Part XIII: A Matter of Faith (1469-1476)
Eparkhos
Banned
Part XIII: A Matter of Faith (1469-1476)
The issue of ecclesiastical sovereignty had been a long simmering conflict between generations of Trapezuntine Metropolitans and Ecumenical Patriarchs, dating back all the way to 1204. This spiritual conflict occasionally boiled over into secular conflict, such as the brief war in 1284 between Trapezous and the Palaiologian Empire, or the brief series of naval skirmishes in the Black Sea that occurred in the 1350s. For most of their coexistence, the two groups had been at a standoff due to the great distance between them and more pressing issues, such as the ongoing conflict with the Turkmen who were eating away at both Empire’s frontiers. However, now that the Palaiologian Empire had been swept into the dustbin of history, Basileios Funa was determined to attain the title that he considered rightfully his and his successors’; the Patriarch of Trapezous.
Basileios of Funa had been born into poverty in the Crimean highlands in 1421, with Gothic as his mother tongue. His parents had been poor farmers who had worked themselves to the bone to send Basileios off to Mangyup to join the priesthood. Once in the capital of the Gothic rump state, Funa had steadily advanced himself through a combination of determination and flattery, with no little amount of luck thrown in. In 1448, he was sent on a missionary expedition to the Vainakhs[1], a warlike mountain people in the Caucasus who had apostasied from Othodoxy after the Mongol conquests. Most of the missionaries were content to preach to a small group of merchants in Kartvelia and consider their work done, but Funa and a few companions cross the great mountains and began to preach amongst the Vainakhs. After several years, they had succeeded in converting many of the Vainakh chieftains, famously taking part in the baptism of some 5,000 Vainakhs in the Reyeko River in 1450. He then went south into the broadest part of the mountains, which was home to another group of fierce mountain warriors called the Maharulal Awars or Avars. He prozletyzied heavily here and was nearly martyred several times but miraculously escaped several times to continue his mission. This culminated in the baptism of Khan Rusalan in the Avar River in 1455; Rusalan would later go on to unify the region--in the name of Christ, of course. He returned to Doros in 1456, the missionary work to be completed by his friend, St. Konstantinos of Khunzakh. Funa ingratiated himself with Patriarch Isodoros II, becoming first a scribe and then a personal secretary of the Patriarch. In 1461, Isodoros consecrated Basileios as Bishop of Pontoherakleia, and two years later he was promoted to Metropolitan of Trapezous. His participation in the Brothers’ War and the Regency Struggle have already been covered in detail, and after these were finished he seemed to be willing to continue on as just another obscure Metropolitan of Trapezous[2].
However, this changed in 1467, with the ascension of Dionysios to the Patriarchal throne. His very name--why on earth would he think that taking the name of the Demon of Debauchery[3] was a good idea?--angered Basileios, and this imagined grievance would soon be followed up with another. DInoysios had defeated a pair of Ponts, Symeon and Theodoros, in the election for the seat of Patriarch, and this appears to have filled Dionysios with a severe dislike for Ponts at large, refusing to appoint a number of prominent Ponts to the bishoprics which they had been promised by his predecessor, Gennadios II. Many of these men then appealed to Basileios, who was the highest-ranking ecclesiastical official in the Trapezuntine Empire. The two men exchanged a series of letters in the closing years of the 1460s, over the course of which subtle insults became far more open. Finally, in 1469, Basileiso told the Patriarch that the best thing he could do for the church would be to castrate himself, then tie a millstone around his neck and throw himself into the sea[4]. Dionysios excommunicated the insolent metropolitan, nominally due to the liturgical problems caused by Regentess Keteon’s extension of freedom of worship to the Armenian church, but the true cause of the chrysobull quickly became an open secret.
