custom that the bishops of these parts should go to Rome to be ordained gradually dies out. Neilos Doxapatres says that the Pope ordained all the bishops after the Norman conquest;[1] yet Gregory VII refused to ordain the Bishop of Mileto in 1081, explaining that this is the right of the Archbishop of Reggio.[2]
Instead of the old state of things, according to which all Southern Italy and Sicily were part of the Roman Metropolitan province, we come now to the establishment of Latin archbishops with their separate provinces in these parts. The country remains part of the Roman Patriarchate; it is no longer part of the Roman province. The Normans also brought back the Roman rite to those Churches which had been made Byzantine by the Eastern Emperors. They built many new churches and monasteries; in most cases, they arranged that the services in these should be carried out according to the Roman rite.
One famous example of this is the monastery built by Roger I in 1090 at Messina. He made this subject to the monastery S Maria de Latina at Jerusalem; the monastery at Messina was also S Maria de Latina.[3] Roger also subjected the Byzantine clergy of his domain to the Roman Ordinaries. Rodotà quotes a number of his diplomas to this effect.[4] He did away with the privilege by which many Byzantine monasteries had been Stauropegia — that is, independent of diocesan authority, subject directly to the Patriarch of Constantinople — and put all the Byzantine monasteries under the Latin bishops. This seems rather a hardship, since there were many Latin monasteries independent of the ordinary, directly subject to the Pope. However, it was difficult to do anything else. The Byzantine monasteries could not remain subject to the Patriarch now that the Patriarch had become a schismatic. They might, perhaps, have been made immediately subject to the Holy See, like the Latin ones.
The Synod of Melfi in 1059 was a considerable factor in the restoration of the Roman rite after the Norman conquest. Melfi is a city on a hill between Benevento and Venoso. The Normans in 1042 made this their first capital in Apulia, and
