The Western Church and the Orthodox Hierarchy

In the early Christian centuries the Latin Church of the West had formed part of a single communion with the Orthodox Churches of the East. The most important religious leaders in the lands which later came to form the Crusader States were the patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem.Footnote ¹ Together with the patriarchs of Alexandria and Constantinople and the pope of Rome they accepted the authority of the seven oecumenical councils.Footnote ² At Antioch in the sixth century two hierarchies developed, that of the Orthodox Church which was in communion with the Byzantine patriarchate of Constantinople, and that of the Syrian Orthodox Church, often called the Jacobite Church after its early leader, Jacob Baradaeus, which did not accept the Council of Chalcedon and was not in communion with the Byzantine Greeks.Footnote ³ In Jerusalem the office of patriarch was not contested: the Orthodox Church there remained in communion with the Byzantine Church. The Orthodox patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem had canonical jurisdiction over Latin Christians who visited their lands or settled in them.

There was no barrier to communication between the Eastern and Western Churches before the Arab conquest of Syria and Palestine in the seventh century. The Arab rulers granted religious toleration to all their Christian subjects, but the Orthodox in communion with the Church of the Byzantine Empire became known to the Arabs as Melkites, ‘the emperor’s men’. During the first century of Arab rule the caliphs did not allow the Melkite patriarchs to live in Antioch, because they regarded them as Byzantine agents. Those patriarchs nevertheless continued to be appointed, but lived in exile in Constantinople until 742 when Caliph Hisham allowed Stephen III to return to Antioch. No restrictions were placed on the rest of the Melkite hierarchy of Antioch, while the Melkite patriarchs of Jerusalem were allowed to live in the city throughout the years following the Arab conquest because the caliphs did not consider them a political threat.Footnote ⁴

As a result of the Arab conquests, the Mediterranean became a frontier between the Arab Empire and the Christian states of eastern and western Europe. Warfare between the two polities was common, which made regular communication between the Western Church and the Orthodox patriarchs of Jerusalem and Antioch difficult. At oecumenical councils papal legates were present, as were representatives of the four Eastern patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, but only two councils of that kind met between the rise of Islam and the First Crusade: the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–1 and the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. It is also possible that representatives of Pope Sergius III met with those of the three oriental patriarchs in Constantinople in 907 to consider the validity of Emperor Leo VI’s fourth marriage.Footnote ⁵ Formal relations, when possible, were maintained on a more regular basis. The popes and the four Eastern patriarchs advised each other of their elections, by sending systatic letters to each of their colleagues. A letter of this kind announced the writer’s appointment and was accompanied by a profession of faith (normally consisting of a text of the Nicene Creed). The name of the new prelate was then inserted in the diptychs of the other four patriarchal sees.Footnote ⁶ It was not always possible to follow this procedure because of the hazards of travel in the Mediterranean world. Communications between Rome and Constantinople always remained open, but at times the papacy could communicate with the Churches of Antioch and Jerusalem only by using the Byzantine patriarch as an intermediary. Communications between Rome and Antioch became easier after 969 when the city was conquered by the Byzantines. The patriarchs of Jerusalem found other means of communicating regularly with the West, which will be considered later in this chapter.

