mouths.
—Mikhail Breik, 1767
O woe is me who in such an inopportune time find myself your bishop and pastor!
—Patriarch Sylvester of Antioch (1724–1766)
THE CATHOLIC PRESENCE IN THE LEVANT
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a time of active economic and religious expansion of the Catholic world in the Levant, was one of the key periods in the history of the Christian East. Arab Christians were faced with a historic “call” from Western civilization. The contact between these cultures led to a dramatic rift in the Middle Eastern Christian communities. A segment of the Eastern Christians abandoned their old identity and passed into union with Rome. These shocks stimulated an enormous release of spiritual energies by all the warring parties—Eastern Catholics of various sects and followers of traditional Orthodoxy—understanding their own identity, justifying their historical choice, and developing new methods of ecclesio-political struggle. It is no exaggeration to say that the Catholic spiritual expansion into the Levant and the establishment of an Arab Unia were the chief events in the cultural and political history of Syrian Christians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Active contacts between the Latin West and the Middle Eastern Christian world took place during the Crusades, but with the expulsion of the Crusaders from Syria and Palestine, communication between Rome and the East sharply weakened. As mentioned, in the 1330s, Mamluk authorities allowed a group of Franciscan monks to return to Jerusalem and Bethlehem. With time, a network of monasteries and
inns serving European pilgrims developed in Jaffa and Ramla. In the seventeenth century, the Catholics were able to establish several monasteries in Palestine: in Nazareth, Mount Tabor, ʿAyn Karem, and Mount Carmel near Haifa. It is traditionally thought that the Franciscans, “the custodians of the Holy Sepulchre,” were not inclined to proselytism, being more concerned with control over the holy places and organizing pilgrimage than preaching among the local Christians.
Nevertheless, even in the Mamluk period, there was a small community of Arab Catholics of the Latin rite in Bethlehem and several other areas of Palestine that by the seventeenth century played a prominent role in Palestinian history. In everyday terms, however, the Arab Latins did not differ from their Orthodox neighbors in Bethlehem; their way of life was characterized by the tribal system and rather vaguely-held religious notions.¹ The existence itself of Arabs of the Latin confes- sion in no way posed a threat to the integrity of the Orthodox community. The position of many Arab Catholics under the authority of the Franciscans was not any more attractive than the status of the Arab Orthodox under the rule of the Phanariots. In regard to this issue, Constantin-François de Volney wrote,
The Spanish monks in Jaffa and Ramla treat the Christians belonging to them with a cruelty that does not in the least agree with the Gospel.… The Christians … are not happy, but they dare not but submit to this condition. Experience has taught them that the good fathers’ indignation entails dire consequences.²
In addition to Palestine, a Franciscan mission was established in Beirut. Officially, its mission was to provide pastoral care to European merchants. Additionally, the Catholic monks maintained close ties with the Maronite community in Lebanon and acted as intermediaries in its dealings with the Vatican. It was largely through the efforts of Franciscan missionaries at the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century that there occurred a final accession of the Maronites to the Church of Rome.
The confrontation between Catholic Europe and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the Portuguese expansion into the Indian Ocean, stimulated the papacy’s renewed interest in the Christian East. The Portuguese alliance with Christian Ethiopia and the increasing strategic importance of Egypt led to a series of attempts by the Vatican at rapprochement with the Coptic Church in the sixteenth century. In 1553, Catholic missionaries managed to persuade one of the lines of Nestorian patriarchs in the mountains of Kurdistan to enter into union.
The Latin Drang nach Osten reached a particular extent during the Counter-Reformation when the Catholic world, recovering from the impact of Protestantism, went on the offensive in all directions, hoping, in particular, to recoup losses in Northern Europe by calling Eastern Christians to union. A number of schools were opened in Rome, such as the Greek and Maronite Colleges, which focused on training agents of papal influence among representatives of the Eastern Christian peoples. In 1583, a permanent Jesuit mission was established in Istanbul. The continental scale of the papacy’s missionary plans can be outlined from almost simultaneous events such as the Union of Brest in 1596 in Ukraine; the Synod of Diamper in 1599, which consolidated the bringing into union of the Malabar Christians in India; the adoption of the Gregorian calendar by the Maronite Church in 1596; and the violent controversy that shook the Coptic Church from 1594 to 1597 over relations with Rome.³
In 1625, a Catholic mission was established in Aleppo, Syria’s largest economic center with a Christian population in the thousands. Already in 1656, part of the Syrian Jacobite community in Aleppo passed into union, forming their own church structure. According to an agreement between France and the Sublime Porte in 1673, Catholic priests enjoyed the same diplomatic status as consular officers serving French subjects in Aleppo. Thus, in 1680, the city had twenty-four Latin priests and monks and only fourteen French merchants.⁴ In Lebanon, Fakhr al-Din II welcomed Western cultural influence, giving a free hand to the Carmelites, Capuchins, and Jesuits. With the support of Lebanese sheikhs and the French consuls, the Latins built monasteries in the mountains and opened missions in the coastal cities of Sidon, Tyre, and Tripoli. In 1643, Catholic missionaries moved into inland Syria, opening a representation in Damascus.⁵
The strengthening of the Catholic position paralleled the massive economic penetration of European countries into the Levant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the composition of an Arab Christian merchant class. From the late fifteenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, Aleppo was the largest commercial center in the Middle East, a crossing-point of trade routes between Central and South Asia and Western Europe. Traditionally, Aleppo’s trade was controlled by Sephardic Jews and Armenians native to Jolfa, who monopolized the trade in Iranian silk. Powerful internal solidarity and a diaspora scattered across many countries helped these communities to have a strong position in international trade. Arab Christians, who had neither sufficient capital nor a diaspora outside of Syria, could not compete with the Jews and Armenians.⁶
Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, however, there was a sharp rise in the
economic activity and prosperity of Arab Christians. This was partially because of
the rapid development of sericulture in Lebanon and cotton in Palestine and the in-
creasing importance of the port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. Additionally,
during this period, France, which was in need of silk for its factories, actively estab-
lished itself in Levantine markets. According to the conclusion of Thomas Philipp,
there was a coincidence of interests between Arab Christian and French en-
trepreneurs: they were both relatively new players in the Levantine market (before
then, England had been dominant) and worked in new, nontraditional sectors of
the economy associated with the production of silk and cotton. Syrian Christians
specialized in the silk trade and acted as intermediaries of Levantine companies
who preferred to have local Arab Christians as their partners, rather than Jews and
Armenians whom they saw as competitors.⁷
The growing Christian merchant class was interested in securing the protection
of the European consulates, who could provide protection from the extortion of the
Ottoman pashas and the attacks on merchant ships by Maltese pirates. Such pro-
tection presupposed entering into union. In this way, the formation of the Uniate
community was a consequence of the formation of the new merchant class that
served France’s interest in the Middle East and acted as an intermediary between
the Syrian and European economies.⁸
Of course, we should not lose sight that this schema (trade–consular patron-
age–Unia) is a simplification and is conditional in many respects. The success of
the Unia in Damascus was achieved without the presence of any European con-
sulates and many merchant families successfully engaged in business for gener-
ations before entering into union. Finally, in Aleppo, more people were under the
patronage of Protestants—the English and Dutch consuls—than under represen-
tatives of Catholic powers.⁹ Although the Ottoman authorities were generally tol-
erant of the Latin presence in the cities of the Levant,¹⁰ the creation of Uniate
communities was not in the interest of the Porte. Despite its broad internal autonomy, the Orthodox Church was partially integrated into the Ottoman state
structure, with the patriarch being something like a government official equal to a
pasha of three tails.¹¹ By contrast, the organization of the Catholic Church re-
mained subordinate to the Vatican. Although Catholics in Turkey paid the jizya to
the sultan’s treasury, they were politically and spiritually tied only to Europe, which
for centuries had been the main enemy of the Sublime Porte.¹² For a Syrian Chris-
tian to become a Frank meant falling out of the existing millet system and to be
practically outside the law. Therefore, Catholicism’s successes in the Levant in the
seventeenth century were rather modest, and cases of directly entering into union
number fewer than a dozen people per year.¹³ What proved to be more effective
was another of the missionaries’ activities: the establishment of schools in which
the younger generation of Arab Christians, more susceptible to Catholic influence,
was enrolled. Missionary schools with dozens of students are known to have been
active in Damascus, Aleppo, and other cities during the seventeenth century. Thus,
by the beginning of the eighteenth century, there had developed a significant class
of pro-Catholic Orthodox Arabs. Using the experience of the Union of Brest, the
Latin monks made a special effort to appeal to the Orthodox clergy, especially the
bishops, hoping that by bringing the upper hierarchy over to the side of union, the
entire community would follow their pastors.¹⁴
THE CHURCH OF ANTIOCH AND THE VATICAN: A CHRONICLE OF CONTACTS
Antiochian Orthodox clergy of the sixteenth and seventeenth century did not view
the Western missionaries with any hostility. As Robert Haddad has written, the
Orthodox Arabs had long forgotten the horrors of the Crusades, and the decline in
their theological expertise left no room for doctrinal controversy with the Franks.¹⁵
Additionally, living in a religiously and ethnically diverse society led to tolerance for
people of other faiths among the Christians of the Middle East, if not on a theo-
logical level, then on an everyday level. Many Middle Eastern Christians dreamed of
a cultural and spiritual revival in their communities through a reliance on European
education and the achievements of Western science. The missionaries’ monetary
assistance to Eastern Christians during times of famine and epidemics was grate-
fully accepted. The hierarchs most inclined to cooperate with the missionaries also
received personal subsidies.¹⁶
Repeated statements by Western missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries about the readiness of the Orthodox Syrians to reunite with the Apostolic See of Rome and accept Latin dogmas seem to have been far from reality. Catholic
historiography, distinguished by its exalted historical optimism, was inclined to de-
clare all Middle Eastern bishops to be supporters of union except those who offi-
cially declared Latin dogma to be anathema. At the same time, Arab Christian
chronicles do not say a word about contacts with Catholics from the sixteenth to
the mid-seventeenth century, and the missionaries’ two-hundred-year-long conver-
sation with Orthodox bishops about unifying the churches produced no concrete
results. Perhaps Latin missionaries exaggerated their success in dealing with the
Orthodox East. Perhaps they were mistaken, taking at face value the refined Middle
Eastern sense of respect, etiquette of dialogue, and code of hospitality. Addi-
tionally, interchurch contacts in the Ottoman world of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries cannot be measured by the same standards as Eastern Europe
during the time of the Unions of Florence and Brest, during which time it was pos-
sible to observe a significant and uncompromising confrontation between Byzan-
tine and Western civilizations. In the Arab East, relations between Christian
communities were far less conflicted. Suffice it to recall the strange attempt at a
Melkite–Maronite union under Patriarch Dorotheus III¹⁷ or the sharing of churches
by Orthodox and Maronites mentioned in the sources from the late sixteenth
century.¹⁸ According to the Arab Uniate historian of the eighteenth century, Yuhan-
na al-‘Ujaymi, Patriarch of Antioch Joachim ibn Jumʿa (1543–1576) took a positive
attitude toward Catholics and, in 1560, sent an encyclical letter to his bishops for-
bidding them from calling the Franks heretics or blaspheming the pope.¹⁹
Pope Gregory XIII (1572–1584), one of the key figures of the Counter-
Reformation, paid special attention to dealings with Middle Eastern Christians. In
the years 1578–1579 and 1580–1582, the mission of the Jesuit Giovanni Battista
Eliano (1530–1589) was active in Sidon in Syria. Although the main purpose of his
visit was to strengthen ties, the legate was ordered to enter into contact with the
Orthodox and Syrian Jacobite Churches. The schism in the Patriarchate of Antioch
beginning in 1581 between Michael VI and Joachim Daw created an extremely favor-
able situation for the penetration of Latin missionaries into the Orthodox milieu
and for bringing at least one of the rival patriarchs into union.²⁰ In December 1581,
Eliano met with Joachim Daw in Damascus. At the missionary’s suggestion, the
patriarch sent a letter to the cardinal of Santa Severina²¹ who oversaw the Vatican’s
contacts with the Orthodox churches. However, to the cardinal’s dismay, in the patriarch’s letter, there was nothing but flowery pleasantries; Joachim declined to
talk specifically about union.²² Eliano’s communication with Michael in Aleppo in
July 1582 proved to be more productive. Feeling that he was losing his standoff
with Joachim, Michael exhibited a willingness for the most extensive possible con-
tacts with Rome and even agreed to go to Italy. “As it stands, not much separates
him from the kingdom of God,” Eliano summarized his communication with the
patriarch in a letter to the superior general of the Jesuit Order.²³ In March 1583, the
pope sent a new embassy to the East, led by the Maltese Lionardo Abel. He was or-
dered to enter into contact with the heads of the Eastern churches and to persuade
them to reunite with Rome under the terms of the Union of Florence and with
acceptance of the decisions of the Council of Trent and the calendar reform of
1582.²⁴ Lionardo Abel began his mission in Tripoli, where he presented the local
Orthodox with the content of papal letters addressed to them. Part of the Tripoli
community supported the idea of union. Later, on September 16, 1584, these peo-
ple sent the appropriate letter to Pope Gregory XIII.²⁵ This letter, as well as the re-
ports of the papal legates, makes it possible to reconstruct the events of 1583–1585.
From Tripoli, Abel went to Aleppo where he remained, sending letters to the
Christian hierarchs. Both of the rival Orthodox patriarchs, Michael and Joachim,
were in catastrophic financial situations and had slim prospects of winning. They
could not neglect such an ally as the Catholic Church with its vast resources—
including, perhaps, financial resources. In the spring of 1584, Lionardo Abel made
a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and, when passing through the Bekaa Valley, made con-
tact with Joachim Daw. They met in the village of ʿAyta, near Zabadani, where the
utterly destitute Joachim was hiding from the extortion of the Ottoman officials.