The Pontic church quickly rallied around Basileios. The Trapezuntine church had had stronger ties to the Kartvelian church than they had to the church in Constantinople for some time now, due to the difficulty of travel and communication with the latter and the proximity of the former. As such, with the exception of the Bishop of Sinope, whose parishioners did a brisk trade with the Constantinopolitan regime and who attempted to remain neutral in the conflict, all of the bishoprics of the Trapezuntine Empire supported Basileios and refused to have anything to do with clergymen sent to fill the vacant roles from Constantinople. This support left Basileios confident in his support and so in 1470, on the advice of several bishops who were personally close to him, he fired back. Dionysios woke one night in late April to find that a chrysobull excommunicating him had been nailed to the door of the Holy Apostles, as well as his personal residence and the Hagia Sophia. The Orthodox World was thrown into a state of schism.
Basileios was now the de facto Patriarch of Trapezous, but he needed legal recognition to legitimize Trapezous as the seat of an independent patriarchate. He soon found an unexpected ally; The Russian Church. In 1461, the Metropolitan of all Russia, St. Jonah, unilaterally declared himself Patriarch of Russia, and was excommunicated by the Ecumenical Patriarch because of it. Now his successor, Philippos, maintained his claim, and was willing to make common cause with Basileios to advance their joint claims. Basileios agreed, and in 1471 the two would-be patriarchs declared that they would not accept communion with the Patriarch of Constantinople unless they were both elevated.
Outside of the lands surrounding the Black Sea, the feelings of most of the Orthodox church was rather lukewarm. The Ecumenical Patriarch wasn’t nearly as powerful as the Pope, and the Patriarchs of Antioch, Alexandria and Serbia and the Archbishop of Cyprus[5] all disliked Dionysios and considered him to be the instigator of the schism. More importantly, Serbia and Georgia were both under assault by the Latin heretics and the Muslim heathens and considered these much more pressing problems than some squabble over leadership. Most importantly, that was exactly how the whole affair was viewed in most of the Orthodox world--just some leadership squabble. Dionysios, nor Basileios or Philippos, was able to really fan the flames of passion needed to turn this issue into a massive schism because there was very little at stake. Rather than there being some all-encompassing doctrinal dispute such as the Acacian or Great Schism, the Dionysian Schism, as it was rapidly becoming known, was more akin to the Arsenite Schism of the late 13th Century, of concern only to those living in a small region.
With very little foreign support for the Patriarch forthcoming, Basileios and Philippos were able to confidently wait him out with little more than an exchange of a series of insulting letters. In 1472, the Bishop of Amisos was convinced to finally pick a side and did so, coming down solidly in support of Basileios. This did little to hurt Dionysios’ cause, but it was a major prestige hit. The schism finally ended in 1474, following a bizzare string of events. The schism, as well as his crass personality and generally repugnant nature, had garnered a great number of enemies for Dionysios, and in 1473 his domestic opponents caused a synod to accuse him of apostasy and depose him. The charges were far from convincing--his accusers were only able to produce a pair of lawyers and a courtesan who swore that they had seen him embrace Mohammed--and his opponents soon became desperate. One night, Dionysios was drugged and kidnapped by his opponents, who then circumcised him in his sleep and returned him to his residence. The next day, when a pained Dionysios hobbled into the cathedral, his opponents demanded he strip naked before the synod to prove he had not been circumcised. It was obvious that the operation had been recently performed, but by now there were enough diehard opponents and idiots for the vote to depose him to carry through. After several weeks, the synod then elected Romanos Khalitzes, the former Bishop of Herakleia, as Patriarch Andreas II.
