Byzantine Church Government

The Byzantine church had no pope. It had five patriarchs of theoretically equal dignity, a standing synod of bishops in the capital, an emperor who summoned councils and appointed patriarchs, a body of canon law with the force of civil law, and a monastic movement that repeatedly acted as an independent power. How these fitted together was never fully settled, and the disagreements about it are the substance of both the schism with Rome and a good deal of Byzantine internal politics.

The Pentarchy

The theory, articulated from the sixth century, was that the universal church was governed by five patriarchal sees: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, in that order of honour.

Rome held primacy of honour as the see of Peter and the old capital. Constantinople was elevated by the councils of 381 and 451 to second place, explicitly on the ground that it was the seat of the emperor and senate — a political rather than apostolic justification that Rome never accepted and that remained a live grievance for a thousand years.

The pentarchy was already a fiction when it was formulated. After the Arab conquests of the 640s, three of the five patriarchates were under Muslim rule, with reduced populations and no political weight, and Alexandria and Antioch had lost most of their Christian populations to the Miaphysite churches in any case. In practice Byzantine church government meant Constantinople.

The Patriarch of Constantinople

The patriarch was the senior churchman of the empire and one of the two most powerful figures in it.

Appointment. The standing synod submitted three names to the emperor, who chose one — or, as happened often enough to be unremarkable, indicated the name he wanted and received it. Emperors also deposed patriarchs, usually by procuring a synodal resolution.

Powers. He ordained metropolitans, presided over the synod, crowned emperors (a function that became fixed from the seventh century and gave the office real leverage), administered a large ecclesiastical bureaucracy, and served as the final court of appeal in church cases.

Title. From the sixth century he was styled Ecumenical Patriarch, a title that infuriated Rome — Gregory the Great objected to it as arrogant — although the Greek sense is closer to “of the imperial world” than “universal.” The office and its modern continuation are described in the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

Some patriarchs were formidable independent figures: Nicholas Mystikos, who refused to recognise Leo VI’s fourth marriage and was deposed for it; Photios, scholar and controversialist; Michael Keroularios, whose confrontation with the papal legates in 1054 was as much about his own authority as about doctrine; Arsenios, who excommunicated Michael VIII for blinding a child emperor.

Many others were compliant. Of roughly 130 patriarchs before 1453, a large number were deposed, resigned under pressure, or were appointed precisely because they would not cause trouble.

The Standing Synod

The synodos endemousa — the “resident synod” — was the working governing body: whichever bishops happened to be in Constantinople on business, meeting under the patriarch’s presidency.

It is an ad hoc arrangement that became an institution, and it handled the routine business of the church: appointments, discipline, marriage cases, disputes between sees, doctrinal questions in the first instance. Its records, preserved for the fourteenth century in particular, are among the best sources for Byzantine social history — the Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople is full of divorce cases, property disputes and complaints about priests.

The Hierarchy

Below the patriarch the structure was territorial and closely mapped onto civil administration, since dioceses generally followed provinces:

• Metropolitans headed provinces and ordained the bishops under them
• Autocephalous archbishops answered directly to the patriarch without a metropolitan
• Bishops headed individual sees, many of them small
• Priests and deacons served parishes and cathedrals

Lists of precedence (notitiae episcopatuum) survive from the seventh century onward and record hundreds of sees — a level of episcopal density far greater than in the medieval west, with bishops in what were effectively large villages.

Bishops were required to be celibate from the Quinisext Council of 692 onward, and in practice were drawn increasingly from the monasteries. Parish clergy could and normally did marry before ordination, a rule that still holds in the Orthodox churches and that was one of the practical irritants in relations with Rome.

Canon Law

Byzantine canon law was a compilation rather than a code: the canons of the ecumenical councils, of certain local councils, and of individual Fathers, together with imperial legislation on church matters.

The characteristic Byzantine legal book was the nomokanon, which set canons and civil laws on the same subject side by side. The Nomokanon in Fourteen Titles, revised under Photios in 883, was the standard. In the twelfth century a series of great canonists — Zonaras, Aristenos and above all Theodore Balsamon — produced commentaries that remain authoritative in Orthodox practice, and the whole tradition continues in the modern Orthodox churches, as Orthodox canon law describes.

Church law was enforceable. Bishops had jurisdiction over clergy and over certain categories of case involving laity, and their decisions were backed by the state. The relationship with the civil law is set out in Byzantine law.