Byzantine sources relate that the Church of Constantinople refused to accept the profession of faith contained in the systatic letter sent by Pope Sergius IV (1009–12) to Patriarch Sergius II because it contained the uncanonical addition of the filioque to the Nicene Creed.Footnote ⁷ Constantinople’s lead seems to have been followed by the other Eastern patriarchs, for when Peter III became patriarch of Antioch in 1052 he sent news of his appointment to Pope Leo IX, asking him in return to send a profession of faith to Antioch, where the pope had not been commemorated in the diptychs for thirty years.Footnote ⁸ This restoration of harmony did not last long, for in 1054 Cardinal Humbert, the legate of Leo IX, excommunicated Michael Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople. Michael and his synod condemned this action, broke off relations with the Latin Church, and informed the three Eastern patriarchs about what had happened.Footnote ⁹ Peter of Antioch’s reply to Michael shows that he did not attach great importance to this dispute: the Latins, he maintained, were our brothers, even if their rusticity, ignorance and attachment to their own way of thinking made them prone to error. Their very barbarism excused their want of precision in understanding correct teaching, which for this reason should not be enforced on them in the same way as on the Orthodox. Surely the most important point is that they hold the right faith concerning the mystery of the life-giving Trinity and the Incarnation.Footnote ¹⁰ In the last resort, however, Peter of Antioch was a Byzantine citizen, and his brother-patriarch of Jerusalem, though living under Muslim rule, relied on imperial protection, and neither would act independently of the Byzantine patriarchate. The events of 1054 did not mark a significant break in relations between the Latin Church and the Orthodox Eastern Churches. The papacy had frequent diplomatic contacts with the Byzantine emperors over the next thirty-five years, and relations between the Churches remained much as they had been in the forty years before 1054: there was a formal schism, but it does not seem to have been taken very seriously by either side, or to have been expected to last.Footnote ¹¹ It was not until the reign of Urban II (1088–99) that this issue was addressed by the papacy. In 1089 the pope sent an embassy to Constantinople led by Roger, Cardinal Archbishop of Reggio, and the Greek abbot, Nicholas of Grottaferrata, asking for full religious communion to be restored between their two Churches. Patriarch Nicholas III (1084–1111) welcomed this initiative, but recommended that a synod attended by the pope should be held at Constantinople to discuss the differences between their two Churches before Urban’s name was inserted into the diptychs of the Byzantine Church. The correspondence breaks off at that point, so it is not known what further steps towards unity may have been taken, though the holding of a new synod was certainly not among them.Footnote ¹² Nevertheless, the correspondence makes clear that Urban II and Nicholas III regarded each other as members of a single Church, even though there were some points of doctrine and practice about which clarification was needed. These attitudes had not changed when the First Crusade reached the Levant in 1097.

The Turks had conquered Antioch from the Byzantines in 1085, but had allowed a new patriarch appointed by Alexios I Komnenos to live in the city. He was John IV, formerly a monk of Oxeia, who took up office between 1088 and 1091.Footnote ¹³ He was recognised as lawful canonical authority by Bishop Adhemar, Urban II’s legate, who restored him to power after the crusade captured Antioch in 1098 and accepted that he had authority over all the Latin as well as Orthodox clergy in his patriarchate.Footnote ¹⁴ The Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem at that time was Symeon II (1092–9) who may have been the author of a treatise against the Latin use of unleavened bread in the eucharist,Footnote ¹⁵ but in Western tradition he was portrayed as friendly to the Latins. According to Albert of Aachen, Symeon II had entrusted to Peter the Hermit, who had gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the early 1090s, a letter for Urban II, appealing for help against the Artuqid Turks who ruled the city at that time. This story, which assigns a central role in the launching of the First Crusade to Peter the Hermit, is generally viewed with reserve by scholars, though it has been defended by Colin Morris and Ernest Blake.Footnote ¹⁶ Certainly the persecution of the Christian population of Jerusalem about which the patriarch allegedly complained appears to have been genuine, because before the First Crusade reached Syria Symeon and his clergy had taken refuge in Byzantine Cyprus.Footnote ¹⁷ Symeon is associated with the crusade leaders in two letters sent to the West: one in October 1097, urging those who had taken the Cross but not yet set out to do so immediately; the other in January 1098, sent in the name of Symeon and all the bishops, both Greek and Latin, to the faithful of the West, threatening those crusaders who had not fulfilled their vows with excommunication.Footnote ¹⁸ Whether these letters are genuine or not, it seems very probable that during the siege of Antioch Bishop Adhemar would have made contact with Symeon in Cyprus, while according to the chronicler Bernold of St Blasien, he recognised Symeon as canonical patriarch of Jerusalem, and intended to restore him to his see.Footnote ¹⁹

There is no evidence that Urban II was intending to replace the Orthodox hierarchy in Antioch and Jerusalem with Latins, although that is what happened after his death. Despite this, Pope Urban influenced the religious settlement in the Crusader States, in so far as the rulers followed precedents which he had established in the former Byzantine lands of southern Italy and Sicily when they had come under the rule of Catholic princes.Footnote ²⁰

