places where the people are accustomed to the Byzantine rite. He declares that Byzantine ceremonies, such as the blessing of the water at the Epiphany, and the lessons in both languages, are to be maintained. The Byzantine clergy may keep their wives, according to their own Canon Law; but Latins must not be ordained in this rite for the sake of being married. There was, at Nardò, too, the difficulty of finding clerks sufficiently instructed in Greek to sing lessons in that language correctly; so he allows Latins to do this, "that the ancient right be not lost."[1] This want of people sufficiently instructed to carry on the Byzantine rite eventually led to its disappearance at Nardò.[2] Galatone had a Byzantine Protopapa, Nicholas Theodoros, who was present at Florence in 1439. There were two chapters here, one of each rite, and mixed ceremonies. But the Franciscans worked against the Byzantine rite, and it disappeared by 1510.[3] At Alessano a synod in 1587 shows that there were then still Byzantine priests there.[4]
About 1560 the Byzantine clergy of Taranto sent an account of their rite to Rome,[5] which shows that it still survived there. Jules Gay found in the Brancaccio library at Naples a manuscript from the collection of Cardinal Santoro. It contains a list of monasteries sent by him to Sirlet, several treatises about the Italo-Greeks sent to Santoro in the years 1572, 1580, etc., and some polemic works against the errors of the "Greeks." From this manuscript Gay has compiled a statement about the condition of the Byzantine rite in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century.[6] The Albanians had already arrived. They form a special class, to which we shall come in the next paragraph. There were also colonies of people of the Byzantine rite who had fled from the Turks. But, apart from these, there still remained vestiges of the old Italo-Greeks, who had kept their rite since the eighth century. Their language and rite were gradually disappearing; but they were not yet extinct. They remained in the two extremities, the South of Calabria and the land of Otranto. There were also still a good number of Basilian monasteries; though these
- ↑ See the decree quoted by Rodotà, "del Rito greco," i, 396-397, n. 1.
- ↑ For Nardò see Ughelli, "Italia sacra," i, 1035-1063; Rodotà, op. cit., i, 388-396.
- ↑ Rodotà, i, 397-400.
- ↑ Ibid., i, 400.
- ↑ Published in "Roma e l'Oriente," vol. ii, pp. 33-35.
- ↑ "Étude sur la décadence du rite grec dans l'Italie méridionale à la fin du XVIᵉ siècle," in the Rev. d'hist. et de lit. rel., ii (1897), pp. 481-495.