The patriarch, daring to appear neither in Damascus nor in Tripoli, was in a situ-
ation in which he could not afford another conflict, including with representatives
of the Catholic Church, which was rather influential in the Levant. At the same
time, he was doubtlessly not a supporter of union. For this reason, in his talks with
Abel, the patriarch had to maneuver frantically. The papal envoy presented Joachim
with a letter from the Apostolic See calling for the resumption of the union con-
cluded at the Council of Florence and the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. The
patriarch replied that he had never heard of the Council of Florence. This statement
has been quoted in the scholarly literature as an example of the Ottoman Chris-
tians’ blatant ignorance of theological matters.²⁶ It seems that this is not at all self-evident. Joachim quite possibly desired to avoid giving a direct answer and to
buy time. Abel gave him a copy of the acts of the Council of Florence for exami-
nation. The patriarch of Antioch stated that before making such an important deci-
sion about religious and ecclesial unity, he needed to consult with the primates of
the other local churches and with the leaders of the Christian community of Syria.
Therefore, he agreed to have another meeting with Abel in Tripoli to finalize the
agreements. It is possible that Joachim already knew that he would not appear in
Tripoli at the stipulated time. He soon set sail for Constantinople, hoping for finan-
cial assistance from the Ecumenical Patriarch to get rid of his debts.²⁷
In Jerusalem, Abel attempted to persuade Patriarch Sophronius to enter union.
He behaved in the same evasive manner as Joachim, referring to the need to dis-
cuss the matter with the authority on it in the Orthodox world, Patriarch Sylvester
of Alexandria, and leaving for Sinai. Without waiting for an answer, Abel returned to
Aleppo, learning along the way that his meeting with Joachim would also not take
place.²⁸ After the failure in negotiations with the patriarchs of both Antioch and
Jerusalem, in 1585, Abel turned to Michael al-Hamawi, who had lost the struggle for
the patriarchate and lived in Aleppo as a private person. He had nothing to lose
and moreover was severely offended by the other Orthodox patriarchs who “be-
trayed” him in favor of Joachim. It is no wonder that at his meeting with Abel, he
complained at length about the misery that he suffered at the hands of Joachim
and his supporters, later writing to Rome about the same thing. The ex-patriarch
told the papal legate of his readiness to accept Catholic dogmas and the primacy of
the pope. Michael drew up the relevant letters and certified them with his seal, but
nothing is known about any response to them from the Vatican.²⁹ It appears that in
the papal curia, they decided that Michael did not have any real power and negoti-
ating with him was pointless. Interestingly, in the Catholic historiography, Michael
is considered to be the only legitimate patriarch of Antioch at that time, while
Joachim Daw appears as a usurping anti-patriarch.
With regard to Joachim Daw’s negative attitude toward union with the Catholics,
one cannot but give the example of his activities in Ukraine in 1585–1586, when the
patriarch of Antioch supported the laity of the Lvov Brotherhood, the future source
of resistance to the Unia, in their conflict with their pro-Latin church hierarchy.³⁰ In
Syria itself, Joachim’s name was firmly associated with the anti-Catholic faction of
Antiochian clergy. There is an Arabic polemical treatise from that time in the form of a response to the papal letter addressed to Patriarch Joachim. This Response
was written by Metropolitan Anastasius al-Marmariti ibn al-Mujalla, the closest
associate of, or, as he styled himself, the “disciple of our master Patriarch Kyr
Yuwakim al-Antaki.”³¹ Anastasius’s treatise, despite its polemical nature, was writ-
ten with exquisite politeness. The author speaks a great deal about the joy it caused
the Antiochian Christians that the pope was striving to overcome the differences
“sowed between … [them] by the devil.” After such a hopeful start, Anastasius be-
gins to examine the theses of the papal letter and demolish them. The Gregorian
calendar reform, which the papal legate suggested to the Orthodox to adopt, was
subject to particular attacks. Anastasius was skeptical about the research of Euro-
pean astronomers and mathematicians, pointing out that the dating of Easter and
other feasts was established by the Apostles under the inspiration of the Holy Spir-
it and that any change to the basic elements of the Christian tradition is cause for
excommunication and damnation. The author appealed to the universal view of the
entire Orthodox world,
Also, our community, our bishops, our kings and all our people, scattered in the four cardinal directions—Greeks, Russians, Georgians, Vlachs, Serbs, Moldavians, Turks [the Turkish-speaking Christians of Anatolia?], Arabs and others … from the time of the Holy Apostles and the God-bearing fathers of the Seven Ecumenical Councils down to this day recognize one faith, one confession one Church and one baptism … and all our nations agree in the four corners of the inhabited world with one word and one affair … and we did not receive the confession and the holy tradition which is in our hands … from unknown people, like other, foreign communities.
“But we pray,” he continues,
with the Holy Apostles and the 318 fathers [of the Council of Nicaea] whose
signs and miracles shine forth from them manifestly. And so how can we change
the tradition of such holy fathers and follow after unknown people who have no
other trade but to observe the stars and examine the sky?³²
Without taking up the task of presenting a detailed analysis and commentary on
the treatise of Anastasius ibn al-Mujalla in this current work,³³ we simply point out
that even among Arab hierarchs of the sixteenth century who were considered “ignorant” and “theologically illiterate,” there were plenty of people with a clear
understanding of their Orthodox identity who were able to assert that identity ar-
ticulately.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: THE EMBRACE GETS TIGHTER
After the 1580s, there was a three-and-a-half-decade pause in ties between Rome
and Antioch. The next attempt to conclude a union probably took place under Patri-
arch Athanasius II (1611–1618) who, according to several authors of the first half of
the seventeenth century, in particular the Jesuit missionary Jacob Galtieri, openly
sympathized with the Catholics and even called a council of bishops in Damascus
in 1617 or 1618 that recognized the Union of Florence and sent an embassy to
Rome with a request to enter into communion.³⁴ These results of this demarche
are not known, and it is odd that the Vatican archives are silent about it. At the
same time, information has been preserved about what happened in the 1614 con-
flict between Athanasius and the Maronite patriarch, who sought to introduce the
Gregorian calendar in the Maronite community in Damascus, against the wishes of
Athanasius.³⁵ For an adherent of union, such a position would seem to be illogical.
Philo-Catholic sentiments are also attributed to Athanasius’s brother Cyril, who,
according to Yuhanna al-ʿUjaymi, “was a Catholic, just like his brother, and al-
ways opposed the schism.”³⁶ Mindful of the ruthless, nine-year struggle between
Cyril and Ignatius ʿAtiya, Catholic authors gave the role of antihero to Ignatius,
“Ignatius was rich, but he did not have praiseworthy qualities. The emirs of the
Maʿan family supported him and he persecuted Cyril, causing him great
expenses.”³⁷
The real picture is much more complicated. It is difficult to imagine that Cyril
Dabbas would have advertised his pro-Catholic sympathies (if indeed they were
such) as long as he enjoyed the unwavering support of Cyril Lucaris, the staunch-
est and most passionate opponent of Rome. Dabbas’s longstanding conflict with
Meletius Karma, whom Catholic historiography counts in the ranks of supporters
of union, also does not fit with his alleged Catholicism. Finally, Cyril’s antagonist,
Ignatius, who was residing in Beirut, also caught the attention of the local Ca-
puchin missionaries, who established contact with him. Ignatius was upset by his
involvement in the killing of Cyril Dabbas, and in 1631, he appealed to Rome asking
for absolution as well as alms for the impoverished Church of Antioch. The patri-
arch’s request was considered by the Congregation de Propaganda Fide, and as a precondition, he was encouraged to accept union with Rome.³⁸ That is, the con-
frontation between Cyril and Ignatius cannot be explained by the Catholic expan-
sion in the Middle East when put together with these contradictions. The mission-
aries cast a wide net and immediately reached out to all parties in a conflict. On the
other hand, some hierarchs of the Orthodox East also reached out to all possible
patrons, simultaneously seeking financial assistance from both Rome and the Rus-
sian tsar, as Ignatius himself did in 1633. And, as has already been noted, the Arabs
did not invest the same meaning in their words of fraternal unity with the See of
Rome in these statements as Catholics saw in them.
Metropolitan Meletius Karma of Aleppo, later Patriarch Euthymius II of Antioch
(1572–1635) is one of the major figures of the Arab literary renaissance. All of his
translation and ecclesial activities were aimed at further familiarizing the Arabs with
the Byzantine cultural tradition. However, being broad-minded and realizing the
full power of the technical and intellectual potential of Western civilization,
Meletius readily entered into contact with the missionaries and attempted to extract
the maximum benefit from this for his cultural projects.³⁹ Thus, he welcomed the
establishment of a missionary school in Aleppo in 1627 and, once patriarch, he
offered to open a similar school in Damascus.
Starting in 1617, Karma negotiated with the Vatican for the publication in Italy of
Arabic liturgical texts and periodically made statements about the desirability of
church unity and the acceptance of union by the Arabs, for example, through his
envoy Pachomius who arrived in Rome in 1635.⁴⁰ It is possible that the value of
these statements was less than was thought in Rome. However, even in Rome,
Karma was not trusted. It was not without reason that seventeen years of talks
about an edition of Arabic books came to nothing: the Vatican did not want to lose
the monopoly on Arabic printing.⁴¹
Catholic historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, without going into
the intricacies of these relationships, referred to Karma in the words of the mis-
sionaries of the seventeenth century as a “good Catholic.” They explained the patri-
arch’s sudden death as a result of being poisoned by “Greek monks” who dis-
agreed with his pro-Catholic orientation. They blamed the absence of evidence for
this in Arabic sources, particularly in the annals of Karma’s disciple the Patriarch
Macarius, on considerations of political correctness that Macarius followed when
producing an official history of the patriarchate.⁴² Generally speaking, in the history of the Church of Antioch, the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were
marked by an unprecedented concentration of real or imaginary poisonings. Of the
twelve patriarchs and anti-patriarchs who lived during this period, five of them are
held by various accounts to have been poisoned and only four of them died a nat-
ural death. In any case, it is evident that Karma’s efforts were focused on inte-
grating the Orthodox Arabs into the Byzantine cultural sphere and that what he
wanted from the Catholic world was technical assistance for this process.
Much the same can be said of Patriarch Macarius al-Zaʿim’s (1647–1672) rela-
tionship with the Catholic world. According to the author of the Beirut Chronicle,
Macarius “out of the purity of the intentions of his heart” allowed the missionaries
to settle in the patriarchal metochion and did not prevent them from communi-
cating with his flock.⁴³ The chronicler attempted to justify the patriarch’s contacts
with the missionaries by referring to his naiveté. The Beirut Chronicle was com-
piled in the late eighteenth century and was marked by the fierce struggle between
Orthodoxy and the Unia. Thus, from the chronicler’s viewpoint, communication
with Catholics by a respected prelate had to be justified. In Macarius’ own time,
such contacts appear natural. The missionaries spoke of the patriarch in
condescending terms, saying that he was a good pastor who had no idea about
theology.⁴⁴ In 1661–1664, on several occasions Macarius conveyed his messages
to Rome through European missionaries. In them, he once more raised the issue
of publishing Arabic liturgical literature and welcomed the efforts of the “Mother
Church” to restore the original unity of Christians. On December 14, 1663, the
patriarch secretly signed a Catholic confession of faith.⁴⁵ In late 1664, a curious
Greek adventurer from Chios named Symeon appeared in Rome, calling himself
the metropolitan of Isfahan and presenting a letter of recommendation from
Macarius. Presumably, the patriarch of Antioch had intended to use Symeon to fur-
ther the negotiations with the Congregation de Propaganda Fide.⁴⁶
In the case of Macarius, later historians automatically applied their notions of
religious identity characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the
seventeenth century. It seemed obvious that if Macarius signed a Catholic confes-
sion of faith, then he was a Catholic. It is not at all the case that this would have
been obvious to Macarius himself. The religious consciousness of the Christians
of the Levant at that time was blurry and did not resemble modern religious no-
tions. Curiously, Macarius’ first letter to the pope was written on September 30, 1661, three days after he wrote a letter of gratitude to the Russian tsarina (one of
the letters brought to Moscow by the embassy of Archimandrite Neophytus in
1662). Macarius’s Catholic confession of faith was certified by his signature in
Greek, made by someone in the patriarch’s entourage. In the opinion of paleog-
raphers, it is the same hand to which belongs Macarius’s Greek signature under an
Orthodox confession of faith in the acts of the Council of Constantinople in 1652,
which Macarius attended.⁴⁷ In 1670–1671, Carmelite and Capuchin missionaries re-
ported to Rome that the Patriarch Macarius was a “crypto-Catholic” who was wary
of openly declaring his true religious sympathies because of his close relations
with the Russian tsar.⁴⁸
Undoubtedly, in informal conversation with the missionaries, Macarius told
them exactly what they wanted to hear. The patriarch’s true views can be found in
the book of his son, Paul of Aleppo, Macarius’s alter ego. We note, incidentally,
that Paul of Aleppo and, later, his sons did not study with the Western mission-
aries even though a missionary school existed in that time in Aleppo. Paul’s Jour-
ney of the Patriarch Macarius is permeated with harshly anti-Latin sentiments.
Most famous in this context is the passage about the forcible imposition of
Catholicism on Ukraine by Jesuit priests whom Paul rhetorically compares to
Yezidis, the Kurdish sect of “devil-worshippers.”⁴⁹ There is no doubt that Macarius
remained in the bosom of the Orthodox tradition. Thus, like many Eastern bishops,
he was not averse to receiving alms from all possible patrons, as when he simulta-
neously addressed letters full of praise and pleas to Alexei Mikhailovich and Louis
XIV. Thus, for example, the patriarch sent a letter to the French king on February 15,
1663. Almost half the text is filled with grandiloquent praise and good wishes for
the addressee. Perhaps Alexei Mikhailovich would have been unpleasantly sur-
prised to learn that it was not only he whom Macarius called “the greatest of all the
Christian kings” and it was not only to him that he wrote “we trust in help from the
Lord and from you.”⁵⁰ However, the letter does not contain any indications of the
patriarch’s willingness to change religious orientations. Macarius complains of the
wretchedness of the Antiochian Christians and requests financial assistance, in re-
turn only promising the mercy of the Lord and that the king would be seated with
the assembly of saints in the kingdom of heaven.⁵¹
In everyday life, Macarius had no hostility toward the non-Orthodox. It is no sur-
prise that when discussing relations with heterodox confessions with Russian clergy in 1656 and later, in correspondence with the tsar and Nikon, Macarius in-
sisted on recognizing the reality of the Catholic sacrament of baptism.⁵² In this
case, the patriarch of Antioch followed the canonical tradition common to the
Orthodox churches of the Eastern Mediterranean. Thus, although Macarius’s posi-
tion toward the Latins was more lenient than that of the people of Muscovy, there
is no doubt about his commitment to Orthodoxy.⁵³
PASSING THE POINT OF NO RETURN
The half-century after the death of Macarius was a key period in the development of
the Melkite union with Rome. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the
Levant Company was organized, strengthening the position of European mer-
chants in Syria. According to a number of agreements, consuls received broad au-
thority to grant their protection to Ottoman subjects. Finally, in the ecclesio-
political arena, there had formed a critical mass of graduates from the missionary
schools. However, most probably the main factor behind the success of the move-
ment for union was the shifts in the international balance of power. The interna-
tional position of the Ottoman Empire suffered dramatically when it suffered se-
vere defeats in the war of 1683–1699 with a coalition of European powers. The
prestige of the Catholic powers in the Middle East increased significantly and the
Sublime Porte’s control over the Arab provinces loosened. All this contributed to a
pro-union sentiment among Christians, oriented toward the new political and cul-
tural centers of power.