Western Pilgrimage to and Knowledge of the Holy Land

Jerusalem became a Christian pilgrimage centre after 325 when Constantine the Great endowed three shrine churches there: the Anastasis, which commemorated Christ’s death and Resurrection, the Holy Nativity at Bethlehem in honour of his birth, and the Eleona on the Mount of Olives which commemorated his teaching. Helena Augusta, Constantine’s mother, went to the Holy Land from Rome in 327. She was almost eighty years old, and although she had official duties to perform in Jerusalem, notably the overseeing of her son’s building programme and the arrangement of suitable endowments for the new churches, the primary purpose of her visit was religious. Constantine’s biographer, Eusebius, says that she wished to pray at those places where Christ’s feet had touched the ground.Footnote ²¹ This motive remained constant among Western pilgrims. Writing almost 800 years later, the anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum related how those who took the Cross in 1095–6 ‘all said that they wished to follow in the footsteps of Christ, by whom they had been redeemed from the pains of Hell’.Footnote ²²

Between the fourth and the seventh centuries large numbers of Western people went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and many of them stayed in the Levant to explore other biblical sites which extended from Sinai to Edessa. The only barrier was the frontier between the Roman and Persian Empires, which they seldom crossed. The Arab conquest of Syria, Palestine and Egypt in the seventh century did not put an end to Western pilgrimage. The Arab rulers had no ideological objection to this expression of Christian piety, but pilgrims did face considerable practical difficulties. The land routes from western Europe to the Levant became unusable because of the presence of hostile and largely pagan peoples in the Balkans. There was also almost constant warfare in eastern Anatolia between the Byzantines and the Arabs, which made it difficult to travel from Asia Minor into Syria. Moreover, there was an ongoing struggle between the Arab and Christian powers for control of the Mediterranean which made travel to the Levant by sea very dangerous. In addition, although the Arab authorities had no objection to Christian pilgrims in principle, they did require them to obtain official permits to travel in Islamic territory, and these were expensive.Footnote ²³ As a result of these difficulties the number of Western pilgrims who visited Jerusalem between c. 650 and c. 950 was substantially reduced.

In the second half of the tenth century a change took place in the circumstances of travel from western Europe to the Near East. The conversion of the Bulgars in the late ninth century and of the Magyars about a century later made it possible to reach Constantinople from the west by land. It was also possible to cross the Adriatic from one of the ports of Apulia in southern Italy and to travel along the Via Egnatia to the Byzantine capital. In 961 the Byzantines recaptured Crete from the Arabs, and this was followed by their recovery of Cyprus, Cilicia and a substantial part of northern Syria, including Antioch, by 969, reinforced by further campaigns of Emperor Basil II in 999. In 1001 a treaty was made between Basil II and the Fatimid caliph by which the frontier between the two powers was fixed to the south of Latakia in Syria.Footnote ²⁴ It was then possible for Western pilgrims to travel from their homes to the Fatimid border without leaving Christian territory.

Not only did the Jerusalem journey become less hazardous after c. 950, but more Western people wished to undertake it. There was an increase in penitential pilgrimage which was enjoined by the monastic reformers at Cluny and elsewhere on some of their more violent noble penitents. Robert I of Normandy, for example, did penance by walking barefoot from Rouen to Jerusalem, though he died at Nicaea in 1035 on his return journey as a result of the rigours of this discipline.Footnote ²⁵ There was also an increase in devotion to the humanity of Christ among devout Western Christians, and this focused attention on the places where he had lived on earth. The biographer of St Altmann of Passau describes how the bishop ‘set forth to visit the earthly Jerusalem in which the Redeemer of mankind mercifully accomplished the work of our salvation’.Footnote ²⁶ The completion of the first Christian millennium also led to some apocalyptic speculation, although the importance of this should not be exaggerated. There was a quite widely held belief that the Second Coming of Christ would take place in a year when Good Friday fell on Lady Day, 25 March. Since it was generally believed that he would return to the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem, the site of his Ascension, some people wished to be there to greet him. Thus in 1064 some 7,000 German pilgrims, led by four bishops, set out to keep Holy Week in Jerusalem in 1065 when Good Friday would fall on March 25.Footnote ²⁷

