A Companion to Latin Greece

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chapter 5

The Latin and Greek Churches in former Byzantine

Lands under Latin Rule

Nicholas Coureas

The Latins and the papacy already possessed experience in ruling over Greeks
well over a century prior to the Fourth Crusade of 1204 and the resultant con-
quest of peninsular Greece, Crete, and the Aegean and Ionian Islands. Latin
states had been founded in the coastal areas of Syria and Palestine after the
successful First Crusade of 1099, while the Normans had conquered southern
Italy and Sicily in the second half of the 11th century. Greek churches, mon-
asteries and communities existed in all these areas, Sicily had a substantial
Greek population and southern Italy, in particular Calabria, was predomi-
nantly Greek. In this chapter the establishment of Latin Churches in Cyprus,
conquered by the King Richard i of England in 1191 during the Third Crusade,
as well as in Constantinople, Thessalonica, Crete, Athens, the Peloponnese
and the Aegean and Ionian Islands after 1204 and their relations with their
Greek counterparts will be examined and discussed. Salient features of this
discussion will be how the papacy regarded the Greek Church, the divergence
between theory and practice in the implementation of papal policy towards
the Greeks, and how the relations between Latin and Greek Churches exhib-
ited strong regional divergences, to some extent attributable to the Latin secu-
lar powers ruling over specific Greek lands.
The Greeks considered the Roman Catholic Church to be distinct from their
own, and the discussion here will regard them as separate institutions. The
papacy, however, did not consider the Greek Church to be distinct. Unlike other
eastern Christian sects, Jacobites, Copts, Armenians, Maronites and Nestorians
which were doctrinally monophysite, miaphysite or monothelite, the Greek
Church was Chalcedonian, like the Roman acknowledging two natures of
Christ.1 For the papacy the Greek Church presented a jurisdictional obstacle,
not a doctrinal one, in that its clergy refused to recognise papal primacy and
the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church. This made them schismatics,
not heretics, and meant that as insubordinate Roman Catholics they had to be

1 Bernard Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church (London,
1980), p. 159.