156 Coureas
extreme cases resulted in their deaths. Furthermore, he harboured pirates, cel-
ebrated mass after acts of violence without first obtaining absolution, forged
documents, promoted excommunicate clergy, maintained incontinent clergy
and was himself incontinent, extorted vast sums of money, destroyed abbeys,
had Templars killed and granted indulgences to those killing them, even in
his presence. He was punished for perpetrating these appalling acts by being
suspended from his pontifical duties for one year, in which he was to live in a
monastery. This punishment, hardly proportionate to his crimes, must have
done little to deter clerical abuses.31
In Latin Syria and Cyprus, as stated above, the Greek vicars of the Latin dioc-
esans were titled bishops, but in Crete, a Venetian colony from 1211 until the
Ottomans conquered it in 1669, the vicars appointed were never titled bishops.
Furthermore, disagreement over who they were accountable to arose between
the papacy and Venice. The Greek metropolitan Nicholas of Crete and three
of his suffragans fled to Nicaea, where a Byzantine Empire in exile had been
established, after the Venetian conquest, and of the ten Orthodox bishops defi-
nitely one and perhaps another three acknowledged the primacy of Rome. A
Latin archbishop replaced Nicholas, with ten Latin suffragan bishops under
his jurisdiction. Until the 14th century the Latin archbishop of Crete had 130
Greek priests under his direct jurisdiction, but the remainder who formed the
great majority of Greek priests in Crete came under the jurisdiction of the local
secular Venetian administration. In 1324 the Venetian government conceded
that the priests under its jurisdiction were also subject to the Latin archbishop
of Crete, but only to the same extent as lay persons. At the head of this great
majority of Greek priests was a protopapas, namely an arch-priest as opposed
to a bishop, an arrangement that had already been applied in parts of southern
Italy with mixed Latin and Greek populations. Whether the Venetian secular
administration or the Latin archbishop should appoint him was a bone of con-
tention until 1402, when Venice decreed that the secular administration alone
should appoint the protopapas, who was to originate exclusively from those
priests under its jurisdiction.32
31 Wolff, “Organization”, p. 43; Schabel, “Antelm the Nasty,” pp. 129–33; Claverie, Honorius iii,
pp. 145, 158–61 and 191.
32 Freddy Thiriet, ed., Délibérations des assemblées vénitiennes concernant la Romanie: 1160–
1463 , 2 vols. (Paris, 1966–67), 1: no. 668 for the number of 130 priests; Hussey, Orthodox
Church, pp. 199–200; McKee, Uncommon Dominion, pp. 104–07; Zacharias N. Tsirpanlis, Το
κληροδότημα του καρδιναλίου Βησσαρίωνος για τους φιλενωτικούς της Βενετοκρατούμενης Κρήτης
(1439–17ος αι) [The Bequest of Cardinal Bessarion for the Uniates of Venetian Crete (1439–
17th Century)] (Thessalonica, 1967), p. 29.