Germans in Pannonia; or Bupus and his colleagues in the Gallic cities attacked by Attila. Such autonomies which represented not only a religious organisation, but also a local form of government, were not to be subdued and directed by the remote Patriarch of Constantinople, whose own relation to the emperor had yet to be determined. So Catholicism remained firm, consolidated as it was in the popular feelings of respect and gratitude.
A new Latin centre was set up in the Byzantine capital itself: for under the Empire all races were grouped around their own churches. When Arabs were tolerated in Constantinople they had their officially recognised houses of prayer: the Jews also. The first Italian merchants established in Byzantium, about the nth century, first Amalfitans, then Pisans, Genoese and Venetians, had colonies of a similar character. Before the Comnenes who were, until the bloody persecutions of the perverse Andronicus, in favour of the Latins, the bells of the little catholic churches sounded as freely as those of the orthodox faith. The Venetians in particular made full use of this imperial tolerance.
Encouraged by the fact that the fourth crusade had been able to set up a « Latin Empire», the Pope was at first persuaded that it would also give him possession, as of right, of his See, as, theoretically, of Jerusalem. He hoped to see a forced dispersal of the Schism, but the feeble emperors and the prudent Venetians, who had gained the right of appointing Constantinople’s religious head from among themselves, did nothing to justify such exaggerated optimism. The Venetian prelate worked only for his enlarged community, and the Greeks, under their spiritual leaders, preserved their former religious life, of which unfortunately almost nothing is known. In the provinces retained by the Latin barons, something similar occurred. Ortho- doxy
