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THE MELKITES
191

(p. 197), there were no less than twenty-five Patriarchs of Antioch of whose catholicity we can be absolutely certain.[1] This number is perhaps an exaggeration; but there are a surprising number of perfectly authentic cases of Patriarchs of Antioch in union with Rome in that interval. First among them again I name Peter III.[2] His correspondence with Pope Leo IX (1048-1054) leaves no doubt at all that just then, when Cerularius was causing his schism, Peter was entirely Catholic.[3] His successor, Theodosius III, however, seems to have been a schismatic. In 1057 he came to Constantinople and made common cause with that Patriarch. It was he who proclaimed Isaac Komnenos (1057-1059) Emperor. But now we see how the defection of one Patriarch was not considered as contaminating the whole line of his successors. When John IV was Patriarch of Antioch (c. 1090-c. 1103) the Crusaders took the city (1098). They would not set up a Latin Patriarch, because it is against the canons that there should be two bishops in one see. Clearly they treat him as a Catholic. Very likely at first he was. But later the Crusaders behaved badly to him; he quarrelled with them and fled to Constantinople (he was himself a Greek). Here he must have joined the Byzantine schism, and the Crusaders, considering the see vacant by his flight, appointed a Latin successor, Bernard of Valence. When John IV died at Constantinople, the Greeks of that city gave him a Greek successor (Theodosius IV). It was the beginning of that series of absentee Patriarchs, Greeks living at Constantinople, which was not only a deplorable calamity for the Christians of their lands, but also did much to fix the state of schism.

The Greeks of Constantinople were naturally the great promoters of the schism. Theodore IV of Antioch (1186-1203), the famous Theodore Balsamon, was undoubtedly a schismatic. He is still the chief Orthodox Canonist. This Theodore, a Byzantine Greek, is responsible for the last degradation of the other Patriarchal Sees by the Œcumenical Patriarch, inasmuch as it was by his advice that their own far more venerable rites were taken from them and they were forced to adopt the modern one of Constantinople.[4] Theodosius V signed the union of Lyons in 1274. He was himself of Frank blood, of the family of Villehardouin, Princes of Achaia. When

  1. Echos d'Orient, iv (1900-1901), p. 268.
  2. His reign began in 1053. The date of his death is not known; before 1057.
  3. "Orth. East. Church," pp. 188-192.
  4. The works of Balsamon are in P.G., cxxxviii.