Page:Orthodox Eastern Church (Fortescue).djvu/177

Rh exiled patriarchs and set up intruders in their see over and over again. The Sultans in later years have never ceased doing so down to our own time, and the Orthodox historians print the names of all these bishops one after another, just as they de facto held the see.

Nevertheless Photius and the Court were very anxious to get Ignatius to resign. In case he would not do so they already foresaw trouble with Rome. So they sent messengers to persuade him to sign a document of resignation. His bishops had already promised to stand by him, and he now and to the end of his life steadfastly refused to give up his right. Soon afterwards the bishops who remained true to him met and declared Photius, the intruded anti-patriarch, and all his followers to be excommunicate. Photius answered by pronouncing the same sentence on Ignatius and on his followers. The Government then began to persecute the Ignatian bishops. Metrophanes of Smyrna, their leader, was shut up in a dungeon, others were sent into exile, imprisoned, tortured. But the worst part fell upon Ignatius himself. He was taken to Mitylene, chained in a prison without enough food, and beaten in the face till his teeth were knocked out, to make him resign. But Photius himself wrote to Bardas to protest against the way his opponents were treated. On the other hand he evicted a number of Ignatian bishops and intruded his own friends into their sees. Both the Emperor and Photius then write to the Pope to persuade him that everything is in order.

Fortunately, when this great crisis between the two halves of Christendom at last came, the Roman See was occupied by one of the very greatest of the Popes. Nicholas I (858–867) stands out as the champion of the Catholic side, as much as Photius was of the Byzantine Church that he was about to drag into