Page:Orthodox Eastern Church (Fortescue).djvu/80

46 from the time Justinian's army conquered Italy from the Goths (554) till the Normans gradually took them (1060–1138). As the people were mostly Greeks, the Greek rite (of Byzantium) was used generally, and they had Greek monasteries. But some bishops (for instance, the Bishop of Tranum to whom Leo of Achrida writes in 1053, p. 178) were Latins. In any case all Italy and Sicily belonged to the Roman Patriarchate even more plainly than Illyricum, and had so belonged for centuries before there was such a person as a Patriarch of Constantinople. But at last the Emperor thought he could cement the allegiance of these distant provinces to his own throne by joining them to the Byzantine Patriarchate. Leo III (the Isaurian, 717–741) made a civil law proclaiming this; and from that time the Byzantine bishops make fitful attempts to assert jurisdiction here too, as long as the land belongs to the Empire. But the Normans conquer Sicily from 1060 to 1091, and then gradually seize the mainland too, forming what was afterwards called the kingdom of the two Sicilies. The last Imperial city to fall was Naples in 1138. From this time no one any longer disputes the Roman Patriarch's jurisdiction in these parts, though the Byzantine rite lingered on and is even still used about here. Magna Græcia is an exception to the general rule that rite follows patriarchate.

This completes our account of the rise and evolution of Constantinople, the "Great Church." So we have reached the classical number of five patriarchates, in this order: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, that afterwards seemed, to Eastern theologians especially, as obvious and necessary in the Christian Church as the five senses to a man's body. We have now only to trace the rise of the one