choose. So the Œcumenical Patriarch became the recognized civil head of the Roman nation.
4. The Porte and the Œcumenical Patriarch.
It is strange that the last step in the advancement of the Patriarch of Constantinople should be due to the Turkish conquest. He now takes something like the place the Emperor would have taken, if Constantine had not preferred a glorious death to the shame of being a tributary prince under the Sultan. And so the Patriarch reached the highest point of his career. When we first met him he was not a patriarch at all, nor even a metropolitan, but only a local bishop under Thrace. Now he has an enormous patriarchate covering all Russia, Turkey in Europe, and Asia Minor; in ecclesiastical affairs he has precedence and something very like jurisdiction over the other Eastern patriarchs, and in civil affairs he has authority over them and all Orthodox Christians.[1] Only he must humble himself before the Sultan, and to make this degradation quite complete he is invested with the signs of his spiritual jurisdiction by the unbaptized tyrant who is his lord. The patriarchs, although they held so great a place over Christians, have always been made to feel that they are nothing before the Turk. They represent the enormous majority of subjects of the Porte in Europe, but they have never been given even the smallest place in the Diwan, that is, the Sultan's advising council. And the Sultans have deposed them, reappointed them, even killed them, just as they liked. On the whole, then, for a Christian bishop the place of a small diocesan ordinary, from which the Patriarchs of Constantinople rose, was more dignified than the servile grandeur they now enjoy. And, as we shall see, the last epoch of this history is the story of how they have lost their authority piece by piece, till at the present
- ↑ The highest point of his advancement in the Balkans was after 1765, when he had crushed the three independent Churches of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Roumania (pp. 307, 317, 328), but Russia had been independent since 1591 (p. 294). The decline of the Patriarch's power began with the independence of the Greek Church in 1833 (p. 312).
