‘They Do It Like This in Romania’

Abstract

Chapter 10 explores the changing uses of Byzantine canon law among the Italo-Greeks in the thirteenth century. The Greek churches and monasteries of southern Italy became increasingly integrated into the administration of the Roman church following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Nonetheless, as the Salentine Group shows, some Italo-Greeks continued to copy nomocanons as late as the fourteenth century. Chapter 10 argues that the manuscripts retained a value as sources of cultural authority, explaining and justifying Greek religious ritual, even as they lost their value as sources of legal authority. To illustrate this point, the chapter begins with a discussion of Nektarios of Otranto’s Three Chapters, a polemical work of c. 1220–1225 that relies heavily on citations of Byzantine canon law to refute Latin attacks on Greek rites and customs. It then considers who these refutations were aimed at, looking in particular at the abortive attempt of Archbishop Marinus of Bari to outlaw Greek baptism in 1232 as a specific example of Latin criticism. It notes, however, that criticism like this from the official church hierarchy was rare and that controversy was probably more restricted to an unofficial, local level. The chapter concludes by examining evidence that canon-law based defences of Greek religious practice were not just aimed at Latins but also at other Greeks. As many Italo-Greeks began to adopt (consciously or otherwise) Latin rites into their worship, more conservative sections of the community attempted to resist such cultural change by mobilising canon law as polemic.