Andreas was far more reconciliatory than Dionysios, and so he reached out to Basileios and Gerontios (Philippos’ successor; the metropolitan died in 1473) in hopes of mending the schism. The two metropolitans were surprisingly receptive, and in mid-1474 the two factions restored communion with each other. There was a clandestine agreement that the metropolitans would soon be elevated, but Andreas was unwilling to do this directly. He was afraid that this would set a bad precedent and that future patriarchs would have to deal with ambitious metropolitans creating schisms willy-nilly in an attempt to advance themselves. As such, rather than directly appointing either Basileios or Gerontios, he instead summoned another ecumenical synod in 1475. This synod was held in Constantinople--the first since the city’s conquest--and after the summary declaration that the hated Council of Florence was null and void the issue of the patriarchs was brought up. Basileios and Gerontios both presented their cases in November 1475. Gerontios stated that the distance between his ecclesiastical provinces and Constantinople was too great for the Ecumenical Patriarch to hold sway over both, and evidently this was found reasonable, for he was proclaimed the first Patriarch of All Russia that very week. However, there was considerably more opposition to a Trapezuntine Patriarchate. The distance to Constantinople was significantly less than Russia’s, while there was much talk of the Metropolitanate of Trapezous and its subsidiaries being transferred to the Patriarchate of Georgia. However, Basileios counterred these with geopolitical and linguistic concerns--the Trapezuntine Empire was the last free, Orthodox Greek polity. If it were to remain subject to Constaintople, it was entirely possible that the perfidious sultan would use it as leverage to reduce the last spark of Rome and righteous Christianity in Asia Minor. As for the Georgians, they were already overstretched, and a transfer to them would necessitate the latering of liturgical languages, something that rang sourly with the primarily Greek synod.
On 11 February 1476, the Patriarchate of Pontos was created, with Basileios invested as its first Patriarch. However, there were still a number of concerns over how this would be implemented. The Ecumenical patriarchate nominally controlled ecclesiastical affairs west of the Taurus mountains, and no one was quite sure where the borders of the new patriarch were to lie. After several more weeks of negotiation, a solution was reached. The Pontic Patriarchate would take control of all Ecumenical territories east of the Ottoman border, while everything west of the border would remain under the Ecumenical Patriarch. This pleased few--Basileios wanted all of Anatolia, while Andreas wanted the Pontic Patriarchate’s borders limited to the spine of the Pontic mountains--but it was good enough to be taken as a makeshift measure. Few at the time knew it, but these stopgap borders would last for several centuries before being altered. Finally, the Orthodox territories in Crimea (Gothia and the lands subject to the Genoese) would also be subject to the Pontic Patriarchate, with the border with Georgia being laid along the current boundary with the Ecumenical Patriarchate[6].
Basileios returned home to a hero’s welcome, with a jubilant crowd meeting him on the Trapezuntine docks and accompanying him all the way to the Hagia Sophia of Trapezous. The Patriarch had emerged victorious from the schism, having finally accomplished the goals of centuries of Trapezuntine metropolitans. For this, along with several reported miracles performed while proselytizing amongst the Vainakhs, he was canonized as Saint Basileios of Funa three years after his death in 1483. He is regarded as patron saint of Trapezous alongside Saint Eugenios and as patron saint of Avaria, alongside Saint-King Rusalav. Finally, he is known as the patron saint of arbitrators, a fitting legacy for a man with such an immense legacy.
However, he has not yet left his story, as he would play a large hand in the reign of Alexandros II….
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] This was the medieval name for the Chechens, as some of you may remember from Byzantium’s Resurrection
[2] The title ‘metropolitan’ can be roughly equated with the Latin archbishop, all this is a very rough comparison. More accurately, a metropolitan bishop is a bishop who presides over a holy city or center of pilgrimage, the latter of which Trapezous was.
[3] The official stance of the Orthodox Church was that the Greek Gods, as with all other pagan pantheons, were in fact demons and/or princes of hell. Even as the popularity of classical names rose in the late middle ages, these were considered inappropriate for baptism (unless the name was shared with a saint).
[4] For those of you not versed in biblical meanings, here Basileios is referencing Matthew 5:30 and 18:6 to suggest that Dionysios was a pedophile.
[5] Cyprus had an arrangement within the church, wherein the Metropolitan Bishop retained his position but bore the privileges of a patriarch.
