often as five times (pp. 265, 267); there seem to have been nearly always, as there are at this moment, three or four ex-patriarchs living at the same time. None of them reigned more than a year or two, and so the number of Patriarchs of Constantinople since 1453 is quite incredible. For instance, during the seventyfive years from 1625 to 1700 there were fifty patriarchs—an average of eighteen months each.
The last and worst result of the subjection of the Church to the Moslem tyrant was Simony. Each patriarch had to make the Sultan an enormous present of money in return for his appointment; to raise this money they then sold all benefices to their bishops and priests, and so the taint of Simony, the buying and selling of the things of God, has been for centuries one of the characteristic marks of the Orthodox Church. However, when he had bought his berat from the Sultan and had swallowed as best he could the shame of the investiture, the Patriarch became, as far as his fellow-Rayahs were concerned, a great lord. The spiritual rights given to him by the berat were: Full authority over all churches and convents, and in all questions of faith, discipline, or rites, the right to depose any unworthy bishop or other clerk in his patriarchate, the right to hand over to the Porte contumacious clerks for punishment. Most of these rights he uses only in union with his synod. As head of the Roman nation the Patriarch judged all questions of marriage law and all disputes between Orthodox Christians, in which both sides had agreed to sue at his court.[1] He could levy taxes from his nation for ecclesiastical purposes, and could keep a small number of gendarmes at his service.[2] Neither he nor any clerks paid any taxes to the Porte at all, and he was the official representative of the other Orthodox patriarchs at the Court. Until quite lately the Byzantine patriarchate was enormously rich. All property of bishops or other celibate clerks who died intestate
- ↑ Most of these rights were shared in a less degree by other bishops as well. The other "nations" had similar arrangements.
- ↑ These civil rights have now disappeared. A Turkish law in 1856 did away with them and established "mixed councils" of Turks and Christians to try cases formerly settled by bishops. The ecclesiastical arrangements of the Orthodox Church have been modified too, since 1860 (p. 338).
