146 Coureas
compelled to acknowledge papal jurisdiction, while being allowed to maintain
those customs and rites of theirs that did not conflict with the doctrines of the
Roman Catholic Church they formed part of, a position articulated clearly dur-
ing the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The fact that the Greeks were consid-
ered a part of the Roman Catholic Church also meant that besides jurisdictional
submission, the Greek secular church had to have the same bishops as its Latin
counterpart, for western canon law prohibited more than one bishop in each
diocese.2 The implementation of this policy inevitably meant the abolition of
Greek dioceses superceded by Latin ones created after the Latin conquests of
lands with Greek populations and the replacement of Greek by Latin bishops
in those remaining. How the policies of jurisdictional submission and episcopal
restructuring were applied forms the subject of the first section of this paper.
The Latin and Greek Secular Churches
Cyprus was the second chiefly Greek territory that the Latins conquered
from Byzantium after southern Italy. It was conquered by King Richard i of
England in 1191, in the course of the Third Crusade, and sold by him first to
the Templars, who returned it following an uprising of the Greeks, and then
to Guy de Lusignan, the dispossessed king of Jerusalem, who established a
French Roman Catholic dynasty which ruled the island for the next 300 years.3
Given that the Latins conquered Cyprus just over a decade before the Fourth
Crusade of 1204, resulting in the conquest of Constantinople, much of conti-
nental Greece and the Aegean and Ionian Islands and the establishment of
Frankish or Venetian dominion there, the establishment of a Latin Church in
Cyprus in 1196, under Pope Celestine iii, was a precedent for what followed in
Constantinople and Latin Greece after the Fourth Crusade.4 The relations of
the Latin secular church with its Greek counterpart on this island shall there-
fore be discussed first.
Following the Latin conquest of Cyprus Guy de Lusignan encouraged Latin
nobles as well as Latin and Syrian burgesses and craftsmen to settle there. For
the most part they originated from the territories of Latin Syria conquered and
2 Nicholas Coureas, The Latin Church in Cyprus, 1195–1312 (Aldershot, 1997), p. 261.
3 Peter Edbury, The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades 1191–1374 (Cambridge, 1991; 2nd ed.
1994), pp. 5–9.
4 See Michael Angold, The Fourth Crusade: Event and Context (Harlow, 2003), pp. 129–62;
Peter Lock, The Franks in the Aegean, 1204–1500 (Harlow, 1995), pp. 1–8; Nicholas Coureas
and Christopher Schabel, eds., The Cartulary of the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom of Nicosia
(Nicosia, 1997), nos. 1–4.