After 1071, when the Seljuq sultan Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantine field army at Manzikert, Turkish emirs occupied much of Anatolia and Syria and took Jerusalem from the Fatimids in 1075. The breakdown in public order which ensued during these long wars made the pilgrim routes unsafe, and it was this, rather than any ideological antagonism on the part of the Turks, which caused a decline in the number of Western pilgrims visiting the Holy Land during the last quarter of the eleventh century. There was never a complete cessation: Robert I of Flanders, for example, went to Jerusalem in 1091.Footnote ²⁸

It is probably true that most educated Western clergy, although they did not go on pilgrimage to the Levant, were interested in the Holy Land because a topographical knowledge of it was needed to understand the texts of the Old and New Testaments. They could obtain some information from returning pilgrims, but they also had written sources to consult. The most detailed of these was St Jerome’s Liber Locorum, a Latin translation, with some editorial changes, of the Onomasticon written in Greek by Eusebius of Caesarea, between 315 and 325. This was, in effect, a gazetteer of the places mentioned in the Bible, but it was not complete and Eusebius was far more interested in the topography of the Old Testament than in that of the New. Jerome’s translation was not easy to use, because he preserved Eusebius’ arrangement of place-names under the letters of the Greek alphabet. This was confusing to a reader with no knowledge of Greek (which was true of most of Jerome’s readers in the early Middle Ages), for although the two alphabets were similar they were not identical, and the letters were not arranged in the same order. For example, Z (zeta) is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet, and in Greek there are two forms of the letter E (epsilon and eta), though no distinction is made between them in Latin. Since this text gave very little information about the New Testament, which was of considerable interest to Western medieval scholars, it was not widely used by them.

The most popular work on the topography of the Holy Land read in the West in that period was Bede’s Libellus de locis sanctis, written in 702–3. Bede based his work on the De locis sanctis of Adomnán, Abbot of Iona, written in the late 680s. Adomnán claimed that his information was derived from Arculf, a bishop from Gaul, who had visited the Holy Land and returned home by way of Iona. As Thomas O’Loughlin has cogently argued, Arculf may have been a literary invention: certainly the information which Bede gives about his journey to Iona seems extremely implausible. O’Loughlin argues that Adomnán’s text, and therefore that of Bede, is a general account of what was known about the Holy Places at Iona and Jarrow in the late seventh century.Footnote ²⁹

Bede’s account was more widely read than Adomnán, probably because his Latin was more accessible. He describes the Holy Places of Jerusalem and its environs, including the church of the Holy Nativity at Bethlehem. He then writes of the shrines of Hebron to the south of Jerusalem, those at the southern end of the Jordan valley, and the Dead Sea, and goes on to describe the religious sites of Samaria, the Sea of Galilee and the nearby shrines, together with Nazareth, and Mt Tabor, scene of Christ’s Transfiguration. His work concludes with brief descriptions of Damascus, of Alexandria in Egypt, site of the burial of St Mark, and finally of Constantinople. Bede’s work was still being read at the time of the First Crusade, although it was becoming more and more out-of-date. Nevertheless, it was important because it kept awareness of the Holy Places alive in a wide range of Western clergy and through them of Western laity in the centuries following the Arab conquests.

Latin Foundations in the Holy Land

Because the Western Church and the Orthodox Churches of the East formed part of a single communion in the early Middle Ages, there was no need to set up Latin churches in the Holy Land. Nevertheless, language was recognised as a problem, since the Orthodox in the patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem had Greek liturgies. The Western pilgrim Egeria, who visited the Holy Places in 381–4, reports that in Jerusalem the Greek liturgy was normally simultaneously translated into Aramaic for the benefit of the local population, while extempore Latin translations were also made for the benefit of Western pilgrims.Footnote ³⁰

In the early centuries there were no special hostels in Jerusalem for Latin pilgrims. It was not until the late sixth century that a Roman abbot named Probus left money to endow a Latin hospice in the Holy City. This is known from a letter of Pope Gregory I (590–604) and Morris has rightly noted that although ‘it is often said that the pope himself was the founder of this hostel … in [his] letter [he] does not seem to be claiming responsibility for the undertaking’.Footnote ³¹ This foundation is not mentioned in later sources and is generally thought to have been destroyed by the Persians when they sacked Jerusalem as a reprisal for the revolt of 614. If this was so, then it had not been restored by 638 when the Arab conquest brought the Christian rebuilding programme to an abrupt halt.

