The Latin and Greek Churches in former Byzantine Lands 155
of Euboea, mentioned above as having submitted to Rome, complained to the
pope that Archbishop Bérard had ejected him and had installed his own nomi-
nee, causing the pope to instruct the archbishop of Neopatras and two other
Latin prelates to have him reinstated. Other island dioceses subject to the Latin
archbishop of Athens included Andros and Kea. In 1210 the pope instructed
Archbishop Bérard to appoint a Latin priest in every locality in which 12 or
more Latins resided permanently.29 This instruction is noteworthy, for in gen-
eral the Latin secular church in Greece and Cyprus lacked organisation below
the level of bishops and cathedral chapters. Latin parishes were few and the
Latin secular churches were invariably centred on towns. The Latin cathe-
dral chapters as well as Latin bishoprics suffered from the absenteeism of the
incumbent bishops and canons. In Patras the problem was compounded when
Archbishop Antelm in 1210 triggered a conflict in his ultimately failed attempt
to replace the secular canons of the chapter by regular canons from St Rufus in
Valence near Lyon, a dispute the seculars won by 1222.30
Abuses were perpetrated by members of the Latin secular church in Greece,
who included persons not properly ordained or not even qualified. An archdea-
con appointed to the see of Corinth in 1213 by the legate Cardinal Pelagius of
Albano had to wait five years before receiving the incomes attached to his office
and in the 1220s the election of the Latin archbishop of Thebes was revoked on
account of his illiteracy. In 1215 the Latin archbishop of Corinth and two bish-
ops were deposed because of their complicity in a murder. In 1227 the bishop of
Olena, accused of ill treating his canons, fleecing the clerics of his diocese and
torturing peasants who had rejected his authority was deposed under Pope
Gregory ix. In 1233 this pope also began proceedings against the archdeacon of
Athens, who had been demanding money payments from the Greeks for per-
forming marriages instead of the traditional cockerel and loaf of bread. In 1239
the cathedral chapter of Cephalonia complained of how the incumbent Latin
bishop had neglected his pastoral duties, dissipated the church’s incomes, had
taken a concubine and had children by her and had allowed Greek priests to
buy canonical prebends, thereby committing simony. In perpetrating abuses,
however, none seem to have equalled, let alone surpassed Archbishop Antelm
of Patras. A letter of Pope Honorius iii of 10 June 1224 records him as squan-
dering church funds, exercising physical violence against Latin and Greek
clerics, which included incarceration, gouging their eyes out, floggings, and in
29 Wolff, “Organization,” pp. 36 and 41; Hussey, Orthodox Church, pp. 190 and 192.
30 Sally McKee, Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity
(Philadelphia, 2000), p. 106; Coureas, The Latin Church in Cyprus 1313–1378 (Nicosia, 2010),
p. 447; Schabel, “Antelm the Nasty,” pp. 100–01.