CHAP. VII. MOROSINI PATRIARCH. 155 wear the pall at all times in all places, except in Rome and in the presence of the Pope; in processions in Constantinople he might ride a white horse with white housings. He had the power of absolving those who committed violence against a spiritual person; to anoint kings within his Patriarchate at the request and with the sanction of the Emperor; to ordain at the appointed seasons and appoint all qualified persons, to distribute, with the advice of sage counsellors, all the goods of the Church, without the approbation of Rome in each special case. But all these privileges were the gifts of a superior; the dispensation with appeal in certain cases, only confirmed more strongly the right of receiving appeals in all others. Of the dispossessed and fugitive Patriarch no notice is taken either in this or any other document; the Latin Patriarch was planting a new Church in the East, as in a Pagan land. Thus then set forth the Latin Patriarch to establish a Latin Church in the East. The Emperor had before entreated the Pope to send a supply of breviaries and missals and rituals according to the Roman use, with clergy competent to administer to the Latins. He requested also some Cistercian monks to teach the churches of Antony and Basil the true rules and constitutions of the monastic life.P Innocent appealed to the prelates of France to supply this want of clergy for the new church of the East. To the bishops he denounced the heresies of the Greeks; first their departure from the unity of the Church, then their denial of the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son as well as from the Father; their use of leavened bread in the Eucharist. "But Samaria had now returned to Jerusalem; God had transferred the Empire of the Greeks from the proud to the lowly, from the superstitious to the religious, from the schismatics to the Catholics, from the disobedient to the devoted servants of God." He addressed the high school of Paris to send some of their learned youth to study in the East the source and origin of knowledge; he not only opened a wide field to their spiritual ambition, the conversion of the P Epist. viii. 70. 4 Gesta, xciv. Greeks to the true Apostolic faith; he described the East as a rich land of gold and silver and precious stones, as overflowing with corn, wine, and oil. But neither the holy desire of saving the souls of the Greeks, nor the noble thirst for knowledge, nor the promise of these temporal advantages (which, notwithstanding the splendid spoil sent home by some of the crusaders, and the precious treasures of art and of skill which were offered in their churches, they must have known not to be so plentiful, or so lightly won) had much effect; no great movement of the clergy took place towards the East. Philip Augustus made a wiser, but not much more successful attempt; he established a college of Constantinople in the university of Paris for the education of young Greeks, who, bringing with them some of the knowledge and learning of the East, might be instructed in the language, the creed, and the ritual of the West. This was the first unmarked step to the cultivation of the study of Greek in the West, which some centuries afterwards was so powerfully to assist in the overthrow of the sole dominion of Latin Christianity in Europe. Thus, then, while Rome appointed the Patriarch of Constantinople, and all the churches within the dominion of the Latins adopted the Roman ritual, by the more profound hatred, on the one side contemptuous, on the other revengeful, of the two nations, the reconciliation of the Eastern and Western Churches was farther removed than ever. No doubt this inauspicious attempt to subjugate, rather than win, tended incalculably to the obstinate estrangement, which endured to the end. The Patriarch, John Camaterus, took refuge in the new EmGreek Patri- pire founded by Theodore Lascaris in Nice and arch at Nicea. its neighbourhood: to him, no doubt, the clergy throughout Greece maintained their secret allegiance. Nor was the reception of the new Latin Patriarch imposing for its cordial unanimity. Before Morosini disembarked, he sent word to the shore that the clergy and the people should be prepared to meet him with honourable homage. But the Frank clergy stood aloof; they had protested against the election being left to the Venetians; they declared that the election had been carried by un CHAP. VII. RECEPTION OF MOROSINI. 157 new Patri worthy subtlety; that the Pope himself had been imposed upon by the crafty republicans. Not one appeared, and the only shouts of rejoicing were those of the few Venetians. The Greeks gazed with wonder and disgust at the smooth-faced prelate, without a beard, fat as a Reception of well-fed swine; on his dress, his demeanour, the arch. display of his ring. And the clergy, as beardless as their bishop, eating at the same table, like to him in dress and manners, were as vulgar and revolting to their notions. The contumacious French hierarchy would render no allegiance whatever to the Venetians; the excommunication which the Patriarch fulminated against them they treated with sovereign contempt. The jealousy of the Franks against the Venetian Primate was not without ground. The Venetians had from the first determined to secure to themselves in perpetuity, and, as they could not accept the temporal dominion, to make the great ecclesiastical dignities hereditary in their nation; so to establish their own Popedom in the East. But Innocent had penetrated their design; he had rigidly defined the powers of