[6] A map of this will be put up soon.
The issue of ecclesiastical sovereignty had been a long simmering conflict between generations of Trapezuntine Metropolitans and Ecumenical Patriarchs, dating back all the way to 1204. This spiritual conflict occasionally boiled over into secular conflict, such as the brief war in 1284 between Trapezous and the Palaiologian Empire, or the brief series of naval skirmishes in the Black Sea that occurred in the 1350s. For most of their coexistence, the two groups had been at a standoff due to the great distance between them and more pressing issues, such as the ongoing conflict with the Turkmen who were eating away at both Empire’s frontiers. However, now that the Palaiologian Empire had been swept into the dustbin of history, Basileios Funa was determined to attain the title that he considered rightfully his and his successors’; the Patriarch of Trapezous.
Basileios of Funa had been born into poverty in the Crimean highlands in 1421, with Gothic as his mother tongue. His parents had been poor farmers who had worked themselves to the bone to send Basileios off to Mangyup to join the priesthood. Once in the capital of the Gothic rump state, Funa had steadily advanced himself through a combination of determination and flattery, with no little amount of luck thrown in. In 1448, he was sent on a missionary expedition to the Vainakhs[1], a warlike mountain people in the Caucasus who had apostasied from Othodoxy after the Mongol conquests. Most of the missionaries were content to preach to a small group of merchants in Kartvelia and consider their work done, but Funa and a few companions cross the great mountains and began to preach amongst the Vainakhs. After several years, they had succeeded in converting many of the Vainakh chieftains, famously taking part in the baptism of some 5,000 Vainakhs in the Reyeko River in 1450. He then went south into the broadest part of the mountains, which was home to another group of fierce mountain warriors called the Maharulal Awars or Avars. He prozletyzied heavily here and was nearly martyred several times but miraculously escaped several times to continue his mission. This culminated in the baptism of Khan Rusalan in the Avar River in 1455; Rusalan would later go on to unify the region--in the name of Christ, of course. He returned to Doros in 1456, the missionary work to be completed by his friend, St. Konstantinos of Khunzakh. Funa ingratiated himself with Patriarch Isodoros II, becoming first a scribe and then a personal secretary of the Patriarch. In 1461, Isodoros consecrated Basileios as Bishop of Pontoherakleia, and two years later he was promoted to Metropolitan of Trapezous. His participation in the Brothers’ War and the Regency Struggle have already been covered in detail, and after these were finished he seemed to be willing to continue on as just another obscure Metropolitan of Trapezous[2].
However, this changed in 1467, with the ascension of Dionysios to the Patriarchal throne. His very name--why on earth would he think that taking the name of the Demon of Debauchery[3] was a good idea?--angered Basileios, and this imagined grievance would soon be followed up with another. DInoysios had defeated a pair of Ponts, Symeon and Theodoros, in the election for the seat of Patriarch, and this appears to have filled Dionysios with a severe dislike for Ponts at large, refusing to appoint a number of prominent Ponts to the bishoprics which they had been promised by his predecessor, Gennadios II. Many of these men then appealed to Basileios, who was the highest-ranking ecclesiastical official in the Trapezuntine Empire. The two men exchanged a series of letters in the closing years of the 1460s, over the course of which subtle insults became far more open. Finally, in 1469, Basileiso told the Patriarch that the best thing he could do for the church would be to castrate himself, then tie a millstone around his neck and throw himself into the sea[4]. Dionysios excommunicated the insolent metropolitan, nominally due to the liturgical problems caused by Regentess Keteon’s extension of freedom of worship to the Armenian church, but the true cause of the chrysobull quickly became an open secret.