The first of the graduates from the missionary schools to reach the top of the ec-
clesiastical hierarchy was Neophytus al-Saqizi, nephew of the Patriarch Euthymius
III, who himself aspired for the patriarchal throne from 1672 to 1681.⁵⁴ However, he
is not known to have had any contacts with Rome during this period.
A much more valuable asset for the missionaries was Euthymius al-Sayfi (1643–
1723), a native of Damascus who became metropolitan of Tyre and Sidon in 1682.
He was also educated at a missionary school and had the reputation among his
contemporaries as a “vessel of learning.”⁵⁵ Euthymius, like much of his flock, was
involved in trading Lebanese silk, and this brought the metropolitan closer to the
French merchants, diplomats, and missionaries. In December 1683, he secretly
converted to Catholicism and, for four decades, remained the main conduit of
Roman influence in the Arab East. Euthymius received regular subsidies from
Rome and was engaged in active missionary activity and promoting Catholicism among pilgrims passing through Sidon and the Christians of Mount Lebanon,
Hawran, and Palestine. For this purpose, in 1685, he established the Arab al-
Mukhallisiya monastic community, known in European literature as the Salva-
torians. In 1701, Euthymius was appointed administrator of the Melkites in union
with Rome in the Levant. On the basis of joint commercial interests, the metro-
politan worked closely with the Lebanese emir and the pasha of Sidon, Usama Abu
Tawuq, attempting to use his assistance to incorporate Acre, a new and growing
center of Christian commercial activity, into his diocese.⁵⁶ The patronage of the
Lebanese emir and the pasha of Sidon allowed Euthymius to feel safe from pos-
sible reprisals from the Orthodox Patriarch Cyril and the anathemas periodically
imposed on al-Sayfi by the Synod of Constantinople.⁵⁷
For the most part, however, Patriarch Cyril had no time for the metropolitan of
Sidon. From 1686 to 1694, the Church of Antioch was split by an internecine strug-
gle for the patriarchal throne between Cyril and Athanasius Dabbas. In this strug-
gle, Athanasius, an alumnus of the Catholic school in Damascus, tried to rely on
the support of the Western missionaries. For many years, Athanasius played a dou-
ble game, presenting himself to Rome as a supporter of Catholicism. In April 1687,
he secretly sent messages to the pope and the French consul in Damascus declar-
ing his recognition of Catholic dogma. In 1694, the rival patriarchs reconciled, and
Athanasius Dabbas abandoned his claims to the patriarchal throne in exchange for
the diocese of Aleppo. Aware of the growing pro-Catholic sympathies of the Chris-
tians of Aleppo, Athanasius tried not to clash with the Western missionaries resid-
ing in the city.
Among the Orthodox, there existed suspicions about Athanasius. Already in
1686 the bishop of Beirut, Sylvester Dahhan, stated, “Our patriarch is a Frank.”⁵⁸
Mikhail Breik was of the same opinion in his chronicle. The authors of the Beirut
Chronicle and other sources believed that Athanasius, seeing the missionaries’
influence on his flock, was simply forced to maneuver and turn a blind eye to
canonical deviations, particularly with regard to fasting, in hopes of keeping the
people of Aleppo within the Orthodox Church through tolerance.⁵⁹ In any case,
Catholic missionaries operated openly in Aleppo without any interference from
Athanasius and, by the end of the seventeenth century, their influence was firmly
established.⁶⁰
In the pro-Catholic milieu of Aleppo in the early eighteenth century, there was a young deacon named ʿAbdallah Zakher (1680–1748) who actively cooperated with
the Jesuit mission. He edited Arabic translations of Latin theological literature and
wrote his own polemical treatises in refutation of Orthodox polemical writers.
Thus, ʿAbdallah rose to prominence in Athanasius’s circle and, according to
some, was his secretary and worked in the Aleppo printing press organized by the
patriarch.⁶¹
At the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, several bishops of the
Patriarchate of Antioch (the bishops of Beirut, Baalbek, Tripoli, and Sidon) secretly
converted to Catholicism. A group of pro-Catholic monks left Balamand Monastery
and founded the Uniate Monastery of Mar Yuhanna (St John the Baptist) in the vil-
lage of Shuwayr in the mountains above Beirut. In 1708, Euthymius al-Sayfi built
the monastery of Dayr Mar Mukhallis (Holy Savior), which became a center of Uni-
ate propaganda and sheltered its preachers during times of persecution.⁶²
In his convert’s zeal, Euthymius al-Sayfi tried to reform the Melkite liturgy on
Latin models and innovated new church rituals. Even the Catholic missionaries felt
this was unnecessary, to say nothing of the Eastern Christians (for more details,
see Chapter 10). Euthymius disseminated pro-Catholic literature in Arabic. He
himself wrote a polemic about the primacy of the pope, al-Dalalat al-Lamiʿat (The
Brilliant Proofs), written at the beginning of the eighteenth century and published
in Rome in 1710.⁶³
Among supporters of union, in addition to the graduates of the missionary
schools in Aleppo and Damascus, increasing numbers of students had studied in
Italy. Prominent among them was the nephew of Euthymius al-Sayfi, Seraphim
Tanas. In Orthodox sources, Seraphim receives even more imprecation than Eu-
thymius. He is called a “cunning fox,” a “viper spewing deadly poison,” and a
“devil in human flesh, the firstborn of Satan, a monstrous beast, a sower of the
wily seeds of wickedness.”⁶⁴ Ordained a priest in 1711, he led the propaganda for
union in Acre and had his eye set on the local bishop’s throne.⁶⁵ Upon the death of
the bishop there around 1713, Euthymius al-Sayfi attempted to achieve the transfer
of Acre into his own jurisdiction to remove the city from the “anti-Catholic atmos-
phere” of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. From the very first, this did not work. Patri-
arch Chrysanthos of Jerusalem installed his own bishop in Acre, the previously
mentioned Arab Photius (ʿAbd al-Nur). After Photius’s death in 1721, Euthymius
renewed his claim to the city. For 1,000 piasters, the governor of Sidon, ʿUthman Pasha, arranged the transfer of Acre into the control of his protégé. In 1722, how-
ever, Chrysanthos managed to buy over the pasha, although it seems also that
British diplomacy was not sympathetic with the Catholics’ success. Acre was again
transferred to the Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the local Catholic community was
persecuted and partially moved to Sidon.⁶⁶
Euthymius al-Sayfi’s activities caused growing irritation in Orthodox circles,
especially among the Greeks. There is mention of the fact that at the beginning of
the eighteenth century the patriarch of Antioch excommunicated Euthymius. In late
1714, Patriarch Chrysanthos of Jerusalem promulgated an encyclical condemning
the treatise al-Dalalat al-Lamiʿat. In October 1718, the patriarch of Constantinople
anathematized Euthymius and sentenced him to deposition and exile. This patri-
archal decree was signed by the other Eastern patriarchs, including Cyril V and
Athanasius Dabbas. Euthymius, however, was under the protection of Uthman
Pasha Abu Tawuq and French diplomacy and so he was able to ignore any deci-
sions from the Phanar.
Patriarch Cyril was unable to stop the Catholic onslaught in Syria. Backing the
pro-Catholic metropolitans were local pashas, European consuls, influential
parishioners, and the Lebanese emirs. The Antiochian primate did not feel the sup-
port of the Sublime Porte and this situation was unaccustomed and painful. As
Robert Haddad has written, Cyril could not have understood that the weakening of
the Ottoman system of authority of which he was a part was due to European
expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean. Backed into a corner, the patriarch tried to
fight his enemies with their own weapon—through rapprochement with Rome.
His intermediaries for contact with the Vatican were the Franciscan friar of Dam-
ascus, Biagio da Salamanca, and the nephew of Euthymius al-Sayfi, Seraphim
Tanas. Cyril’s first letter to Pope Clement XI, written on August 20, 1716 (Grego-
rian), was of a fairly streamlined character. Cyril referred to the pope as his “elder
brother,” declared his adherence to the teachings of the Seven Ecumenical Coun-
cils, and indicated among the conditions for a rapprochement between Antioch
and Rome the protection of the French consuls for Syrian Christians and the termi-
nation of European corsairs off the Levantine coast. Upon reading the contents of
the letter, the French consul in Sidon, Poulard, found its wording unacceptable and
requested that the patriarch compose a new one, suggesting an appropriate model.
Cyril’s second letter, dated September 8, was strikingly different from the previous one: the patriarch wrote of recognizing the primacy of the pope and accepted the
decisions of the Council of Florence and all Catholic dogmas.
Cyril’s correspondence with Rome was kept a closely guarded secret to avoid
confusion among the Orthodox and repression from the Ottoman authorities. Var-
ious centers of power in the Latin East challenged each other’s prerogatives to
determine Rome’s policy in relation to the Church of Antioch. The Franciscan mis-
sionaries of Italian and Spanish background patronized Athanasius Dabbas and
sought to sideline Euthymius al-Sayfi and Cyril Tanas, whose interest were often in
conflict with the Franciscans’ plans. However, they were outweighed by the influ-
ence of Euthymius, who was supported by French diplomacy, and further contact
with Cyril was carried out by monks of the Salvatorian Order. Euthymius expected
to inherit the patriarchal throne after Cyril and insisted that Rome annul its recog-
nition of Athanasius Dabbas as patriarch of Antioch. In October 1717, Seraphim
Tanas delivered to Cyril a new text for him to sign with a Catholic profession of
faith, which would be the final approval of the patriarch’s reunion with the See of
Rome.
However, shortly thereafter Cyril’s relationship with Rome rapidly started to cool.
In the opinion of his contemporaries, Cyril was not interested in the theological
peculiarities of Western and Eastern Christianity and sought rapprochement with
Rome for the purely pragmatic reasons of consolidating his power. Not having re-
ceived the expected benefits, he began to reproach his Catholic correspondents
over the imposition of Latin canons and rituals on the Syrian Christians and their
inability to rein in the Maltese pirates. The Uniate emissaries Seraphim Tanas and
Gabriel Finan, in contact with the patriarch in Damascus in the spring of 1719, re-
ported to Rome about the duplicity of Cyril, who spoke like a “schismatic” with the
“schismatics” and refused to continue contacts with the Vatican.
In April 1719, Cyril received news of Euthymius al-Sayfi’s deposition by a synodal
decision of the patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. To avoid
conflict with French diplomacy, the patriarchs did not mention Euthymius’s pro-
Catholic orientation among the reasons for his deposition but rather he was
charged with various canonical offenses. After some hesitation, Cyril made public
the document excommunicating Euthymius. He had accumulated his own mass of
grievances against the metropolitan who was outside the control of his authority,
ranging from his nonpayment of tithes to his performing noncanonical weddings.
One of the Franciscan missionaries in Damascus, Tomaso Díaz Campaya, bro-
kered a reconciliation between the hierarchs. He persuaded Euthymius to go to
Damascus and repent to Cyril in exchange for the removal of the charges against
him. The formal reconciliation between Cyril and Euthymius occurred in late
November 1719, but latent hostility remained. Many believed that it was at Eu-
thymius’s instigation that the patriarch was accused by the authorities in Dam-
ascus of secretly performing the marriage of a Christian man to a Muslim woman
and had to pay 3,000 qurush in his defense.⁶⁷
Despite Cyril’s contacts with Rome, Orthodox chroniclers generally speak
sympathetically of the patriarch. In particular, Mikhail Breik wrote that he had ruled
his community “very well,” decorating churches and the patriarchal compound and
having an enormous influence over both Christians and Muslims. Nevertheless, he
did not interfere with the strengthening of the Catholic missionaries in Damascus
who, in the 1720s during a period of rapprochement between the patriarch and
Rome, made significant progress in the struggle over the souls of the Christians of
Damascus. Two generations later, Mikhail Breik illustrated Cyril’s nonresistance
and lack of will with a proverb: “They ate the sour grapes but we got the
stomach-ache.” They ate the unripe grapes but we got the sour taste in our
mouths.⁶⁸
Cyril died in January 1720 of gangrene probably caused by diabetes, as reported
to Rome by the Franciscan missionaries and Euthymius, or from being poisoned
by Tomaso Campaya who was present with him, as reported by Breik.⁶⁹ Euthymius
al-Sayfi expected to gain the patriarchal throne but was confronted with competing
claims from Athanasius Dabbas. Euthymius’s position was complicated by the fact
that he did not receive absolute support in the Catholic world. The metropolitan
could rely on the Jesuits and French diplomacy, whereas the Franciscan monks,
who were mostly of Spanish and Italian backgrounds and were influential in the
Middle East, stood with Athanasius. Moreover, Athanasius Dabbas had extensive
connections with Orthodox circles in the Balkans and enjoyed a degree of support
from the Phanar. All of this resulted in victory for Athanasius who became the new
patriarch. His relationship with Euthymius was hopelessly ruined.⁷⁰
The personality of Patriarch Athanasius seems much more complex and contra-
dictory than that of Cyril. Intelligent and educated but unprincipled and spineless,
he vacillated between his pro-Latin flock (Athanasius continued to live in Aleppo, even after consecrating the nominal metropolitan of Aleppo, Gerasimus) and pres-
sure from the Phanar, which demanded that he combat Catholic influence. The
Synod of Constantinople urged Athanasius to take real steps against union and so,
in 1721, he translated from Greek into Arabic the polemical treatise the Rock of
Offense⁷¹ and wrote several treatises expounding Orthodox doctrine (see Chapter
10). Similar anti-Catholic literature and a previous synodal decision were sent to
Syria, along with the requirement not to read and to burn the pro-Latin materials
published by Euthymius al-Sayfi.⁷²
Although Athanasius avoided contact with the Vatican after his elevation to the
patriarchal throne, he was not trusted in the Phanar, and in 1722, he was sum-
moned by the Synod of the capital, where he was required to publicly make his
confession of Orthodox faith. Then Athanasius signed a joint encyclical con-
demning Catholic dogmas. As a result of all these declarations, in 1723, the Sub-
lime Porte sent instructions to the pashas of Damascus and Aleppo for the arrest
of a number of persons involved in the movement for union. Even earlier, in
November 1722, ʿAbdallah Zakher had fled from Aleppo to Mount Lebanon fear-
ing persecution on account of his polemical activity.⁷³ The patriarchs appealed to
the Sublime Porte to ask that Euthymius al-Sayfi be exiled to Adana. After the trans-
fer of ʿUthman Pasha from Sidon to Damascus, Euthymius’s position was weak-
ened. He was arrested and spent three months imprisoned in the citadel of Sidon.
