Page:Uniate Eastern Churches.pdf/129

Rh the Sees of Sicily and Italy as part of their Patriarchate, keeping up a futile theoretic claim to them for centuries after they had lost all authority there. But, when a diocese received a Latin bishop, it did not follow that all the clergy of the diocese were Latins. Under the Latin bishops there remained Byzantine churches, Byzantine priests, monasteries, and institutions of various kinds, all through the Middle Ages. At first, large numbers of the people continued to worship God according to the Byzantine rite. These Greek institutions (in many cases) came to an end at last; but some of them lasted on till the coming of the Albanians in the fifteenth century, thus forming a link between the older Greek churches here and the new wave of the Byzantine rite. Indeed, there are still in Italy one monastery and many curious relics of the old Byzantine influence, apart from the new Albanian settlers who now form the main Byzantine element.

At Naples in the thirteenth century there were still six parish churches of the Byzantine rite; a document of the year 1305 speaks of the "assembly of priests, Greek and Latin," of the church of St January ad Diaconiam, "in regione Furcillense."

In the thirteenth century Altamura was a tiny village. The Emperor Frederick II (1215-1250) in 1232 restored this place, and made it an asylum for many Greeks dispersed throughout the province of Lecce. They used the Byzantine rite and built three churches for it. Reggio was particularly tenacious of its Byzantine use. After the Metropolitan see had become Latin, it still had Byzantine suffragans. Alexander III (1159-1181) in 1165, in confirming the use of the Pallium by Roger, Archbishop of Reggio (c. 1146-c. 1165), expressly gave him the right of ordaining suffragans "both Latin and Greek." So the Third Lateran Council in 1179 names among the bishops who attended it two: "Philippus Crotonias (al. Crotomas) græcus, Leratinus (al. Eterantinus), Episcopus græcus,"