Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/40

 church, in northern Transylvania a patriarchal decree was required for the superior of a free monastery (stauropigy) to exercise episcopal power. As one of the first Wallachian exarchs to become a true Metropolitan was the overlord of the houses on Mount Athos. The Constantinople Patriarch, heir of Byzantine imperialism, alone could hope to rule the new establishment, which had sprung up under its guidance.

The hope however was vain: there is no trace of the intervention of the religious chief of all the Greeks. When another Patriarch wished to make the non-canonical Metropolitan seat of Moldavia a simple province within his jurisdiction, sending his own nominee to take over control, he was met with stubborn resistance from such bishops as were consecrated in the monasteries of the Slavonic tongue. founded by a Serbian monk of Macedonian origin and athonic forming, Nicodeme. He was eventually forced to resign his claims and the first Metropolitan was a Moldavian, one of the victorious opponents.

The powers of the Patriarch were materially curtailed by the Turkish conquest, which made him a creature of the Sultan and the political head of a single nation in the orthodoxy; impoverished, he was constrained to seek the help of the Roumanian princes, to dwell and celebrate in such buildings as were the property of the Roumanian principalities; always menaced, he asked the protection, and oft-times the shelter, of the Danubian rulers to whom visits were paid from the 16th century onwards. In the 17th century the rich Prince of Moldavia, Basil, took over the financial administration of the «great Church » in Constantinople and the life of this church was thereafter controlled by him. The other patriarchs followed the example of Constantinople: they were, up to the beginning of the Russian era, and often afterwards too, at the service of the