On the closing of the churches and the rebaptism of Latins: Greek perfidy or Latin slander?

Abstract

Following the testimony of various western medieval authors, historians sometimes assert that Byzantines closed the Latin churches of Constantinople on at least two occasions and rebaptised Latin Christians who married Greek ones from c.1054 on. Both the polemical context of these accusations, however, and statements in contemporary Greek sources call these assertions into question. Latin churches were probably not closed by the Greek patriarch in 1054 or 1089, and rebaptism of Latin Christians was not the policy of the Constantinopolitan church at any point in the Middle Ages. In the tenth century the Italian city-state of Amalfi became the first Latin city to have a resident merchant community in Constantinople. Although Amalfi had been within the Byzantine orbit in the early Byzantine period, it was not a Greek city, but a Latin one with inhabitants of the Latin rite. Therefore, the Amalfitans who resided in Constantinople needed a Latin church and were given the right to have one, as well as a house for Benedictine monks. Amalfi was joined later by Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, and all the merchant communities (to different degrees at different times) had special privileges which included the right to protect their own quarter of the City and to have Latin churches there. Eventually Cistercians, Franciscans, and Dominicans would join the Benedictines in the spiritual service of these merchant colonies. The emperor needed these merchants, andin granting them the right to hold their own church services he was acting in accordance with tradition. They did not speak Greek, but they were Christians who needed and deserved spiritual care, so they must have clergy who spoke their language, just as the Greeks in Rome had Greek clergy.This seems to have bothered no one before the middle of the eleventh century. There are only a few, scattered references to Greek complaints about Latin ritual and even fewerLatin complaints about Greek harassment before c.l050. As was true in many different realms, however, feelings began to change around the middle of the eleventh century.Latins in the East began to complain that the Greek clergy were denigrating some of their rites and harassing them. If true, these claims indicate that the Greek clergy were hostile to Latin ways of worshipping from the middle of the eleventh century, at the latest.

Confessionalization and/as Knowledge Transfer in the Greek Orthodox Church

“…The second is 'bad innovation': for example, in matters of faith, the beliefs of misguided schismatics who differ from the followers of the Sunna, and, in matters of practice, the forms of worship invented by the common people on no authority but their own." For the innovation controversy 'moment of the consecration of the Eucharist' (fifteenth century), 6 at the end of the seventeenth century Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodoxy was shaken by another Eucharistic controversy: in order to better express one of the hidden mysteries of ' and T. Kolbaba, '1054 Revisited: Response to Ryder', Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 35 (2011) 20-37 and 38-44, respectively; V. Grolimund, 'Die Entwicklung der Theologie der Eucharistie in Byzanz von 1054-1453', in I. Perczel, R. Forrai andG. Geréby (eds) both Churches, Roman-Catholic and Orthodox, assert the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist in contrast to the tenet of a symbolic-spiritual presence in the Protestant doctrine, a difference still exists between the two: against Ratramnus of Corbie (ninth century) and Berengarius of Tours (c. , who denied the identity of the Eucharist with the physical Body of Christ-bread and wine being only efficient 'signs' of Christ's spiritual-heavenly body-the 'doctor Ecclesiae' Thomas Aquinas, employing the Aristotelian philosophical system and the distinction between substance and accident ('hylomorphism'), explained that what appear to be bread and wine ('accidents') are actually the Body and Blood of Christ ('substance'); the substance has changed without the accidents changing.…”