Once freed, the metropolitan moved to Damascus under the protection of Uthman
Pasha.⁷⁴
The octogenarian Euthymius al-Sayfi died in November 1723.⁷⁵ The author of the
Orthodox Beirut Chronicle states that the empty see was claimed by Seraphim
Tanas, who became the leader of the pro-Catholic party in the Patriarchate. Athana-
sius, who returned from Aleppo around that time, refused Tanas’s claims. Then
Tanas appealed for help to the Lebanese Emir Haydar Shihab. Tanas managed,
with generous gifts, to win over the emir and his entourage, who were already
sympathetic to the Catholics. The emir’s servants brought the Armenian Catholic
bishop and Bishop Neophytus of Beirut and forcibly compelled them to consecrate
Seraphim as a bishop, contrary to the canons.⁷⁶ Of course, this story is a fiction of
later Orthodox polemicists who wanted to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the Uni-
ate hierarchy. In fact, Seraphim remained a priest until the autumn of the following
year. In 1723, Ignatius al-Bayruti was made metropolitan of Tyre and Sidon.
Although sympathetic to the Catholics, he was weak-willed and did not seem dan-
gerous to Athanasius.⁷⁷
The struggle between Orthodox and Catholics for the soul of Patriarch Athana-
sius continued until his last days. On his deathbed, Latin missionaries visited the
patriarch and offered him absolution in the name of the See of Rome. In Catholic
circles, the common version of the story is that the missionaries succeeded in get-
ting the dying patriarch to renounce his schismatic errors. Orthodox chroniclers in-
form us of their own interpretation of events.⁷⁸ Mikhail Breik claimed that Athana-
sius, like Cyril, was rumored to have been poisoned by the Latins,⁷⁹ whereas the
Beirut Chronicle states that the patriarch, wanting to clarify his religious orien-
tation, several times before his death defiantly confessed to the abbot of the
Monastery of St George, the priest Peter who was known for his hatred of
Catholics.⁸⁰ The eighteenth-century Uniate historian Yuhanna al-ʿUjaymi also ac-
knowledged that Athanasius refused to make a confession of faith before the Je-
suits and states, “They say that he died as a schismatic.”⁸¹
Athanasius died on July 25, 1724. The last of the participants in the events of the
previous fifty years had died, and the history of the Church of Antioch began a new
phase, in which the Catholics began to reap the fruits of their centuries of work.
THE SCHISM
Subsequent events fit quite well into the scheme described previously of the con-
frontation between regional centers of power. Damascus, which had had a long as-
sociation with Euthymius al-Sayfi, supported the claims of his nephew, Seraphim
Tanas, to the patriarchate. Aleppo, which for many years had been oriented toward
Athanasius Dabbas, was prepared to accept the man designated to succeed him.
This was Athanasius’s deacon, the Greek Cypriot Sylvester, who previously had
served in Aleppo and at that time was on Athos. The Aleppans wrote to Con-
stantinople to express their desire to see Sylvester as patriarch. Seraphim acted
swiftly. On his side, in addition to the pro-Catholic part of the congregation, was
the governor of Damascus ʿUthman, Pasha Abu Tawuq, who previously had pa-
tronized his uncle, Euthymius al-Sayfi. One of the French merchants in Sidon gave
Seraphim the money to pay for official approval for his being named patriarch.⁸²
Documents pertaining to the election of Seraphim, who took the name Cyril upon
acceding to the patriarchate, have been preserved. Among the names of the elec-
tors’ signatures are 29 priests, 11 notables (aʿyan al-ta’ifa), 3 deacons, and 287 people who refer to themselves as aʿyan. For the small Christian community of
Damascus, the number of aʿyan seems inflated; most likely, they are simply the
heads of families.
Seraphim/Cyril was also supported by six bishops (Tyre-Sidon, Homs, Aleppo,
Saydnayna, Banyas, and a bishop of the See of Furzul, newly created for the occa-
sion) and three abbots (Dayr Mar Mukkhallis, Mar Yuhanna in Shuwayr, and Mar
Samʿan near Beirut).⁸³ On September 19 or 20, 1724, Cyril Tanas occupied the
patriarchate with the assistance of the pasha. In later Orthodox chronicles, these
events were embellished with many details meant to highlight Cyril’s uncanonical
actions. According to the Beirut Chronicle, two Orthodox bishops who were in the
city at that time as well as some priests and laity boycotted the pro-Catholic patri-
arch. Then Cyril sent his men as well as the pasha’s Muslim police to catch these
bishops and priests. They seized them and dragged them through the streets
“offering them up for all kinds of humiliation before the people passing by.”⁸⁴ In
the church, which was filled with soldiers, Cyril made the Orthodox clergy exclaim
“Many Years” for him.
An interesting feature distinguishes the Orthodox and Catholic interpretations of
the election of Cyril Tanas. Orthodox authors argue that from the very beginning
Cyril expressed his submission to the pope and received ordination from the head
of the Capuchin missionaries, representing the See of Rome.⁸⁵ However, this
seems to be another polemical overreach.⁸⁶ Initially, Cyril did not set himself in
opposition to the Orthodox millet; he wanted to be the legitimate patriarch of Anti-
och, recognized by the Phanar and the Sublime Porte. It was only five years later,
when he realized that he would not receive legal status in the empire, that the patri-
arch appealed to Rome for support and recognition. At the council of Uniate clergy
at the Monastery of al-Mukhallis in 1730, the Capuchin missionary Dosithée de la
Sainte-Trinité declared on behalf of the pope the recognition of Cyril as patriarch of
Antioch.⁸⁷ Even by the autumn of 1724, Cyril was, if not supported by the Porte, at
least supported by the pasha of Damascus and so felt sufficiently strong. For its
part, the Synod of Constantinople immediately after the death of Athanasius in-
formed the Sublime Porte of the catastrophic situation of Orthodoxy in Syria and
received an order from the sultan to select a patriarch “alien to Latin error.” The de-
cree stipulated that the candidate for the patriarchate should not be from Syria
(this, of course, was a suggestion of the Phanariots), so much was the purity of Orthodoxy among the Syrians in doubt.⁸⁸ According to the will of Athanasius, the
new patriarch should be the aforementioned Greek Cypriot Sylvester (ca. 1696–
1766). He was summoned to Constantinople and consecrated on September 27,
1724. From this moment began the Greek xenocracy in the Patriarchate of Antioch,
against which Arab nationalists fought so hard in the second half of the nineteenth
century. However, the fact is that something that in the late nineteenth century
looked like absolute evil looked entirely different in the early eighteenth century.
In the recollection of Mikhail Breik, who knew him personally, Sylvester was “a
holy and God-fearing man,” something recognized even by the Muslims, “but he
did not have political tact and his opinions were fickle.”⁸⁹ Sylvester waited for more
than a year in Constantinople until a favorable political climate developed. Finally,
in October 1725, he went to Syria with a decree from the sultan accepting him as
patriarch and ordering the arrest of Cyril. The field had already been cleared for
Sylvester. By this time the patron of the Uniates, ʿUthman Pasha, had died. With-
out waiting for the arrival of Sylvester, in January 1725, Cyril looted the patriarchal
compound in Damascus and fled to the Lebanese Emir Haydar in Dayr al-Qamar.⁹⁰
Was it not at this time that the Uniate Monastery of Mar Yuhanna in Shuwayr was
decorated with a collection of old Russian icons, about which nineteenth century
travelers wrote?⁹¹ It is likely that many of the gifts given to Patriarch Macarius by
Alexei Mikhailovich were stored there.
Sylvester arrived in Aleppo from there went to Damascus, and then made a tour
of several dioceses and finally settled in Aleppo.⁹² Historians have long noted the
surprising paradox: the most pro-Catholic city in Syria willingly accepting a Greek
patriarch supplied by the Phanar. Then there was the regional rivalry between the
two Syrian metropolises; the people of Aleppo did not want to obey a patriarch
from Damascus chosen by the people of Damascus.⁹³
Thus, two parallel hierarchies began to take shape in the Patriarchate of Antioch:
Orthodox and Uniate. The greatest successes achieved by the propaganda for
union were in Aleppo, as well as in the coastal and mountainous regions of
Lebanon south of Beirut. In 1728, Grigorovich-Barsky found no Orthodox faithful in
Sidon apart from a few visitors. According to his account, the Uniates did not obey
the local Orthodox bishop, but rather had their own bishop and followed Eastern
rites with an admixture of Latin elements, with services conducted in a both Arabic
and Greek “where they know but do not only know Arabic.”⁹⁴ The main center of the Uniate Church was in the mountains above Sidon, where the residence of Cyril
and the Monastery of Dayr Mar Mukhallis were located. Cyril Tanas gathered to-
gether loyal monks there, around twenty in 1728. There in the Lebanese mountains,
other Uniate monasteries were founded at the turn of the seventeenth to the eigh-
teenth century—Mar Yuhanna at Shuwayr with fifteen monks and St Isaiah, which
was smaller in size and joined together with the Maronite Monastery of St George,
a day’s journey from Beirut. It was there in 1728 that Grigorovich-Barsky met Patri-
arch Cyril and later wrote, “There were many debates with me over the articles of
faith, praising the Uniates, but calling all the Greeks together with the most holy
patriarch heretics.”⁹⁵ However, the majority of Syrian monasteries remained faith-
ful to Orthodoxy, including the largest—Balamand, Saydnaya, and St George.
At that time, the Orthodox predominated in Beirut, something that Grigorovich-
Barsky tied to the piety of its bishop, Neophytus. Somewhat later, in the mid-
eighteenth century, a Uniate community was formed in Beirut, led by the influential
Dahhan family. Remaining on the side of Orthodoxy were the communities of
Tripoli, Homs, and Sidon, from which the congregations expelled bishops who
had fallen into union, such as those of Antioch, Alexandretta, and other cities. A
number of regions were engulfed in a permanent struggle between the two confes-
sions. Thus, Grigorovich-Barsky wrote of the Christian community of Baalbek,
All there is the devil’s own chaff, and raised up by Uniates … half are of the old Greek Orthodox faith, and got a rise out of the holy Church; they have among themselves hatred and strife for all the days, united in deeming the others heretics. … There from long ago is the episcopal throne known, along with the Archbishop who does not pass all his time there these days, for when the Orthodox are overcome by the Uniates, then there will be the bishop on their throne, when the Uniates defeat the Orthodox, then they will expel the bishop.⁹⁶
Acre, at the junction between Syria and Palestine, became another battlefield be-
tween Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
Grigorovich-Barsky describes the position of Orthodoxy in Damascus, the center
of the patriarchate, in pessimistic terms. In Damascus itself, the traveler found only
four hundred Orthodox men, who constituted the smallest of all the city’s commu-
nities “but those were not altogether strong in faith and fasting.”⁹⁷ There were twice
as many Uniates, and they did not go to the Orthodox church, preferring the Roman Catholic one.
However, Grigorovich-Barsky’s bleak assessment of the situation (“having
crossed Syria where few Orthodox are discovered, there are Uniates everywhere”)
seems exaggerated.⁹⁸ The Orthodox hierarchy, supported—albeit inconsistently—
by the Ottoman authorities, succeeded in stabilizing the situation in the interior of
Syria, where Uniates were in the minority. This applies to Damascus, in contrast
with Aleppo, where the Uniates almost completely dominated. In this way, the an-
cient rivalry between Damascus and Aleppo took on religious overtones.⁹⁹ The
Uniate community operated freely only in Mount Lebanon, which was not con-
trolled by the Ottoman administration.
THE ALEPPAN EPICENTER
The main events of that time were played out in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, where
Patriarch Sylvester settled in early spring of 1726. Although most of the people of
Aleppo were supporters of union, as has been mentioned, they tried not to spoil
relations with the patriarch and received him with honor. Sylvester, however, did
not possess political tact and attempted to eradicate Uniatism with an iron fist.
