170 benjamin arbel
Church—and therefore not very popular among local believers, and cor-
ruption was not limited to the Catholic camp.160
Venice, the stato da mar and the Renaissance Church
On several occasions during the 15th century, Venice still appears to
have backed Roman efforts of proselytism carried out in its territories,
and it also acted itself against what must have seemed to its leaders as
unorthodox patterns of religious life. For example, it allowed the bishop of
Cattaro to carry out a campaign aimed at converting Orthodox villagers to
Catholicism; and after taking possession of Veglia, where Catholic religious
services had been conducted in Church Slavonic, Venice chased out the
Slavic monks and declared Latin to be the only legitimate language for
religious services on the island.161 The Republic also favored the Uniats.162
From the 16th century onward, however, the Dominante appears to have
been more liberal, and certainly more cautious, in handling religious
affairs in its overseas territories.
Between the mid-15th and the mid-16th centuries, the papacy’s attitude
towards the Greek Orthodox world was rather lenient, under the influ-
ence of the Italian Renaissance and the role of Greek scholars in Renais-
sance humanism and also in view of papal policy of appeasement with
the Greek Orthodox world against the backdrop of Ottoman advance. This
trend was particularly manifest in the papacy’s policy regarding the Greek
community in Venice and its overseas territories. In two papal bulls, issued
in 1514, Pope Leo X, in reply to an official request by Venice, allowed the
Greeks in Venice to build a church in which the Greek liturgy would be
celebrated and to have a separate cemetery. The Greeks were placed under
the pope’s direct supervision, overriding the authority of the local Roman
clergy, including that of the Venetian patriarch.163 In 1521, the same pope
ruled that the Greeks could not be brought to trial before Roman bishops
and that Greek monks and priests in the Venetian islands of Zante and
Cephalonia were only subject to their own bishop and were entitled to
all the prerogatives and immunities enjoyed by their Latin homologues.
160 Theocharis Detorakis, History of Crete (Heraklion, 1994), p. 177.
161 Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 591–92, 603.
162 Arbel, “Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox,” pp. 78–79.
163 Fedalto, Ricerche, pp. 44–53; Manoussos I. Manoussacas, “The History of the Greek
Confraternity (1498–1982) and the Activity of the Greek Institute of Venice (1966–1982),”
Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 5 (1989), pp. 324–26; Arbel, “Roman Catholics and Greek
Orthodox,” p. 80.