There was certainly an institutional Latin presence in Jerusalem in the early ninth century. Charlemagne received a request for alms from the patriarch of Jerusalem and in response sent envoys to draw up detailed estimates of the financial needs of the Christian communities there. On their return to the West they drew up three assessments which they presented to the emperor in 810: Breve Commemoratorii de illis casis Dei vel monasteriis qui sunt in sancta civitate Hierusalem vel in circuitu eius; memoria de illis monasteriis quae sunt in extremis Hierusalem in terra promissionis; and a document of which only a fragment remains, headed Dispensa patriarchae. These documents are preserved in a ninth-century scroll in the University of Basle, and have recently been edited and translated with a detailed commentary by Michael McCormick.Footnote ³²

Two Latin communities are identified in this source. The first is described as a convent of twenty-six women, ‘of whom seventeen nuns who serve at the Holy Sepulchre come from the Empire of Lord Charles’. McCormick notes that it is unclear whether this was a new foundation or one which had survived from late antiquity.Footnote ³³ Presumably the nuns sang the Divine Office in Latin in one of the chapels of the basilica.

There was also a Latin monastery in Jerusalem: ‘in the monastery of St Peter and St Paul at Besanteo alongside the Mount of Olives [there are] thirty-five monks’. In 807 two monks, Egilbald and Felix, chosen by Patriarch Thomas of Jerusalem, were members of the embassy sent to Charlemagne by Harun al-Rashid.Footnote ³⁴ This community almost certainly owed its foundation to Charlemagne, as is implied in the appeal which the brethren made to Pope Leo III in 809. In that year the community, or some members of it, had celebrated midnight Mass in the Latin rite at the church of the Holy Nativity in Bethlehem, but John, an Orthodox monk from St Sabas, had tried forcibly to evict them from the basilica because they had included the filioque clause in the creed. As they told the pope, they sang the creed in the way in which they had heard it sung in the palace chapel at Aachen. The letter was signed by Dominic, presumably the abbot, Theodore, Arimond, Gregory, John, Leo ‘and all the community of the Mount of Olives’.Footnote ³⁵ In 826 Dominic, Abbot of the Mount of Olives, de partibus transmarinis attended the Synod of Ingelheim.Footnote ³⁶ It is possible that he had taken refuge in Europe after the destruction of his monastery during the civil wars which followed the death of Harun al-Rashid in 809. Certainly the community is mentioned in no later source.

Later sources claim that Charlemagne also endowed a hospice in Jerusalem for Western pilgrims. It is possible that this was attached to the Latin convent which served the Holy Sepulchre. Bernard the Monk, who, with his companions, went on pilgrimage in the 860s, reported:

The hospice was presumably administered by the ‘Hospitallers’ mentioned in the Commemoratorium de casis Dei, and it was situated near the church of the Holy Sepulchre in approximately the same position as the later church of St Maria Latina.Footnote ³⁸