When, during a solemn reception for the patriarch on a Wednesday, fish was
served at mealtime, he knocked over the table legs and angrily cursed the people of
Aleppo as “fish-eaters.” Then, in the church, Sylvester threatened to excommu-
nicate those who ate fish during fasts. Apparently because of the fact that it was the
elites of the Christian community who determined its pro-Catholic sympathies,
Sylvester deliberately treated influential members of his flock coldly and, much to
their humiliation, rendered honor to the lower classes and ordinary people. His
threats attained the opposite result: the people of Aleppo were embittered, stopped
going to church, and plotted a conspiracy against him. At first, Sylvester enjoyed
the total support of the pasha and of prominent Muslims, which allowed him to
imprison notables found guilty of Catholicism, to impose exactions on them, and
so on. In the court archives of Aleppo, there are preserved lists of local Christians
suspected of having pro-Latin sympathies. These documents are dated March 24
and July 1, 1726. The latter list included hundreds of names. Many of those on the
lists were arrested and imprisoned. On August 24, the Uniates of Aleppo put for-
ward a counterclaim against Patriarch Sylvester, meticulously enumerating all of
his exactions, which were on the order of thousands and tens of thousands of
qurush.¹⁰⁰
Sylvester realized that oppression alone would not be able to halt the onslaught
of Uniatism. The spiritual assault of Catholicism had to be countered with an as-
sault at no less of an intellectual level. The patriarch appealed to Makarius
Kalogeras, scholarch (rector) of the Academy of Patmos, at the time the largest
center of education for the Ottoman Greeks. Makarius (ca. 1689–1737) who pos-
sessed an encyclopedic education and was pious to the point of fanaticism, was
one of the most prominent figures of the Orthodox millet at that time. He immedi-
ately responded to Sylvester’s request and sent his best disciple, James of Patmos,
to Syria. There, with the patriarch’s support, in early August 1726, he opened a
school in Aleppo, “that despite the many times over intelligent and verbose men
and skilled philosophers, they could have been able to oppose the enemies of the
church of Christ.”¹⁰¹
Nevertheless, Sylvester’s struggle with the Uniates of Aleppo ended with his de-
feat. The people of Aleppo were able to win over the Muslim authorities of the city
with lavish gifts. The French consul, who originally remained neutral, could not for-
give the patriarch for rounding up pro-Catholic Arabs, which occurred in the
French church, violating its diplomatic immunity. The French were also irritated by
the close (including commercial) ties between Sylvester and the British
consulate.¹⁰² Perhaps the Orthodox, searching for a counterweight to the French–
Uniate tandem, fumbled toward a rapprochement with British diplomacy, which
was not pleased with French Catholic expansion in the Levant. The dragoman of
the British consulate in Aleppo during the 1720s was Elias Fakhr, later logothete of
the See of Antioch, the leading Orthodox polemicist of the eighteenth century.¹⁰³
However, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, France had pushed Britain
out of the leading economic and political positions in Aleppo. Thus, Sylvester
found himself surrounded by enemies.¹⁰⁴
According to Orthodox accounts of subsequent events (which occurred, approx-
imately, at the end of August 1726), a Uniate mob attacked the patriarch, plotting to
kill him, but he escaped by swimming across the river and managed to reach
Constantinople.¹⁰⁵ The dramatic cast of this story could be attributable to the
polemical bent of the author of the Beirut Chronicle, but Mikhail Breik, a much
more balanced narrator, also notes that the people of Aleppo rebelled against the
patriarch “out of anger and stubbornness” and, taking advantage of the local au-
thorities, wanted to kill him, on account of which Sylvester had to flee the city by night.¹⁰⁶ According to other information, the Ottoman authorities imposed a
crushing fine on the patriarch and failure to pay it would result in imprisonment.
Fortunately, the British consul helped Sylvester to leave Aleppo in secret.¹⁰⁷
Catholic authors omit these details, saying only that the patriarch was forced to
leave the city, feeling that the qadi and Muslim notables had gone over to the side
of the Uniates. After that, there was a crackdown on the Orthodox in Aleppo.
Sylvester’s vicar and priests appointed by Sylvester were thrown into prison and
the Uniates seized the city’s church. In the first half of 1728, James of Patmos was
briefly arrested and his school was closed.¹⁰⁸
At the same time, the people of Aleppo sought to leave the Patriarchate of Anti-
och and be placed nominally under the authority of the See of Constantinople.
They sent the Phanar complaints about Sylvester’s cruel and unreasonable actions.
To verify this, the Synod of Constantinople sent Bishop Gregorius, who spent two
years in Aleppo and upon his return reported that the residents of the city were firm
in their faith, except that they kept fasts poorly. The Uniates tried not to arouse
Gregorius’s suspicion and strongly expressed their loyalty to him. Additionally, as
is evident in Uniate sources, they bribed him with 10,000 qurush and so the
bishop did not interfere in the affairs of Aleppo’s Christians. For this reason, when
Grigorovich-Barsky visited the city on Christmas Day, 1728, he could not find an
Orthodox priest to whom he could confess in all of Aleppo, and so he was forced
to go to a village two days’ journey from the city. The Uniates of Aleppo, according
to Grigorovich-Barsky, “exceedingly hate the Orthodox and give them no mercy.”
The Orthodox in the city were “of little number and the Uniates were innu-
merable in that place.”¹⁰⁹ After Gregorius’s departure, the people of Aleppo asked
the Synod of Constantinople to bring back from exile Metropolitan Gerasimus, a
secret Uniate who had been installed and later exiled by Patriarch Athanasius. In
Constantinople, they believed in their trustworthiness and agreed to it, all the more
so because all of Syria remained without a pastor as Patriarch Sylvester had spent
six years in the Danubian principalities to raise funds for his impoverished see.¹¹⁰
When Gerasimus arrived, he commemorated Sylvester in the prayers, behaved
carefully, and did not advertise his Catholic views. At the same time, the people of
Aleppo, supporters of union who were backing him, spun a new intrigue and at-
tempted to achieve complete independence from the See of Antioch. A special role
in the conspirators’ plans was played by the monk Michael of Mar Yuhanna in Shuwayr, brother of the sultan’s doctor Mansur, an Aleppan who had converted to
Islam and had great influence at the court. With Mansur’s help, the Uniates man-
aged to obtain their demand for autocephaly upon payment by Aleppo of the same
taxes that were levied on any patriarchate. The elderly Gerasimus, who long refused
to go into retirement, was eventually forced by the people of Aleppo to install the
bishop Michael (who took the name Maximus) and to go into exile in a monastery
in Lebanon where, according to the Beirut Chronicle, he soon died.¹¹¹ However, ac-
cording to the Uniate chronicler Hanania al-Munayyir, Metropolitan Gerasimus did
not die so soon after his retirement, but rather a quarter-century later, in 1754.¹¹²
That is, he was not sent to retirement on account of senility but because of some
internal struggle among the Catholics of Aleppo. Orthodox authors strongly rel-
ished the compromising story of the Uniates’ forcible overthrow of Gerasimus.
Strangely, the Aleppan Catholic chronicle of Niʿma ibn Khuri Tuma does not
mention Gerasimus, stating only that the Lord dealt bountifully with the city when,
for forty-five cases paid to the authorities of Aleppo and Istanbul, Aleppo was with-
drawn from Sylvester’s jurisdiction and transferred to Metropolitan Maximus, who
arrived on April 13, 1730.¹¹³
Such a radical redrawing of the church’s boundaries failed for the Uniates, not
least because the Sublime Porte had no time for them then. In the autumn of 1730,
Istanbul was engulfed in an uprising that ended with the execution of Grand Vizier
Ibrahim Nevşehirli and a change of sultans. In such an unstable environment, it
was easier for the Catholics to buy the right decision from the Ottoman authorities.
Orthodox hierarchs tried several times to return Aleppo to their control. Three
complaints are known to have been made to the sultan by the Eastern patriarchs
between 1730 and 1732, with the request that he put an end to Catholic expansion in
the Levant. It was first and foremost about Aleppo where, according to the patri-
archs, there were only fifty diehard Catholics and about a hundred people who were
partially attached to the heresy. This group, with the support of thirty to forty Frank-
ish priests, kept under their control a silent majority of Christians of Aleppo, “who
remain faithful in their soul to the true church and their sultan.”¹¹⁴ However, this
time the Catholics managed to win Istanbul over to their side, recalling the support
of Maximus through the pasha and qadi of Aleppo and upheld their arguments
with new cash offerings.¹¹⁵
The autonomy of Uniate Aleppo lasted from 1730 to 1746. Only one time, from 1733 to 1734, did Sylvester manage to briefly return Aleppo to his administration.
Maximus fled to Mount Lebanon but then bribed the qadi and the pasha and was
able to return. During these years, the people of Aleppo openly professed Catholi-
cism. Those who remained loyal to Orthodoxy, in the words of Mikhail Breik, “they
handed over to the judicial authorities,” threatened with chains and executions and
bribed the poor with money and gifts. Many Christians fled the city. Orthodox
chronicles rhetorically compared Maximus’s actions to the ancient heretics’ perse-
cutions of the faith.¹¹⁶
The position of Orthodoxy was slightly better in the rest of Syria. In the early
1730s, Patriarch Sylvester went to Damascus and immediately there were clashes
between the Orthodox and the Uniates. Grigorovich-Barsky, who was living there in
1733, wrote of the adherents of the union, “on any day they were ready to kill and
murder the Most Holy Patriarch Sylvester, defiling and betraying whom they please
and because of this we were in constant fear … and prepared for flight on any given
day.”¹¹⁷ In 1728, James of Patmos transferred his school from Aleppo to Tripoli and
then in 1733 to Damascus, trying to influence the Uniates with passionate sermons
and denunciations, but without success. As Grigorovich-Barsky explained, “their
hearts were corrupted by the teachings of the Jesuits.”¹¹⁸ The preacher, however,
did not know Arabic and this prevented him from entering into contact with his
audience. Attempting to prevent the onslaught of the Unia, Sylvester sent James to
preach in Syrian cities. In his absence, the school withered because the didaskalos
had not been able to find a worthy successor. James returned from his mission
broken and disillusioned after having witnessed the widespread success of the
Uniates. Seriously anxious about the collapse of his near decade of efforts, he left
Syria forever in 1735.¹¹⁹ Sylvester visited the dioceses then went to Constantinople
and returned to Damascus. In 1744, he sent his wakil Michael Tuma to Wallachia
to seek alms to pay off debts. Cyril Tanas took advantage of his absence and, with
the help of Western diplomats in Constantinople and well-placed Armenians
sympathetic with the Latins, obtained a berat for himself as patriarch of Antioch
from the Sublime Porte over the head of the Synod. On July 21, 1745, Cyril’s rep-
resentative arrived in Damascus and occupied the patriarchal residence. Pasha
Asʿad al-ʿAzm ordered that the church be given to him and Sylvester’s represen-
tative be thrown into prison. Cyril sent a command to all the dioceses that he be
commemorated at prayers, threatening disobedience with punishment. Cyril himself appeared in Beirut where, as already mentioned, by that time there was an
influential group of Uniates led by the aristocratic Dahhan family. With the help of
the Lebanese Emir Mulhim Shihab, the Uniates seized the Orthodox church and
Cyril consecrated the priest Theodosius from the Dahhan family as bishop of
Beirut. The elderly and ailing bishop of Beirut, Neophytus, was forced to attend the
ceremony. Meanwhile, the Syrian bishops wrote to Constantinople, requesting
Sylvester’s return. The synod recalled Sylvester from Wallachia and had the Porte
cancel the decree for Cyril’s recognition. The patriarchal vicar went to Syria in the
retinue of the newly appointed pasha of Sidon with a document confirming
Sylvester’s authority.
Cyril and Theodosius fled to the mountains under the protection of the Lebanese
emir. In Damascus, Cyril’s representative was arrested by the governor and impris-
oned along with some of the Uniate clergy. The Orthodox walked through the
Christian quarter with music. Many Uniates fled the city because they were being
persecuted by the local Janissaries even more than by the pasha. In 1746,
Sylvester’s messenger, Metropolitan Nicophorus, arrived in Damascus with the
sultan’s decree for the return of Uniates to Orthodoxy. Asʿad Pasha seized many
Christians praying in a Catholic monastery and literally ordered them to pray with
the Orthodox and cease communicating with the Franks. A little later, the Uniates
bribed the pasha and regained the right to pray in the monastery of the Latins.
Arriving in Damascus in 1754, Sylvester found that over half the congregation had
fallen away into union, but took no action, fearing another attack. An uneasy truce
was established in Damascus.¹²⁰
Ironically, Western authors, who generally stress the successes of Uniate propa-
ganda, write that it was greatly reduced during the second half of the eighteenth
century as Jesuit missionaries were repeatedly expelled from the city and their activ-
ities were severely restricted by the watchful eye of the Orthodox clergy. All of this
is connected with the absence of European consuls from Damascus and, conse-
quently, an institution of consular patronage for missionaries and supporters of
union.¹²¹
THE BATTLE FOR ALEPPO CONCLUDES
In 1746, Sylvester managed at great cost to secure the repeal of Uniate Aleppo’s
independence from the patriarch of Antioch. This was made possible by the resig-
nation of the Aleppo Catholics’ patron, the sultan’s doctor Mansur. The patriarch’s determination encouraged Cyril to rely even more on assistance (including mate-
rial) from the people of Aleppo for his response. Sylvester sent an Ottoman official
to Aleppo with orders to seize the church building and to throw a number of prom-
inent Catholics into prison. Metropolitan Maximus managed to escape to Cyril
Tanas in Keserwan.
In 1746, the Orthodox metropolitan Gennadius entered the city accompanied by
twelve priests. They were intended to replace the Uniate clergy. Subsequent events
are described differently in the Catholic and Orthodox sources. The Catholics com-
plain of Gennadius’s cruelty and write that he arrived with broad powers in the
name of the grand vizier commanding that anyone who does not recognize the
metropolitan’s authority be punished, tortured, and imprisoned. According to the
Catholics, Gennadius unleashed a reign of terror against them, and the people of
Aleppo had to spend tens of thousands of qurush to bribe the authorities to tem-
per the metropolitan’s enthusiasm.¹²² However, according to the Beirut Chronicle,
out of credulity or a weak will, Gennadius allowed the Catholics to once again gain
control over the church and, on account of his incompetence, was replaced two
years later by Metropolitan Sophronius.¹²³ The Orthodox version is apparently
closer to the truth. Gennadius was not able to bring the Christians of Aleppo under
his control and so left the city, as is evident from the Catholic sources (Niʿma ibn
Tuma even uses the verb “fled” in this regard).¹²⁴ As for the description of the
persecutions organized by him, they consist of literary clichés that were typical of
the period and should not be taken literally.
