176 benjamin arbel
Oecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople had great power over the local
ecclesiastical institutions and, through them, over the entire Greek Ortho-
dox population. The patriarch enjoyed half of the bishops’ revenues, and
the nomination of prelates and abbots was also in his hands. His bulls
were highly respected, and the sanction of excommunication, which was
his main weapon, deterred believers from disobeying his commands.184
It was too risky to make any radical changes in the institutional struc-
ture of the Orthodox Church in the Morea. Yet Venice could not tolerate
these expressions of foreign influence in its newly acquired territory, con-
sidering the dependence of the patriarch on the Ottoman sultan. Venice
did not hesitate to introduce a Latin hierarchy, with four bishoprics and
an archbishopric see at Corinth. Priests and monks followed suit. How-
ever, the Senate did not go so far as appropriating the election of Greek
bishops itself, but it authorized the newly established town councils to
do so. Unlike the situation in other overseas territories, the relative sta-
tus of the Latin and Greek hierarchies seems to have been left without
a clear definition. To prevent the flow of money from the Morea to the
patriarch in Constantinople, the Senate abolished the bishops’ extraordi-
nary revenues, whereas the regular ones, derived from the papàdes and
monasteries, were reduced to the sum that had previously remained in
the bishops’ hands.185 These measures were not entirely successful. The
patriarch’s influence over the Greek Orthodox inhabitants of the Morea
persisted, money continued to flow to Constantinople, and the election
of prelates, though exercised by the communal councils, was accompa-
nied (as before) by simony. Greater success was achieved in blocking the
execution of the patriarch’s bulls, for these were treated in the same way
as the papal bulls that were subject to the Republic’s exequatur.186
Except for one moment, in the early 1570s, when Venice seriously con-
sidered, after the loss of Cyprus, the re-establishment of Greek Orthodox
bishoprics on Crete, the Republic always strove to prevent such an even-
tuality. In 1586–87, both Gabriel Seviros, Archbishop of Philadelphia in
Venice, and Maximos Margounios, bishop of Cerigo, were in Crete, for-
mally for private affairs but quite evidently also in an attempt to revive
Orthodox episcopal presence on the island. Venice made every possible
effort to prevent the two prelates from remaining there, and later did not
184 Leopold von Ranke, “Die Venezianer in Morea,” in his Sämtliche Werke, vol. 42: Zur
venezianischen Geschichte (Leipzig, 1878), p. 342.
185 Ibid., pp. 340–42; Cozzi, “La Repubblica di Venezia in Morea,” p. 786.
186 Ranke, “Die Venezianer in Morea,” pp. 342–45.