Page:Orthodox Eastern Church (Fortescue).djvu/62

28 Moslem. Sophronius begged to be allowed to surrender the city to the Khalifah himself; Omar agreed, travelled with one single attendant to Jerusalem, promised the Christians the possession of their churches and freedom of worship on the usual condition—a poll-tax, and then entered the city side by side with the Patriarch, discussing its antiquities. It is said that Omar refused to pray in the Anastasis (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) for fear that afterwards his followers might make his example an excuse for turning it into a mosque, in spite of the treaty. So the Anastasis has always been a Christian church, and the Moslem conquest of Jerusalem did not at first involve any great suffering. But the city that had been Aelia Capitolina now became the Mohammedan "Holy Place"; and when, after an interval of fifty years, John V (in 705) succeeded Sophronius, the Church of Jerusalem was reduced to a subject-community of Christians in a corner of the great Saracen Empire. The Patriarch of Jerusalem has ever since been the poorest of his kind, and for many centuries he was content to live at Constantinople as an official of that Patriarch's Court.

We come lastly to the story of the rise of Constantinople. The most significant development among the Eastern Churches, indeed the connecting link of the unity of their history, is the evolution of the See of Constantinople from being the smallest of local dioceses to the position of first Church of all Eastern Christendom, so great that her bishops even ventured to think themselves the rivals of the Roman Pope, so influential that when at last they fell into formal schism they dragged all the other Eastern bishops with them. It is the most significant development and the latest: it was, moreover, this ambition of the bishops of the Imperial City that far more than anything else caused and fostered friction with Rome, so that if one looks for the deeper causes of the schism, one realizes that it was not the Filioque in the Creed, not the question of leaven or unleavened bread, not the rights of Ignatius the Patriarch that really