158 Coureas
on such occasions. Yet numerous Latin secular priests in Rhodes as well as the
Greek Church were jurisdictionally subject to the Hospitallers, not the Latin
secular church.34
When surrendering under conditions in 1309, the Rhodians formally
acknowledged the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, while maintaining
their Greek rite and clergy, but the Hospitallers exercised this primacy, not the
Latin archbishop. The Greek patriarch of Constantinople continued to appoint
bishops of Rhodes until 1369, after which the office was held by other Greek
metropolitans, but these bishops never set foot on Rhodes, and although in
1357 the patriarch wrote to the clergy and laity on Rhodes that Archbishop
Neilos would arrive to ordain priests and deacons and to consecrate churches
it is doubtful that this was implemented. The Greek metropolitan church in
the town of Rhodes was administered by a dikaios or dean, and Greek clergy
resident in Rhodes were being ordained or consecrated by someone on Crete
or elsewhere without synodal mandate, as the patriarch complained in his
letter. The Greek metropolitan church in Rhodes town maintained Greek
clerics, notaries and officers of the ecclesiastical court that arbitrated over
issues involving only Greeks, although the original Greek metropolitan church
was transformed after the conquest into a Latin cathedral for the archbishop.
By the early 15th century, however, Greek bishops are attested in residence on
Rhodes, Kos and Castellorizo, although the last of them seems to have been
the bishop of a see in adjacent Asia Minor, since this tiny island was never a
bishopric.35
In the Cyclades, likewise under Venetian rule, a pattern similar to Crete
emerged although one observes that no amalgamation of bishoprics took
place, unlike other Greek areas of Byzantium conquered by Latins. Instead,
the seven Greek bishoprics of the Byzantine period simply became seven Latin
ones, their Greek incumbents likewise replaced by Latins. In the Byzantine
periods all these bishoprics had been subject to the archdiocese of Paros-
Naxos but following the Latin conquest the sees of Andros and Kea were made
34 Anthony Luttrell, The Town of Rhodes, 1306–1356 (Rhodes, 2003), pp. 75–78 and 100–03;
Tsirpanlis, Ανέκδοτα Έγγραφα, pp. 210–11; Anthony Luttrell, “The Latins and Life on the
Smaller Aegean Islands, 1204–1453,” in Latins and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean,
pp. 146–57; Coureas, Latin Church 1195–1312, pp. 69–80 and 96; idem, Latin Church 1313–1378,
p. 251; Lock, Franks, p. 211; Claverie, Honorius iii, p. 142.
35 Anthony Luttrell, “The Greeks of Rhodes under Hospitaller Rule: 1306–1421,” Rivista
di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici n.s. 29 (1992), 211, repr. in idem, The Hospitaller State on
Rhodes and its Western Provinces, 1306–1462 (Aldershot, 1999), iii; Luttrell, Town of Rhodes,
pp. 124–29; Tsirpanlis, Ανέκδοτα Έγγραφα, pp. 204–08.