It seems that among the Christians of Aleppo there remained a group of adher-
ents to Orthodoxy. The sources mention that the arrests of Catholic priests under
Gennadius were accompanied by street clashes between Christians of various
denominations.¹²⁵ One of the most influential Christian merchants of the city was
the Orthodox Yusuf al-Dib, dragoman of the British consulate. In 1749, Patriarch
Sylvester made him his wakil in Aleppo. Using his new powers, Yusuf returned the
city’s church to the Orthodox and secured the arrest of the city’s Uniate clergy and
many of the Christian aʿyans. However, he often settled personal grudges with
commercial competitors, such as George ‘Aida, a prominent Uniate merchant also
in the service of the British consulate who was arrested in 1750 on charges of finan-
cial mismanagement.¹²⁶
In the autumn of 1749, the Uniates attained the promulgation of a decree returning Metropolitan Maximus to power, but this decision was successfully chal-
lenged by Patriarch Sylvester. He once again gained control over the city and in-
stalled Metropolitan Sophronius, the former bishop of Acre.¹²⁷ It was in all re-
spects a strong move by Sylvester. Sophronius, a native of the town of Kiliz near
Aleppo, could be perceived by the community of Aleppo as one of their own. More-
over, Sophronius was a prominent figure in the Orthodox millet by virtue of his
education, knowledge of languages, literary talents, and future career—in 1771, he
would become the patriarch of Jerusalem and in 1774 he would go on to be ecu-
menical patriarch.
Arriving in Aleppo in 1750, Sophronius, unlike Sylvester, tried to act on the basis
of exhortations and beliefs and, thankfully, his intellectual level allowed him to en-
gage in theological debates. For a time, to avoid conflicts with the Aleppo commu-
nity, the metropolitan posed as almost supporting the Uniates. He talked with
them about the dogmas of the faith, trying to determine who the most insistent
Catholics were and who were wavering. A Uniate chronicle calls Sophronius a
“snake in the grass,” adding that he was even worse than Gennadius.¹²⁸ However,
Sophronius’s attempts to convince the Uniates of Aleppo with words did not find
success and so the metropolitan, like many Eastern hierarchs, succumbed to the
temptation to solve the problem quickly, drastically, and effortlessly—to have the
Unia suppressed at the hands of the Ottomans. In April 1752, the governor of Alep-
po, Sa‘d al-Din Pasha, who supported Sophronius, imprisoned the leaders of the
local Catholics and demanded that they return to Orthodoxy. Although the metro-
politan denied his involvement in the repression, the Catholics believed that he
was to blame for the incident. Mutual hostility reached the point that the Catholics
sent their children to throw stones at Sophronius as he exited the church. The
metropolitan seized the cathedral from the Catholics and drove out their priests.
The people of Aleppo waited for the pasha’s departure from the city to go meet the
caravan of pilgrims on their way to Mecca, and then they paid off his deputy, the
qadi, and the notables of the city and thus gained a free hand to crack down on the
metropolitan. On September 24, 1752, a mob of Catholics attacked the metropoli-
tan’s compound and Sophronius was arrested, beaten, and imprisoned.¹²⁹
The metropolitan spent four and a half months in captivity, subject to daily vilifi-
cation and harassment. Finally, upon the pasha’s return, Sophronius was released
with a written promise to never return to Aleppo. The predominance of the Catholics was once again established in the Diocese of Aleppo. Metropolitan Max-
imus returned to the city in 1754. The few remaining Orthodox prayed in the house
of the English dragoman Elias Fakhr along with two priests who hid their status as
clergy from outsiders.¹³⁰ However, in 1755, Raghib Pasha became governor of Alep-
po. Sympathetic to the Orthodox, his doctor was Athanasius Ypsilanti Comnenus,
an influential Phanariot and author of a historical work that is a valuable source for
the history of the Unia in Syria. Comnenus demanded from the Uniate Metro-
politan Maximus the paper prohibiting Sophronius from returning, so that he
could freely enter the city. The pasha initiated proceedings for the transfer of the
church building in Aleppo to the Orthodox and denounced the commitment of the
people of Aleppo to papism before the grand vizier. The following year, in 1756, the
vizier issued a decree exiling Maximus to Adana and returning the diocese to
Sophronius. Meanwhile, Raghib Pasha was transferred away from Aleppo and
Sophronius, neither a fighter nor a fanatic by nature, categorically refused to return
to Aleppo and expose himself to new dangers. The patrons of the Catholics of
Aleppo, the sultan’s doctors Mustafa Efendi and Maximus’s brother Mansur, used
the sultan’s hostility toward the vizier and, threatening them with death, prevented
Comnenus and the ecumenical patriarch from acting and so facilitated Maximus’s
return from exile in April 1757.¹³¹
However, after the death of Sultan Osman III that same year, the Orthodox once
again gained the upper hand. Athanasius Comnenus and the Synod of Con-
stantinople suggested that Sylvester transfer the Diocese of Aleppo to the control
of the ecumenical patriarch. Sylvester, who, according to one chronicler “had be-
come very sluggish and cowardly on account of the Aleppans’ wrath, having suf-
fered so much on account of them over thirty years,” agreed.¹³² The new metro-
politan installed by the Phanar, Philemon, arrived in Aleppo in May 1758 along with
a Turkish official who had the authority to hand the church over to Philemon and
arrest Maximus. Maximus, however, already had not been sure of his safety and so
had fled to Lebanon several months earlier.¹³³
Philemon’s reign in Aleppo was relatively quiet. The Catholics were afraid to re-
sist actively the representative of the powerful ecumenical patriarch. During this
period, the Catholics turned to new methods of confronting the Orthodox hier-
archy. Without entering into open conflict with the metropolitan, they boycotted
the Orthodox church and conducted services in private homes or in the Maronite church.¹³⁴ Philemon, in turn, did not pursue the Uniates and limited himself to ob-
taining a set fee from them. He found only pitiful remnants of the Orthodox
community—one elderly priest and a few laypeople who did not know the practices
of the Church.¹³⁵
Over the decades, as the situation in Aleppo stabilized, the patriarchs of Antioch
raised the issue of returning the diocese to their jurisdiction. Appropriate resolu-
tions were issued by the Synod of Constantinople from 1766 to 1792, but for un-
clear reasons, Aleppo remained under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Con-
stantinople until the nineteenth century.¹³⁶
THE MELKITE UNIATE CHURCH
During same decade, simultaneous to the struggle for Aleppo, the basic structures
of the Uniate Church took form in Mount Lebanon. As mentioned, Cyril’s patri-
archal rank was officially recognized by Rome in March 1729. Having ascertained
the truth of the patriarch’s assertion of full acceptance of Catholic doctrine and un-
conditional obedience to the Holy See, in February 1744, the pope and the Congre-
gation de Propaganda Fide sent Cyril the pallium¹³⁷ as a token of special honor.¹³⁸
Accepting Catholic dogmas, the Arab Uniates preserved the Byzantine rite with—at
least during that time—minor additions of Roman elements. The services were
conducted in Arabic and Greek and the clergy’s vestments remained the same as
those of the Orthodox, so the less educated segment of the Christian population
often could not ascertain the difference between the two confessions.¹³⁹
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Uniate Church included about a
half-dozen episcopal sees, mainly along the coast from Jubayl to Acre and in
Mount Lebanon. The metropolitans of Aleppo also remained in Mount Lebanon for
the most part. There were also several Uniate monasteries, the most important of
which were the aforementioned Dayr Mar Mukhallis near Sidon and Mar Yuhanna
in Shuwayr.
Among the Uniates, as among the Maronites, the monastic movement played a
greater role than it did among the Orthodox. A significant proportion of the Uniate
urban intellectual elites migrated to the Lebanese monasteries, where they had the
opportunity to express themselves freely. The monasteries also attracted the sons
of the surrounding mountain peasants, some of whom received an education and
rose to prominent roles in the community. Almost all Uniate metropolitans and
patriarchs came from the monastic environment. In contrast to Orthodox monasticism, religious orders existed among the Uniates, bringing monasteries to-
gether into two congregations: the Mukhallisiya, led by the monastery of Dayr Mar
Mukhallis, and the Shuwayriya, centered on the monastery of Mar Yuhanna.¹⁴⁰
Grouping around the Monastery of Shuwayr were six monasteries, including one
for women, located on the slopes of Mount Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley on lands
donated by local sheikhs and emirs.¹⁴¹ In 1785, the order numbered 178 people.¹⁴²
The congregation’s heyday came in the time of its rector Nicholas Sayigh (1692–
1756), a prominent religious figure and poet who headed the monastery from 1732
until the end of his life. Nicholas instituted monastic regulations on the model of
the Rule of St Basil and in 1754 sent them to Rome for approval, which would come
after his death.¹⁴³ A decade earlier, in 1745, the Vatican approved the charter for the
congregation of Dayr Mar Mukhallis.¹⁴⁴
A prominent member of the Shuwayrite order was the aforementioned deacon
ʿAbdallah Zakher who settled in the monastery of Mar Yuhanna after retiring from
Aleppo in 1722. Along with his literary and propagandistic activities, he is known as
the founder of Uniate printing. There was an active printing press at Shuwayr from
1734.¹⁴⁵
There was a strong rivalry between the Shuwayriya and Mukhallisiya congre-
gations because of regional differences (Shuwayr was dominated by immigrants
from Aleppo and Mar Mukhallis by immigrants from Damascus), and this was ex-
pressed in debates over rituals and the relative severity of monastic rules. These
debates gave rise to ample polemical literature on both sides. There were several
councils at which the rivals attempted to bridge the gap.¹⁴⁶
Confrontation between the two religious congregations reached its peak when,
shortly before his death in December 1759, Cyril Tanas handed the patriarchal
throne over to his nephew, Athanasius IV Jawhar, a native of Damascus. Several
bishops and the Shuwayrite community opposed his candidacy and, in August
1761, elected the metropolitan of Aleppo Maximus al-Hakim, and then, after his
death in November of that year, the bishop of Beirut Theodosius V Dahhan (patri-
arch from 1761–1788). The feud lasted for several years. Athanasius Jawhar en-
trenched himself at Dayr Mar Mukhallis, benefiting from the patronage of the
Druze feudal Jumblatt clan, whereas Theodosius went to Acre under the protection
of the ruler of Galilee, Dahir al-ʿUmar. The pope took the side of Maximus and
Theodosius. Although he personally went to Rome to defend his rights, after a long struggle, in 1768, Athanasius was forced to renounce the rank of patriarch and
agree to become metropolitan of Tyre and Sidon.¹⁴⁷
The deaths of Cyril Tanas, Maximus, and their antagonist Sylvester, who died in
1766, marked an epochal change in the relations between Orthodoxy and the Uni-
ate Church. The period of bitter struggle in inner Syria as a whole ended. In Aleppo,
the Uniates retained their victory, remaining subordinate to the Orthodox metro-
politan only formally. In Damascus and most other cities, the Orthodox hierarchy
remained in control and the Uniates were in the minority. From time to time, the
Orthodox patriarchs started to persecute the Uniate community. For example, in
1784, Patriarch Daniel secured the arrest of a Uniate sheikh and three priests in
Sidon for the murder of an Orthodox priest and then took four churches from the
local Uniates. Some of them, however, were soon returned to the Catholics at the
insistence of Ghandur al-Khuri, a lieutenant of the Lebanese Emir Yusuf.¹⁴⁸
THE BEIRUT EPICENTER
The center of gravity in the confrontation between the two faiths then shifted to
Lebanon. The strengthening of political separatism in several parts of the Ottoman
Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century led to a convergence between
local Muslim rulers who aimed to achieve independence from the Sublime Porte
(such as Yusuf Shihab in Mount Lebanon, Dahir al-‘Umar in northern Palestine,
and ‘Ali Bey al-Kabir in Egypt) with the Uniate merchant class who, unlike the
Orthodox and other traditional confessional communities, were not incorporated
into the empirewide administrative system and were not recognized by the central
Ottoman authorities and therefore were vitally interested in the patronage of re-
gional Muslim leaders. The Uniates supplied cadres of officials for the semi-
independent rulers of the Middle East and so controlled trade in many areas of the
Levant and tried to influence the political situation in the Eastern Mediterranean.¹⁴⁹
The favorable position of the Uniate communities in Mount Lebanon and parts
of the Levantine coast led to mass migration to these areas by supporters of union
from regions of inland Syria where Catholics were persecuted. During the eigh-
teenth century, the Christian population of Damascus and Aleppo fell by almost
half, but this coincided with an equally dramatic increase in the number of Uniates
along the Syro–Palestinian coast. In 1815, there were four thousand five hundred
Uniates in Sidon, almost a third of the city’s population of fifteen thousand. They
made up two thousand of the seven thousand five hundred inhabitants of Acre, as well as most of the inhabitants of Tyre, Haifa, and Zahle.¹⁵⁰ Involvement in mar-
itime trade favored the migration of Uniates to the cities of Egypt, where by the
beginning of the nineteenth century they numbered four thousand people. The
cohesive and dynamic Uniate community of Egypt successfully integrated itself
into the country’s economic system, displacing competing ethnic and religious
groups. Uniates took positions as the advisers, financiers, and tax farmers for the
Mamluk rulers of Egypt. Starting in 1768, the Uniates had full control over the
Egyptian customs office, disposing of enormous cash flows. In the informal struc-
tures of the self-governing Melkite community led by the merchants and customs
officials, the clergy took an unusually subordinate position. Generally speaking, the
secular elite, represented by merchant clans connected through marriage, played a
vital role in the life of the Uniates.¹⁵¹
In the early 1770s, when Turkey suffered defeats in the war with Russia and the
Mediterranean was dominated by the Russian navy, the Uniates actively supported
the anti-Ottoman policy of the separatist leader of the Egyptian Mamluks, ‘Ali Bey
(d. 1773) and Sheikh Dahir al-‘Umar. Thus, the leading place in the circle of Dahir
was taken by his advisor and steward, the Uniate Ibrahim Sabbagh, who placed
fellow Uniates in all key positions in the administration. In the historical literature,
a negative image of Sabbagh has developed—a tyrant, oppressor, and bribe-taker
who because of his avarice was thwarted. After the fall of Acre and the death of
Dahir in early 1776, Sabbagh was captured by the Ottomans and strangled, because
he was someone who knew too much about the sheikh and about what wound up
in the hands of the Kapudan Pasha.¹⁵² Catholics also played an important role in
the administration of the Lebanese Emir Yusuf Shihab, especially Ghandur al-
Khuri, the emir’s lieutenant from 1782. The Beirut chronicler wrote of Ghandur, “As
for his power, he was very great…. The Emir Yusuf wrote to him, ‘Dear brother!’
