Page:Uniate Eastern Churches.pdf/128

98 the twelfth century. Bova in Calabria had Byzantine bishops till the sixteenth century (p, 109), Oppido (p. 108) and Gerace till the fifteenth (p. 108). In Sicily, too, there remained Byzantine diocesan bishops for some time after the Normans came. Under the Normans there was a Nicodemus, Archbishop of Palermo, who was a Greek. Leo Allatius says: "In the time of Roger there were many Greek bishops in Sicily, as can be proved by the Ectypus of Roger. ... No one can doubt that at that time there remained many Greeks in Sicily, or that the Greek bishops were not yet replaced by Latin ones."

But these cases were the exception. The general trend after the Norman conquest was that the Byzantine bishops were succeeded by Latins. The See of Otranto became Latin in the eleventh century. It remained an archbishopric and had new Latin suffragans. At Gallipoli there were alternately Latin and Byzantine bishops. Roger I changed the See of Reggio from Byzantine to Roman; Gregory VII confirmed its rank as an archiepiscopal see (but a Latin one) in 1081. At Squillace (Scyllatium) Roger I built a new cathedral; when its Byzantine bishop, Theodore Mesmer, died in 1096, he appointed a Latin successor, John de Nicephoro. The See of Tropea became Latin in 1094, under the Bishop Iustego. In Sicily, although Roger I expressly said he would tolerate the Byzantine rite, yet he used influence to make the people accept that of Rome. In short, the policy of the first Norman kings seems to have been to avoid anything like open hostility to the rite of Constantinople; while prudently, where they could, they introduced that of Rome.

Meanwhile the Patriarchs of Constantinople went on