Emperor and Church

The relationship is the contested question, and two caricatures need disposing of.

The first is caesaropapism: the claim that the emperor was effectively head of the church and that the Byzantine church was a department of state. It is too strong. Emperors who pushed doctrine against the conviction of the church failed — the iconoclast emperors, the Monothelites, the unionists of 1274 and 1439 — and in each case the church’s position eventually prevailed over the state’s.

The second is the harmonious symphonia described in Justinian’s sixth novel: priesthood and empire as two gifts of God, working in concert, each in its own sphere. This is the official theory and describes an ideal that was frequently not met.

The workable summary is that emperors had enormous practical power over the church — appointment, deposition, finance, the summoning of councils — and no recognised authority to define doctrine. Where the two came into conflict, the emperor usually won in the short term and usually lost over fifty years. Theodore the Studite’s formulation, made while resisting imperial interference, was that it is not for emperors to legislate on matters of faith; he said it from exile, which is the point.

The Patriarchal Bureaucracy

The patriarch of Constantinople ran an administration comparable in scale to a substantial government department, and its structure is documented in the precedence lists.

The senior officials were grouped in ranks of five. The first group, the exokatakoiloi, included:

• The megas oikonomos — chief financial officer, administering the patriarchate’s estates and revenues
• The megas sakellarios — responsible for the monasteries
• The megas skeuophylax — keeper of the vessels, vestments and treasury of the Great Church
• The chartophylax — keeper of the archives and the patriarch’s chief legal officer, who in practice became the most powerful of them, issuing marriage licences, examining ordinands and presiding in the patriarch’s absence
• The sakelliou — responsible for the parish clergy

Below them ran deacons, notaries, legal officers, the clergy of Hagia Sophia — 600 by Justinian’s establishment of 535, including 80 priests, 150 deacons, 40 deaconesses, 110 readers and 25 cantors — and the staff of the patriarchal school.

The chartophylax is worth noting because his rise illustrates a general Byzantine pattern: the official who keeps the records ends up interpreting them, and interpretation is power. By the twelfth century, canonists like Balsamon held or had held the post.

The Register

The single richest source for how the church actually governed is the surviving register of the patriarchal synod for the years 1315–1402.

It records the synod’s business as it came: disputed episcopal appointments, clergy accused of misconduct, monastery property disputes, and above all a great volume of marriage cases — betrothals contested, marriages within prohibited degrees of kinship, divorce petitions, abandoned wives seeking permission to remarry, and disputes over dowry.

The value for social history is considerable, because the cases involve ordinary people whose lives no other source records. A woman petitioning the synod because her husband has gone to Anatolia and not returned in seven years appears nowhere else in the written record of the fourteenth century.

The register also shows the church’s reach at a moment when the state’s had collapsed. In the 1340s the patriarchate was adjudicating cases from Russia, the Caucasus, the Balkans and Anatolian territories long since lost to the empire — an ecclesiastical jurisdiction that outlasted the political one, and a direct anticipation of the millet arrangement described in Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire.

Deposing a Patriarch

The procedure by which patriarchs were removed reveals the real balance of power better than any theory of church and state.

The forms had to be observed. An emperor could not simply dismiss a patriarch; a synod had to find grounds, or the patriarch had to resign. In practice, grounds were found.

The usual mechanisms were a charge of canonical irregularity in the original appointment, an accusation of misconduct, or sustained pressure producing a resignation that was then accepted with expressions of regret.

Of the patriarchs between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, a substantial proportion left office other than by death — deposed, resigned under pressure, or exiled. Photios was deposed twice; Nicholas Mystikos was deposed for opposing Leo VI’s fourth marriage and later restored; Arsenios was deposed for excommunicating Michael VIII.

The patriarchs who successfully resisted did so by having the monasteries and the population behind them. That is the practical shape of the church–state relationship: the emperor controlled the appointment, the church controlled the reception, and a patriarch with popular and monastic support could not be removed quietly.

• Patriarch Photios — the most formidable holder of the office
• The Ecumenical Patriarchate — the institution then and now
• The Seven Ecumenical Councils — how doctrine was actually decided
• The Great Schism of 1054 — the argument about authority
• Byzantine Law — the civil framework
• Orthodox Canon Law — the tradition that continues
• Byzantine Monasticism — the church’s independent power base