and the rulers of the country and citizens struggled to even write him.”¹⁵³ Even the
Uniate chronicler, for all his sympathy for Ghandur, admitted his arrogance, “he
behaved … as though he were emir.”¹⁵⁴ Ghandur was a Maronite, but he fully sup-
ported the Melkite Uniates in the fight against Orthodoxy and, according to the
Beirut chronicler, used his authority “to raise up a persecution against the Ortho-
dox Christians, disturbing the tranquility of their lives, oppressing them with extor-
tion and mercilessly harming them. He sought that as a result of such treatment
they would give up their true Orthodox faith and accept the false Catholic faith.”¹⁵⁵
To those who apostatized, he promised privileges, and to those who stood firm in
faith, he threatened death, killing some of them. He seized Orthodox churches and
handed them over to the Uniates.¹⁵⁶
The Uniate metropolitan of Beirut, Ignatius, and the Catholic missionaries were
particularly zealous in persecuting the Orthodox. Just as in the interior of Syria, the
Orthodox hierarchy periodically resorted to persecuting the Uniates, in Mount
Lebanon the inverse situation occurred. The Orthodox were vulnerable to pressure
from secular authorities and could not appeal to the Sublime Porte. “At this time,”
we read in the Beirut Chronicle, “His Holiness the [Orthodox] metropolitan of
Beirut let out mournful sighs and we lifted up continuous prayers to the Lord with
bitter tears, begging Him to stop the persecution.”¹⁵⁷
In 1789, Yusuf Shihab waged war against the pasha of Acre, Ahmad al-Jazzar, and
was defeated, captured, and hanged along with his lieutenant Ghandur. When the
Orthodox of Beirut learned of this, they rejoiced and “gave great thanksgiving to
God Most High”¹⁵⁸ because if he had been victorious over al-Jazzar, Yusuf had
promised to put Beirut under rule of Ghandur, and the city was fraught with the
persecution of the local Orthodox community. After Ghandour’s execution,
churches confiscated by him were returned to the Orthodox and many who had
been forcibly converted to Catholicism returned to Orthodoxy.¹⁵⁹
Unlike the separatists Dahir and Shihab who were associated with the Uniates,
the Pasha of Acre, Ahmad al-Jazzar, consistently demonstrated loyalty to the Sub-
lime Porte. This is why, according to Thomas Philipp, he preferred to use Orthodox
officials in his administration, the most famous of whom were the Sarruj
brothers.¹⁶⁰ However, upon closer examination of the pasha’s personnel policy, it
appears that he was indifferent to the religion of his advisors. Ahmad Pasha readily
employed the services of Orthodox, Uniates, and Jews and then, when necessary,
threw them in jail, executed them, and seized their property. Having looked favor-
ably upon and taken into his service the sons of Ibrahim al-Sabbagh in 1779, the
pasha threw them in his dungeon a year later. The Sarruj brothers’ longstanding
service to the pasha ended with their disgrace and execution in 1794.¹⁶¹ The senior
Uniate official Mikhail al-Bahri managed to get out of al-Jazzar’s prison alive in
1789, but with his nose and ears cut off and after having sworn to never again deal
with the powerful people of this world. His sons, however, did not follow their fa-
ther’s example, and in the early nineteenth century, they held prominent positions in the eyalets (administrative divisions) of Sidon and Damascus. They built the
Uniate church in Damascus and later served the Egyptian Pasha Muhammad ‘Ali
and had great influence during the Egyptian occupation of Syria in the 1830s.¹⁶²
Returning to the era of Ahmad al-Jazzar, it should be mentioned that in the admi-
nistration under his power in Beirut, the pasha also exploited the rivalry between
the two powerful merchant clans led, respectively, by the Orthodox Yunus Niqula
and the Uniate Faris Dahhan. Economic competition between these two poles of
Beirut society was aggravated by the religious enmity and political rivalry between
Yunus and Faris when the pasha alternately farmed out the city’s customs office to
them and then imprisoned them and demanded the payment of enormous fines.
Yunus generally enjoyed more respect from al-Jazzar, which ensured the domi-
nance of the Orthodox Christian community of Beirut until the sheikh’s death in
March 1789. Yunus Niqula, almost the only member of Ahmad Pasha’s circle who
managed to die a natural death not in disgrace, bequeathed control over the city’s
finances to his brother Selim.
However, in March 1791, the situation deteriorated for the Orthodox group. Faris
Dahhan, a man whom the Beirut Chronicle characterizes as “very proud, stubborn,
vindictive, vengeful, a fanatic for his religion,” gained the post of head of the Beirut
customs office by promising to pay al-Jazzar a thousand purses from the city’s
Christians.¹⁶³ Selim Niqula was convicted of a shortfall of 2 piasters and impris-
oned. After Niqula, all of the more or less wealthy Orthodox of Beirut were impris-
oned, and were presented with unbearable demands for cash payments. As the
chronicler wrote,
their arrest lasted for three days…. They began to search in hiding-places, cellars and wells. If someone was not found, then his son was taken and thrown into prison, even if he was a child. Anyone whom the Almighty preserved changed his clothes and fled into the mountains. However, his name was listed [on the arrest list], his shop was sealed, and the debt-collectors were in his house [demanding payment] from his household.¹⁶⁴
If we are to believe the Beirut Chronicler, Faris Dahhan managed to paralyze all
commercial activities of his Orthodox competitors, who spent many months in
prison, were subjected to torture and extortion, and were forced to sell all their
property for a pittance to pay even a fraction of the taxes. The Sarruj brothers tried to intercede for the Orthodox, but al-Jazzar was not inclined to agree to a reduction
of his revenue. Then the pasha had the idea to expand the fines to all the Christian
confessions of the city. There was a new wave of arrests of the merchants of Beirut;
the overcrowded prisons could not accommodate the prisoners who were already
there.
Al-Jazzar was of course aware that much of the money that had been shaken out
of the Christians had found its way into the pockets of Faris and his henchmen.
Waiting until they were sufficiently enriched, the pasha ordered the high adminis-
tration of Beirut arrested and their property confiscated. Dahhan was seized in the
diwan, throne into the dungeon, and required to pay 100 purses. However, al-
Jazzar had barely managed to get half that amount before Faris died in prison in
April 1792, either from beatings or from the plague.¹⁶⁵
THE LAST BATTLE
Thereafter, in the history of confrontation between the Orthodox and the Uniates,
there was a lull that lasted for almost three decades. The sources do not contain
any information about significant intercommunal conflicts. Bruce Masters believes
that this very problem of the Ottoman authorities ignoring the Uniates was
beneficial to them. Their church continued to exist, quasi-underground in inland
Syria and openly in the mountains and along the coast. The permanent bans on
contact with Latin monks or worship in private homes issued by the sultans were
easily ignored by corrupt pashas and qadis on the ground. However, the central-
ization of the state ruthlessly pursued by Sultan Mahmud I (1809–1837) still gave
the Orthodox Church a chance to put an end to the Uniates at the hands of the Ot-
toman authorities.¹⁶⁶
The final offensive against the Uniates in the Ottoman Empire was undertaken in
January 1818 when, at the initiative of the Armenians of Constantinople, the Porte
ordered Uniates of all persuasions to go to the churches of their ancestors. The
governor of Aleppo, Khurshid Pasha, received similar instructions. On March 14,
the Orthodox metropolitan Gerasimus al-Turkuman arrived in the city. He was a
native of Aleppo, as the Phanar’s policy of appointing clergy had become more
thoughtful. On April 17, 1818, the metropolitan announced before thousands of
Uniates the Porte’s decree that they submit to Orthodox clergy and that recalcitrant
Uniate priests be imprisoned. The leaders of the community tried to talk to the
pasha to bring him over to their side, but he turned a deaf ear to the Uniates’ theological arguments. According to some reports, the pasha, “who had a relent-
less hatred of Catholics,”¹⁶⁷ even arrested and deported a number of Uniate priests
for noncompliance with the decrees. After that, the city’s Uniates rioted against
Metropolitan Gerasimus, whom they blamed for the persecution. The agitated mob
marched on the metropolitan’s residence. The metropolitan managed to escape
under the protection of the qadi. Then, the Uniates laid siege to the court building,
an open challenge to Ottoman authority. The qadi fled along with the metropolitan
to the pasha and presented the affair to him in the darkest colors: “the infidels
came to kill us.”¹⁶⁸ The Uniate mob went to the pasha’s residence, but was dis-
persed by soldiers. Thirteen of the instigators were beheaded on the spot.
Gerasimus, however, could not hold onto the city and, after surviving two as-
sassination attempts, abandoned his see. In May, the Uniate community, having
brought the pasha an appropriate sum of money to apologize for the recent riots,
had the opportunity to restore the status quo ante.¹⁶⁹
Around the same time, Patriarch Seraphim of Antioch sent one of his metro-
politans to bring the Uniates of Sidon into submission. However, a powerful Uni-
ate lobby had developed in the Pashalik of Sidon, as Uniates predominated in the
bureaucracy of Acre, Sidon, Tyre, and Beirut, and they were closely associated with
‘Abdallah Pasha and the powerful sarraf Haim al-Yahudi. Thus, the pasha expelled
the metropolitan from his territories.¹⁷⁰
Patriarch Seraphim, who is portrayed in Uniate sources as a fanatical ascetic
who pathologically hated Catholics, obtained a new decree at the capital on sub-
ordinating the Syrian Uniates to him but, as usual, obtaining a new decree (he ar-
rived in Damascus in June) was easier than seeing it implemented. The Uniates,
supported by the qadi of Damascus, did not recognize the patriarch’s orders. The
Orthodox also managed to gain to their side the mutasallim Salih Agha. According
to the Uniate chronicle, the Rum attacked Patriarch Seraphim in the market of
Damascus, tearing his clothes and breaking his staff. The Ottomans used this as a
pretext to accuse the Uniates of political disloyalty and conducted mass arrests of
Catholics and other Christians, only releasing them after receiving lavish
ransoms.¹⁷¹
The initial outbreak of this conflict was followed by a six-month lull, but then, in
early 1819, all the Uniate priests of Damascus were arrested in one night. At the
patriarch’s insistence, the authorities banned Frankish, Maronite, and other non-Orthodox clergy from entering the houses of the Uniates and talking to them
about matters of faith. They arrested the Uniate priests and sent them into exile.
Apparently, there was a plan to put them on a ship and send them to the Balkans or
Anatolia. The prisoners were taken through Homs and Tripoli via a detour through
Mount Lebanon, where the Maronites were able to free the convicts. At the insis-
tence of the Uniates in his entourage, the Pasha of Sidon, ‘Abdallah, convinced the
ruler of Tripoli, Mustafa Berber, to release the exiled priests and send them to Acre,
under ‘Abdallah’s protection. The Uniate Chronicle reports that upon having
learned of this, Patriarch Seraphim fell into a rage and swore before an icon of the
Theotokos to fight the Catholics until the end.¹⁷² However, he failed to fulfill this
promise.
In 1821, after the start of the Greek uprising and the Ottoman persecution of the
Orthodox, the Uniates resumed their worship. Upon hearing of this, the patriarch,
however, “did not dare say a word, as he was in disgrace.”¹⁷³ It was now no longer
the Uniates, but rather the Orthodox, who appeared to the Porte to be potential
traitors and rebels. It is no wonder that in April 1821, at the beginning of the Greek
uprising, a delegation of Uniates of Aleppo rushed to assure the Ottoman
authorities of their loyalty and to disassociate themselves from the Greeks. Shortly
thereafter, the Uniates of Aleppo were recognized as a de jure autonomous
Catholic ta’ifa within the Rum millet.¹⁷⁴ In 1827, motivated by harassment from the
authorities, the entire Diocese of Amida (Diyabakir) of the Patriarchate of Antioch
passed into union with Rome, hoping for the protection of France.¹⁷⁵ Finally, in
1829, with the end of the persecution of the Orthodox, the Porte officially issued a
decree on religious freedom for Uniates.¹⁷⁶ During the Egyptian occupation of Syria
(1831–1840), the Uniates used the full protection of the authorities to build cathe-
drals in the cities. In 1837, the Sublime Porte recognized the Melkite Uniates as a
separate millet with all the rights of autonomy.
In this way, a century and a half of dispute between Orthodoxy and Uniatism
came to an end. Relations between the two communities gradually stabilized dur-
ing the nineteenth century and movement back and forth between the union and
Orthodoxy disappeared. However, the Orthodox community had lost about a third
of its members, including the most dynamic and advanced. Therefore, to summa-
rize, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Orthodoxy lost this fight.
WHY DID THE UNIA SUCCEED? UNIATE IDENTITY
What was the reason for this outcome of events? Why were the structures of the
Orthodox Church ineffective before the Uniate challenge, even as they enjoyed sup-
port from the Ottoman authorities?
The Orthodox authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have given a
superficial treatment of the Unia’s successes. The chroniclers tended to explain
them by “God’s acquiescence” as well as the fact that the Jesuits, according to
Neophytus of Cyprus who was not without Phanariot snobbery, “knew Arabic and
had a lot of gold, valuable clothes and things like this, which seems sufficient to
lure the base Arabs.”¹⁷⁷ “The only reason for the [Uniates’] propagation,” said Neo-
phytos, is that the Catholic missionaries allowed their followers to eat fish during
fasts and recognized the legitimacy of marriages in the fourth and fifth degree of
kinship “because,” in the author’s words, “the Arabs indulge in gluttony and there-
fore the rest of the passions.”¹⁷⁸ The authors of the Beirut Chronicle also believe
that Christians accepted Roman dogma “in their simplicity and because there was
nothing to eat during fasts.”¹⁷⁹ That is, in the opinion of the Orthodox Church, the
Jesuits worked on the basest human instincts—gluttony and lust—which explained
all their successes. Only in passing does Mikhail Breik hint that the Catholics’
successes occurred “by God’s allowance on account of the strife of our spiritual
leaders.”¹⁸⁰ The assessment of the Uniate movement was self-evident to Orthodox
authors: there is the true Orthodox faith, inheritor of the apostolic tradition, and
the ecumenical councils; and there is malicious heresy introduced from the out-
side. But how did the Uniates themselves understand their transition to union with
Rome?
