been honoured because of St Leo."[1] "St Severina of Calabria[2] has five sees."[3]
In all this we have a good example of the Byzantine attitude of that time. There is, first, frank acknowledgement that originally the sees of Southern Italy and Sicily were under the Pope (whether as Patriarch or as Metropolitan); but, because he is no longer in the Roman Empire (of the East, the Empire whose capital was Constantinople), therefore he has lost all his rights. He is in the hands of Lombards, Goths, or Normans, whom the Byzantines pleasantly dismiss as Barbarians. We see also the typically Byzantine idea that politics must settle the whole question of ecclesiastical order. Wherever the Emperor holds territory the bishops in that territory must depend on the Emperor's Patriarch. Neilos did not foresee that three hundred years later his principles would fall with much greater force on the Patriarch in whose favour he writes. If to be in the hands of Barbarians be a reason for taking away a Patriarch's jurisdiction, what would become of that of Constantinople after 1453? It is a curious point, worth noticing, how the unchanging Byzantine habit of making Church affairs depend on those of the state, their invariable practice of founding ecclesiastical rights on the splendour of the Emperor would react against themselves, as soon as there was no longer an Emperor. But Constantinople has never thought of applying its principles to its own case since the Turks came.
We have, then, as the general situation, that from the time of the first Iconoclast persecution, under the Emperor Leo III (717-741), till the Norman conquest of Southern Italy (beginning about 1030), there was a determined attempt on the part of the Emperors and Patriarchs at Constantinople to detach Sicily, Calabria and Apulia from their ancient obedience to the Roman Pontiff, and to make the Church in these parts dependent on the See of Constantinople. With this dependence, shown mainly in the ordination of the bishops at Constantinople, went naturally the use of the Byzantine rite. The object of this movement was to unite these provinces more closely to the capital. Its chief moments were Leo III's
- ↑ St Leo, Bishop of Catana, † c. 780. His feast, in the Byz. Menaia and the Roman Martyrology, is February 20. See Nilles, "Kalendarium manuale," i, 108; L. di Brolo, "Storia d. Chiesa in Sicilia," ii, cap. vi, pp. 121-135. St Leo of Catana's Life is in the Acta Sanctorum, February III, pp. 227-229.
- ↑ Ἡ γία Σεβερίνη τῆς Καλαβρίας.
- ↑ Neilos, ed. Parthey, pp. 300, 303.