The Pontic church quickly rallied around Basileios. The Trapezuntine church had had stronger ties to the Kartvelian church than they had to the church in Constantinople for some time now, due to the difficulty of travel and communication with the latter and the proximity of the former. As such, with the exception of the Bishop of Sinope, whose parishioners did a brisk trade with the Constantinopolitan regime and who attempted to remain neutral in the conflict, all of the bishoprics of the Trapezuntine Empire supported Basileios and refused to have anything to do with clergymen sent to fill the vacant roles from Constantinople. This support left Basileios confident in his support and so in 1470, on the advice of several bishops who were personally close to him, he fired back. Dionysios woke one night in late April to find that a chrysobull excommunicating him had been nailed to the door of the Holy Apostles, as well as his personal residence and the Hagia Sophia. The Orthodox World was thrown into a state of schism.
Basileios was now the de facto Patriarch of Trapezous, but he needed legal recognition to legitimize Trapezous as the seat of an independent patriarchate. He soon found an unexpected ally; The Russian Church. In 1461, the Metropolitan of all Russia, St. Jonah, unilaterally declared himself Patriarch of Russia, and was excommunicated by the Ecumenical Patriarch because of it. Now his successor, Philippos, maintained his claim, and was willing to make common cause with Basileios to advance their joint claims. Basileios agreed, and in 1471 the two would-be patriarchs declared that they would not accept communion with the Patriarch of Constantinople unless they were both elevated.
Outside of the lands surrounding the Black Sea, the feelings of most of the Orthodox church was rather lukewarm. The Ecumenical Patriarch wasn’t nearly as powerful as the Pope, and the Patriarchs of Antioch, Alexandria and Serbia and the Archbishop of Cyprus[5] all disliked Dionysios and considered him to be the instigator of the schism. More importantly, Serbia and Georgia were both under assault by the Latin heretics and the Muslim heathens and considered these much more pressing problems than some squabble over leadership. Most importantly, that was exactly how the whole affair was viewed in most of the Orthodox world--just some leadership squabble. Dionysios, nor Basileios or Philippos, was able to really fan the flames of passion needed to turn this issue into a massive schism because there was very little at stake. Rather than there being some all-encompassing doctrinal dispute such as the Acacian or Great Schism, the Dionysian Schism, as it was rapidly becoming known, was more akin to the Arsenite Schism of the late 13th Century, of concern only to those living in a small region.
With very little foreign support for the Patriarch forthcoming, Basileios and Philippos were able to confidently wait him out with little more than an exchange of a series of insulting letters. In 1472, the Bishop of Amisos was convinced to finally pick a side and did so, coming down solidly in support of Basileios. This did little to hurt Dionysios’ cause, but it was a major prestige hit. The schism finally ended in 1474, following a bizzare string of events. The schism, as well as his crass personality and generally repugnant nature, had garnered a great number of enemies for Dionysios, and in 1473 his domestic opponents caused a synod to accuse him of apostasy and depose him. The charges were far from convincing--his accusers were only able to produce a pair of lawyers and a courtesan who swore that they had seen him embrace Mohammed--and his opponents soon became desperate. One night, Dionysios was drugged and kidnapped by his opponents, who then circumcised him in his sleep and returned him to his residence. The next day, when a pained Dionysios hobbled into the cathedral, his opponents demanded he strip naked before the synod to prove he had not been circumcised. It was obvious that the operation had been recently performed, but by now there were enough diehard opponents and idiots for the vote to depose him to carry through. After several weeks, the synod then elected Romanos Khalitzes, the former Bishop of Herakleia, as Patriarch Andreas II.
