170 Coureas
north-eastern tip of Sicily and its dependencies, which likewise solicited such
protection and had judges conservators appointed to safeguard their rights
from encroachment by Latin secular lords or prelates, from the 13th through
to the 15th centuries.54
From the 1220s onwards the presence of the mendicant orders, with their
missionary zeal that caused clashes with the Greek monks, made itself felt
strongly. The Franciscans, established in Constantinople by 1220, were influ-
ential under the Latin Emperor John of Brienne (1229–37) who later joined
the order and his successor Baldwin ii, the last Latin emperor. They secured
a number of holy relics from the city for King Louis ix of France and sup-
ported the Latin patriarch Giustiniani in his attempts to obtain sums of
money from insubordinate clergy. When the Greeks regained the city in 1261
the patriarch left the Franciscan Anthony behind as his vicar. The Franciscans
and Dominicans were instrumental in the negotiations for the union of the
churches inaugurated under Pope Gregory ix in 1234, paying a visit to the court
of Nicaea in January, where the Byzantine emperor John Vatatzes and the
Greek ecumenical patriarch received them, although these negotiations were
unsuccessful. After January 1234 these negotiations continued in Nymphaem,
but broke up in acrimony. They reflected the earlier failure of the attempts
of the Dominican friar Andrew to persuade a community of Greek monks
established in Kantariotissa, Cyprus of the validity of unleavened communion
bread. Whereas the Latins regarded both leavened and unleavened bread as
acceptable the Greeks rejected the latter. The 13 monks were arrested, brought
to Nicosia and incarcerated, tried in 1231 and then handed over to the secular
arm and burnt at the stake. This martyrdom of the monks was a unique event
in the Orthodox world. The news reached Emperor John Vatazes shortly before
negotiations for the union of the two Churches began in Nicaea. Patriarch
Germanos of Nicaea also mentioned it with bitterness in a letter he sent to Pope
Gregory ix in 1232. In the Peloponnese, where the first recorded Dominican
house dates from 1228, and that of the Franciscans from 1247, nearly 20 years
54 Richard, “Latin Church in Constantinople,” p. 54; idem, “Un monastère grec de Palestine
et son domaine chypriote: le monachisme orthodoxe et l’établissement de la domina-
tion franque,” in Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Cypriot Studies,
ed. T. Papadopoulos and B. Englezakis (Nicosia, 1986), pp. 61–65, repr. in Jean Richard,
Croisades et États latins d’Orient (Aldershot, 1992), xiv; Kalopissi-Verti, “Relations between
East and West,” p. 13; Coureas, Latin Church 1195–1312, pp. 288–89 and 313–14; idem, Latin
Church 1313–1378, pp. 459–74; idem, “Papal Judge-Conservators among the Greek Clergy in
Lusignan Cyprus, Southern Italy and Sicily in the Fourteenth Century,” in Sacri Canones
Servandi Sunt, ed. Pavel Krafl (Prague, 2008), pp. 313–23.