Unfortunately, we have few such assessments dating back to the first and sec-
ond generation of the Uniate movement. Early examples of historical interpre-
tations of the nature of the Syrian Unia can be found in the Vatican’s declarations
associated with sending the pallium from Rome for Cyril Tanas in 1744 and in the
annals of the first Uniate chronicler, Yuhanna al-‘Ujaymi (1756).¹⁸¹ Uniate histori-
ography formed under the strong influence of Catholic scholarship and Roman
officialdom. Al-‘Ujaymi, who was born in a remote village in Lebanon, received
such a profound Jesuit education and spent so many years in Europe, that he was
in fact the Arabic-speaking representative of the Roman Catholic historiographical
tradition. In the writings of the Uniate historians, it is sometimes difficult to distin-
guish original thoughts from the suggestions of the College of St Athanasius or of the Syrian missionary schools.
The Melkite Catholics did not have the strongly pronounced historical inferiority
complex found among most Uniates at that time. For many people, adopting union
with Rome meant crossing out the entirety of their former historical identity and
recognizing their ancestors as heretics burning in hell. From this, for example, de-
rives the frantic polemical ardor of Maronite historiography which, against all evi-
dence, attempts to prove the perpetual orthodoxy of its church or the radical de-
struction of all the community’s manuscripts from the pre-union period, as was
done by the Malabar Church, as well as presumably the Maronites, to destroy the
evidence and delete their non-Catholic past.¹⁸²
By contrast, the Melkite Uniates were proud of the glorious past of the Apostolic
See of Antioch and presented its history after 1054 as a series of attempts to enter
into communion with the Roman Mother Church. This historiographical trend
gained particular strength during the nineteenth century. Catholic writers remem-
bered Peter of Antioch’s rejection of the “Cerullarian Schism,” the signature of the
exarch representing Antioch on the acts of the Council of Florence, and the seven-
teenth-cen-tury patriarchs’ contacts with missionaries. All the pathos of Melkite
Catholic historiography came down to the fact that the Melkite Uniate Church did
not begin in 1724, but rather with the Apostle Paul.¹⁸³
Thus, al-‘Ujaymi was not a fanatic and recognized “as holy men” even those
patriarchs of Antioch who were not in the diptychs of the pope.¹⁸⁴ Uniate chron-
iclers writing in the Lebanese mountains wrote about the Orthodox in much calmer
terms than the chronicles written in major cities, which were the epicenters of reli-
gious confrontation. The fact that the Orthodox Church of Antioch, from the point
of view of Rome, remained in schism but not in heresy, allowing Melkite scribes to
look down on their fellow Catholics from other Middle Eastern churches. This,
however, did not prevent close everyday contact between Melkites and Maronites
and personal friendships between many of the bishops of both churches. In the
context of the rejection of the Arab Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy by the Ottoman
authorities, Melkites in large cities were often forced to go to Maronite churches,
the only Eastern Catholic churches to enjoy legal status. There were even transfers
of Melkite Uniates into the Maronite community, about which Cyril Tanas com-
plained to the See of Rome. At the same time, the rapprochement of the Melkites
with the Maronites led to some friction between them, particularly regarding their attitude toward the revered founder of the Maronite community, Yuhanna Maroun,
whom the Melkites regarded as a Monothelete heretic. When they sent Patriarch
Cyril Tanas a printed icon of St Maroun, he defiantly tore it into shreds. Yuhanna
al-‘Ujaymi dedicated an entire treatise to denouncing the heretical origin of the Ma-
ronite community.¹⁸⁵
The ethnic identity of the Uniates initially remained as it had been. They called
themselves Romaians—al-Rum, al-Rum al-Kathulik—and their Orthodox oppo-
nents they called “heretical” or “schismatic” Rum—al-Rum al-aratiqa
wa-l-mashaqqin.¹⁸⁶ Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, Uniate bishops
and scribes managed to adopt for themselves the traditional self-designation of the
Orthodox community, “Melkites,” and thereby claimed the ancient heritage of the
Middle East and put themselves in opposition to Orthodox Christianity on the level
of ethnic identity.¹⁸⁷
With time, the ethnic component of conflict between Uniates and Orthodox
played an increasingly important role in the development of a Melkite “national
myth.” In the nineteenth century, in an era of widespread awakening of nationalist
movements and ideologies, many historians and commentators interpreted the
schism of 1724 and the emergence of the Melkite Catholic Church as a Greco–Arab
national struggle, a struggle between Greek (Orthodox) and local (Catholic)
parties.¹⁸⁸ In Chapter 6, we attempted to demonstrate the illegitimacy of such an
interpretation.
Let us once more summarize the considerations of an ethnic nature for the
union with Rome. First, there was no Phanariot domination of the Church of Anti-
och in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It preserved its fully Arab
character. Greek bishops were few in number and did not attempt to Hellenize the
Syrian church. Interventions into the affairs of the Patriarchate of Antioch by the
Patriarchate of Constantinople usually failed.
Second, the Arab Christians did not view the Greek xenocrats of the eighteenth
century as a foreign oppression. Their religious consciousness prevailed over their
ethnic consciousness. In the corpus of chronicles, letters, memoirs, and decla-
rations by members of the Syrian church, only a very few times are disputes im-
plied to have ethnic motivations. Bruce Masters correctly noted that the Dama-
scene chronicler Mikhail Breik never expressed dissatisfaction with the Greek ori-
gin of the Patriarch Sylvester, “the undisputed hero” of Arab Orthodox historiography.¹⁸⁹ The resentment among Syrian hierarchs by the installment of
Greek patriarchs in 1767 and 1813 was more a manifestation of thwarted personal or
family ambition than a conscious national protest. Even in the eighteenth century,
the Greek hierarchs did not seek to Hellenize their flock. This was discussed in
Chapter 6, but we will give another example here. When the Cypriot Greek metro-
politan of Beirut, Ioannicius (1745–1774), decided to abdicate, he advised the peo-
ple to invite to the metropolitan see the famous preacher from Tripoli, Macarius
Sadaqa. Ioannicius pointed out that the Arab Macarius would be close to his flock,
unlike a Greek who would be “alien to you both in language and in nature.”¹⁹⁰ That
is, even this Cypriot bishop was alien to Hellenic chauvinism and religious soli-
darity seemed to him to be more important than national solidarity.
Third and finally, there is something about which no one seems to have spoken
yet. In terms of religious independence, the only advantage that the Uniates had
over the Orthodox was that all of their patriarchs and metropolitans were of Arab
origin. In all other respects, the Melkite Catholic Church was more tightly con-
trolled by the Vatican than the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch was by the Phanar.
Rome sanctioned the election of each Uniate patriarch, and in the case of a
disagreement between candidates for the patriarchate, it independently determined
the winner. This decision was not subject to appeal, unlike similar interventions by
the Phanar in the See of Antioch in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was
in Rome that monastic charters and the acts of Uniate councils were or were not
approved. These councils themselves often were held at the initiative of papal
legates. Uniate canons and rituals underwent increasing Latin influence culmi-
nating in the mid-nineteenth century with the introduction of the Gregorian cal-
endar. Roman pressure at the end of the eighteenth century began to provoke resis-
tance among Uniates desiring to defend their Middle Eastern identity and indepen-
dence from the steamroller of Latin unification. Similar sentiments were partic-
ularly reflected in the activities of Germanus Adam, metropolitan of Aleppo from
1777 to 1780, and the most prominent of the Melkite Catholic patriarchs of the
nineteenth century, Maximus Mazlum.¹⁹¹
To summarize, we repeat that the opposing religious parties in Syria in the eigh-
teenth century were almost completely unaware of nationalism, and this did not
play a prominent role. It is significant that a serious writer such as Bruce Mas-
ters—for all his credulity to stereotypes and the inadequacy of his sources—came to similar conclusions, noting in particular that parts of the Jacobite and Armenian
Churches, in which there were no ethnolinguistic conflicts, also came into union
with Rome.¹⁹²
Alongside the nationalist interpretation of the rise of the Unia in Syria, there is a
regionalist interpretation. According to this interpretation, union with Rome was
the result of Christian Arabs’ desire for independence and autonomy in church life,
not in the nationalist sense of Arabs versus Greeks, but rather in the regionalist
sense of Aleppo versus Damascus, Damascus versus Constantinople, and so
on.¹⁹³ Such an interpretation appears more convincing, because, in contrast to the
other theory, it does not contradict the obvious lack of national consciousness
among Syrian Christians of the eighteenth century and it explains, for example,
such a paradox as the Uniates of Aleppo supporting the Orthodox Greek Sylvester
in 1724 against the Catholic Arab Cyril. The leading proponent, if not the originator,
of this interpretation in terms of regional separatism was Thomas Philipp, who
claimed that the prosperous Arab Christian middle class began to seek a greater
role in the affairs of their own communities and this gave rise to their conflict with
the church authorities of the Phanar. According to him, in 1724, the first patriarch
was elected by the community of Damascus and not appointed by Constantinople.
Orthodoxy was identified with centralism and Catholicism symbolized local inter-
ests. “Local autonomy was a key question in the genesis of Uniate society,” con-
cluded the researcher.¹⁹⁴
A similar view was held by Bruce Masters. He calls the pro-union mood of Mid-
dle Eastern Christians “a populist, reform movement with strong localist
tendencies,”¹⁹⁵ and argued that, “a strong mercantile middle class dominated all
three sects [i.e., the Orthodox, Jacobites, and Armenians who were still suffering
from Catholic expansion] and a locally based hierarchy would best serve its polit-
ical interests.”¹⁹⁶ Masters was also not without factual errors, attributing to the
Uniate churches the introduction of the intelligible local language of Arabic instead
of the traditional Greek and Syriac.¹⁹⁷
However, this “regionalist” interpretation also raises objections. What was writ-
ten shows how strong regional bonds were in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.¹⁹⁸ Those very people of Aleppo from generation to generation deter-
mined by their own will the candidates for the patriarch of Antioch, not the metro-
politans of Aleppo. At the same time, the motives for the election of one person or another to the bishop’s throne are not fully understood. It is noteworthy that a
candidate’s origins did not play a decisive role here. Of the seven metropolitans of
Aleppo from the end of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth
century, two were natives of Aleppo, the origin of one is not clear, and the remain-
ing four were from other cities. Of these four, Meletius Karma, born in Hama, was
elected unanimously in 1612 by the clergy and laity of Aleppo. The native of Hama
Athanasius was installed in 1648 by the Patriarch Macarius, who is known to have
been from Aleppo, whereas the Damascene Athanasius Dabbas was, paradoxically,
put forward in 1686 by the community of Aleppo in opposition to Patriarch Cyril
al-Zaʿim, who was born in Aleppo. Too many contradictions do not fit in with the
monodimensional explanation on the basis of regional preferences.
In our opinion, the roots of the Unia should be sought in another sphere.
Summarizing the views of Western scholarship, Bruce Masters highlighted two
explanations for the success of Catholic propaganda: a material explanation put
forward by Robert Haddad and a spiritual explanation put forward by Bernard
Heyberger.¹⁹⁹
With regard to the importance of material factors, the Syrian economy’s close
contacts with Europe and the involvement of Arab Christian business circles within
the Catholic cultural and political spheres of influence have been mentioned in this
chapter. The Unia’s triumph in Syria was largely a consequence of the weakening of
the Ottoman Empire and the strengthening of European influence, when Syrian
Christians preferred to focus not on the Sublime Porte and the Phanar but on Ver-
sailles and the Vatican. It is symbolically significant that the first Uniate, the metro-
politan of Tyre and Sidon Euphymius Sayfi joined with Rome in the same year that
the Ottomans were defeated near Vienna and entered upon their path of protracted
decline. Robert Haddad even noticed that the speed with which Patriarch Cyril
joined with Rome in 1716 coincided with the rate of advancement of the European
armies during the Austro–Turkish War during that time. According to Haddad,
Orthodoxy was the first victim of European expansion into the Ottoman Empire.²⁰⁰
Bruce Masters believes that the Uniates, by keeping the Eastern rituals, “were pro-
tected by that all-important façade of tradition, while committing themselves to a
place in a new economic and political world order, increasingly dominated by the
West.”²⁰¹
Bernard Heyberger, in turn, wrote about the importance of religious and cultural factors. According to him, ossified tradition and corrupt Eastern clergy failed to
meet the spiritual needs of their flock. Catholicism stimulated the spiritual revival
of Arab Christians. The missionaries’ preaching especially had an influence on
women, who held a higher social status in the Catholic tradition.²⁰² If we set aside
the confessional bias of the author—who relies almost exclusively on Catholic
sources and idealizes the Uniate Church, whose internal defects were no less than
those of the Orthodox—it should be recognized that the missionaries’ policy in the
cultural and educational spheres became an important factor in the success of
Catholic propaganda. The decline of Middle Eastern Christianity and the cultural
degradation and ignorance of both the flock and the clergy were acutely felt by
Orthodox, Coptic, Jacobite, and Armenian clergy. Within each of the Levantine
churches, there were sizeable groups of clergy who, to have a chance for spiritual
renewal and the revival of their churches, were ready to enter into union with the
Catholics and to make use of their system of education and learning. As Ignaty
Kratchkovsky wrote, the advantage that the Maronites and Uniates had over the
Orthodox lay in the fact that the Western-oriented elements of society
could rely … on a long tradition and serious assistance both in schools and in the development of writing…. The Orthodox clergy did not have such opportunities…. In its ideological aspirations oriented towards Greco-Byzantine writing, it did not have any center analogous to Rome to which it could gravitate.²⁰³
At the same time, it must be admitted that Orthodox culture had sufficient vitality
to rapidly evolve over the seventeenth century and that the Catholic challenge of
the eighteenth century stimulated a further rise in creative activity among the Arab
Orthodox, as will be discussed in the following chapter.
From the book Arab Orthodox Christians Under the Ottomans 1516–1831 by Constantin Alexandrovich Panchenko
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