the new Patriarch, and admonished him, before he left Rome, not to lend himself to the ambition of his country, to appoint the canons of Santa Sophia for their worth and knowledge, not for their Venetian birth; the Legate was to exercise a controlling power over these appointments. From Rome Morosini had proceeded to Venice, to embark for his Patriarchate. He had been received with bitter reproaches by the son of the Doge, and many of the counsellors and nobles, as having betrayed his country; as having weakly abandoned to the Pope the rights and privileges of Venice. They threatened not to furnish him with a ship for his passage; he was deeply in debt, his creditors beset him on all sides; he was compelled to take an oath before the Senate that he would name none but Venetians, or at least those who had resided for ten years in the Venitian territory, as canons of Santa Sophia; and to take all possible measures that none but a Venetian should sit on the Patriarchal throne of Constantinople. If even dim rumours of these Nicetas, in loc. oath; he immediately addressed a letter Innocent heard of this extorted to the Patriarch, positively prohibiting stipulations had reached the French clergy, their cold reception of the Patriarch is at once explained. So deep, indeed, was the feud, that Innocent found it necessary to send another Legate to Constantinople, the Cardinal Benedict, who enjoyed his full and unlimited confidence. The former Legate to the East, Peter of Capua, with his colleague the Cardinal Soffrido, had caused great dissatisfaction to the Pope. He had released the Venetians from their interdict, he had deserted his proper province, the Holy Land; and, in a more open manner than Innocent thought prudent, entered into the great design for the subjugation of the Greek Empire. He had absolved the crusaders, on his own authority, from the fulfilment, for a limited period, of their vows to serve in Palestine. He had received a strong rebuke from Innocent, in which the Pope dwelt even with greater force on the cruelties, plunders, sacrileges committed after the storming of Constantinople. The Saracens in Palestine, instead of being kept in the salutary awe with which they had been struck by the capture of Constantinople, could not be ignorant that the Crusaders were now released from their vow of serving against them; and would fall with tenfold fury on the few who remained to defend the Holy Land. The Cardinal Benedict, of Santa Susanna, conducted t his office with consummate skill; perhaps the disastrous state of affairs awed even the jealous clergy with the appreConstitution hension, that their tenure of dignity was but of the Clergy precarious. The Emperor Baldwin had now fallen a captive into the hands of the King of Bulgaria ; his brother Henry, the new Sovereign, made head with gallantry, but with the utmost difficulty, against the Bulgarians, who, with their wild marauding hordes, spread to the gates of Constantinople; Theodore Lascaris had established the new Greek Empire in Asia. The Cardinal not only reconciled the Frank clergy to the supremacy of the Patriarch, Morosini himself was inclined to the larger views of the churchman rather than A.D. 1206. him from observing it; from the profane attempt to render the patriarchate here ditary among the Venetian aristocracy. CHAP. VII. SETTLEMENT OF THE CLERGY. 159 the narrow and exclusive aims of the Venetian. He gladly accepted the Papal absolution from the oath extorted at Venice; and, so far from the Venetians obtaining a perpetual and hereditary majority in the Chapter of Santa Sophia, or securing the descent of the Patriarchate in their nation, of the line of the Latin Patriarchs after Morosini there was but one of Venetian birth. The Legate established an ecclesiastical constitution for the whole Latin Empire. The clergy were to receive one-fifteenth of all possessions, cities, castles, tenements, fields, vineyards, groves, woods, meadows, suburban spaces, gardens, saltworks, tolls, customs by sea and land, fisheries in salt or fresh waters; with some few exceptions in Constantinople and its suburbs reserved for the Emperor himself. If the Emperor should compound for any territory, and receive tribute instead of possession, he was to be answerable for the fifteenth to the Church; he could not grant any lands in fief, without reserving the fifteenth. Besides this, all monasteries belonged to the Church, and were not reckoned in the fifteenth. No monastery was to be fortified, if it should be necessary for the public defence, without the permission of the Patriarch or the Bishop of the diocese. Besides this, the clergy might receive tithe of corn, vegetables, and all the produce of the land; of fruits, except the private kitchen-garden of the owner; of the feed of cattle, of honey, and of wool. If by persuasion they could induce the landowners to pay these tithes, they were fully entitled to receive them. The clergy and the monks of all orders were altogether exempt, according to the more liberal custom of France, from all lay jurisdiction. They held their lands and possessions absolutely, saving only allegiance to the See of Rome, and to the Patriarch of Constantinople, of the Emperor, and of the Empire." Even towards the Greeks, as the new Emperor discovered too late the fatal policy of treating the Toleration of conquered race with contemptuous hatred, so the Greeks. ecclesiastical rule gradually relaxed itself, and endeavoured to comprehend them without absolute abandonment of "Dated 16 Calends, April. Confirmed at Ferentino, Nones of August. |