One consequence of the presence of Latin monks in Jerusalem was that the Orthodox patriarchs could use them as envoys to the papacy, and in this way they were able to establish regular links with the Western Church for the first time since the Arab conquest. In 881 Patriarch Elias III (878–907) sent the monks Rainard and Gispert to the West to seek alms for the churches of Jerusalem.Footnote ³⁹ A generation later Pope Benedict IV (900–3) licensed envoys sent by the same patriarch to solicit alms from western Europe in order to pay the ransoms of members of his curia held captive by the Muslim authorities.Footnote ⁴⁰ The importance of this development was twofold. First, a tradition of supporting the Holy Places with alms and sometimes with grants of property was established in the West almost 200 years before they passed under Latin rule. Secondly, Orthodox monks began to take part in these embassies, as well as Latin monks based in Jerusalem. Ralph Glaber records that, in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, ‘each year monks came to Rouen, even from the famous Mt Sinai in the East, and took back with them many presents of gold and silver for their communities’. He notes that Duke Richard II of Normandy (996–1026) was a particularly generous patron of the shrines in the Holy Land.Footnote ⁴¹ In this way Western people, including many who did not go there on pilgrimage, had some contact with the Orthodox monasteries of the Holy Land, for a significant number of monks from the Near East did not merely visit but also settled in western Europe in the first half of the eleventh century.Footnote ⁴² Notable among them was St Symeon of Trier, who played a major part in establishing the cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in the Western Church, and whose relics were taken back to the Holy Land by Godfrey of Bouillon when he went on the First Crusade.Footnote ⁴³

The community of St Mary’s at Jerusalem, who administered the Latin hospice, was still in existence in the late tenth century. In 993 the Marquis Hugh of Tuscany (post 961–1001) and his wife Julitta gave estates at Aquapendente in southern Italy to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and ‘to the monks who are in Sta Maria Latina in Jerusalem, that they may receive the income which the Lord [Marquis] has given for the benefit of all the pilgrims who go to and return from the Holy Sepulchre of the Lord’. This property was to be administered by Warinus the abbot, and his kinsman Gi. Count Riant, who first drew attention to this document, argued that Warin was Guarinus, Abbot of Cuxa in the Pyrenees, and that Gi. was his cousin Gislebert, Count of Roussillon.Footnote ⁴⁴ Guarinus of Cuxa had certainly been to Jerusalem, and might therefore have been responsible for persuading Hugh to make this donation, but Riant’s suggestion remains conjectural. There seems no reason to doubt the validity of the document, even though it exists only in an eleventh-century copy and contains an error in dating, probably as a result of faulty transcription. Sta Maria Latina, which stood so near to the Holy Sepulchre, together with its conventual and hospice buildings, was almost certainly destroyed in 1009 when Caliph al-Hakim ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre and of the other Christian churches in Jerusalem.Footnote ⁴⁵ The administrators of the Aquapendente benefaction seem to have diverted the funds to build a church in that estate dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre and to have transferred the endowment to it.

For some years after 1009 there was no institutional Latin presence in Jerusalem, but at some time before his death in 1038 King Stephen I of Hungary endowed a hospice there for Hungarian pilgrims. It seems only to have had a brief existence, although it was refounded in the twelfth century. Its location is unknown.Footnote ⁴⁶

William of Tyre relates that in the reign of Caliph al-Mustansir (1036–94) the citizens of Amalfi built a monastery in Jerusalem which was known as ‘de Latina’. It stood within a stone’s throw of the Holy Sepulchre. The community then built a hospice for the use of Latin pilgrims, which had a chapel dedicated to St John the Almsgiver, Patriarch of Alexandria (d. c. 616). A convent dedicated to St Mary Magdalene was also founded nearby.Footnote ⁴⁷ Jonathan Riley-Smith is probably correct in suggesting that the Amalfitan foundation occupied the site of the monastery and hospice of the same name, Sta Maria Latina, destroyed by Caliph Hakim, but no archaeological evidence supporting this view has yet been found.Footnote ⁴⁸

In the eleventh century the south Italian maritime city of Amalfi was ruled by patricians who were subjects of the Byzantine emperors. Caliph al-Mustansir gave permission to Emperor Michael IV (1034–41) to rebuild the church of the Anastasis at his own expense, and the historian John Skylitzes, writing soon after 1057, says that this work was completed before Michael’s death in 1041.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Amalfitans, who were Byzantine subjects and Latin-rite Christians, received permission from the same caliph to rebuild the Latin monastery and hospice in the city. It is not known precisely when this happened, but it must have been while the city was still under Fatimid rule, before the Turkish general Atsiz bin Awaq seized control there in 1073. Although his Turkmen followers were not used to living alongside Christians and did not treat the Christians of Jerusalem well, Sta Maria Latina and the adjacent convent and hospice survived their rule and were still functioning when the First Crusade entered the city in 1099.