Andreas was far more reconciliatory than Dionysios, and so he reached out to Basileios and Gerontios (Philippos’ successor; the metropolitan died in 1473) in hopes of mending the schism. The two metropolitans were surprisingly receptive, and in mid-1474 the two factions restored communion with each other. There was a clandestine agreement that the metropolitans would soon be elevated, but Andreas was unwilling to do this directly. He was afraid that this would set a bad precedent and that future patriarchs would have to deal with ambitious metropolitans creating schisms willy-nilly in an attempt to advance themselves. As such, rather than directly appointing either Basileios or Gerontios, he instead summoned another ecumenical synod in 1475. This synod was held in Constantinople--the first since the city’s conquest--and after the summary declaration that the hated Council of Florence was null and void the issue of the patriarchs was brought up. Basileios and Gerontios both presented their cases in November 1475. Gerontios stated that the distance between his ecclesiastical provinces and Constantinople was too great for the Ecumenical Patriarch to hold sway over both, and evidently this was found reasonable, for he was proclaimed the first Patriarch of All Russia that very week. However, there was considerably more opposition to a Trapezuntine Patriarchate. The distance to Constantinople was significantly less than Russia’s, while there was much talk of the Metropolitanate of Trapezous and its subsidiaries being transferred to the Patriarchate of Georgia. However, Basileios counterred these with geopolitical and linguistic concerns--the Trapezuntine Empire was the last free, Orthodox Greek polity. If it were to remain subject to Constaintople, it was entirely possible that the perfidious sultan would use it as leverage to reduce the last spark of Rome and righteous Christianity in Asia Minor. As for the Georgians, they were already overstretched, and a transfer to them would necessitate the latering of liturgical languages, something that rang sourly with the primarily Greek synod.
On 11 February 1476, the Patriarchate of Pontos was created, with Basileios invested as its first Patriarch. However, there were still a number of concerns over how this would be implemented. The Ecumenical patriarchate nominally controlled ecclesiastical affairs west of the Taurus mountains, and no one was quite sure where the borders of the new patriarch were to lie. After several more weeks of negotiation, a solution was reached. The Pontic Patriarchate would take control of all Ecumenical territories east of the Ottoman border, while everything west of the border would remain under the Ecumenical Patriarch. This pleased few--Basileios wanted all of Anatolia, while Andreas wanted the Pontic Patriarchate’s borders limited to the spine of the Pontic mountains--but it was good enough to be taken as a makeshift measure. Few at the time knew it, but these stopgap borders would last for several centuries before being altered. Finally, the Orthodox territories in Crimea (Gothia and the lands subject to the Genoese) would also be subject to the Pontic Patriarchate, with the border with Georgia being laid along the current boundary with the Ecumenical Patriarchate[6].
Basileios returned home to a hero’s welcome, with a jubilant crowd meeting him on the Trapezuntine docks and accompanying him all the way to the Hagia Sophia of Trapezous. The Patriarch had emerged victorious from the schism, having finally accomplished the goals of centuries of Trapezuntine metropolitans. For this, along with several reported miracles performed while proselytizing amongst the Vainakhs, he was canonized as Saint Basileios of Funa three years after his death in 1483. He is regarded as patron saint of Trapezous alongside Saint Eugenios and as patron saint of Avaria, alongside Saint-King Rusalav. Finally, he is known as the patron saint of arbitrators, a fitting legacy for a man with such an immense legacy.
However, he has not yet left his story, as he would play a large hand in the reign of Alexandros II….
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] This was the medieval name for the Chechens, as some of you may remember from Byzantium’s Resurrection
[2] The title ‘metropolitan’ can be roughly equated with the Latin archbishop, all this is a very rough comparison. More accurately, a metropolitan bishop is a bishop who presides over a holy city or center of pilgrimage, the latter of which Trapezous was.
[3] The official stance of the Orthodox Church was that the Greek Gods, as with all other pagan pantheons, were in fact demons and/or princes of hell. Even as the popularity of classical names rose in the late middle ages, these were considered inappropriate for baptism (unless the name was shared with a saint).
[4] For those of you not versed in biblical meanings, here Basileios is referencing Matthew 5:30 and 18:6 to suggest that Dionysios was a pedophile.
[5] Cyprus had an arrangement within the church, wherein the Metropolitan Bishop retained his position but bore the privileges of a patriarch.
[6] A map of this will be put up soon.
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