Chapter 8 — Southern Italy was Orthodox

The Eastern Orthodox often claim that Southern Italy was Eastern Orthodox for 1,000 years and that the Italians were never Latin or Roman Catholic prior to the Norman conquest. After the Norman conquest, they argue, there was a “latinization” which tore the southern Italians away from Greek Orthodoxy.

Now, as already stated, the Eastern Orthodox revisionists believe that all of Western Europe was Orthodox prior to 1054 AD, however they have a particular fixation on southern Italy. The claim is also closely interconnected with the claim that “southern Italians are Greek”, which is a related but still distinct claim which will be addressed later. And since southern Italians are Greeks — according to them — they must have been Eastern Orthodox too.

In reality Southern Italy was never “Orthodox”. I will briefly explain here what actually occurred.

It began in the 8th century during a dispute known as the Iconoclast Controversy.

Iconoclasm is the doctrine according to which the use of religious images or icons is wrong and therefore icons must be prohibited and destroyed. This ideology originated in the Jewish world, which transmitted it to the Arab Muslim world, and from there gained traction in the Byzantine Empire. It found supporters among both the Byzantine emperor and the bishop of Constantinople, whereas it was strongly opposed by the Latin West and by some monks in the Byzantine Empire and Near East.

At this time, parts of southern Italy (Sicily, Calabria, Salento in Puglia) were ruled by the Byzantine Empire, while the rest of southern Italy — most of southern Italy, in fact — was under the authority of Longobard dukes.

It must be remembered also that at this time the bishops of Rome and Constantinople were in union: the Latin and Greek churches had not yet split from each other, and Eastern Orthodoxy did not yet exist.

The dispute over Iconoclasm, however, led to a temporary schism between Rome and Constantinople. The reigning Byzantine emperor Leo III the Isaurian was an Iconoclast, and so too was Anastasius the bishop of Constantinople. After being condemned by Pope Gregory III, the emperor retaliated by confiscating the pope’s estates in Calabria and Sicily and by detaching southern Italy, Sicily and Illyricum from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Rome and instead placing them under the jurisdiction of Constantinople.

The emperor did not have any right to do this, especially given the fact that both he and the bishop of Constantinople were promoting the heresy of Iconoclasm and had been excommunicated. However, because the Byzantine emperor ruled those territories, he could also exert power and influence over the churches, whether the pope liked it or not. And thus Constantinople came into ecclesiastical possession of the churches in southern Italy (more specifically, the churches in those territories which were under Byzantine imperial rule).

Up until that time, all of southern Italy was part of the Latin Church under the direct jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome. We know from the reforms and interventions of Pope Gregory I (and even earlier than this) that all of Italy was subject to the Latin Church since the earliest centuries of Christianity:

“At the time of St. Gregory the Great Church of Brutium was made up of 14 dioceses: Reggio, Locri, Squillace, Tauriano, Tempsa, Vibona, Miria, Torri or Thurii, Crotone, Cosenza, Tropea, Blanda, Nicotera and perhaps also Cirella. ... All the dioceses of Bruttium (Calabria) were of Latin language and Roman rite, and all depended directly on the Bishop of Rome: Gregory often intervened in the affairs of the local churches of Bruttium either directly or through his representative: the regional deacon Savinus or Sabinus, Rector of the Patrimony of the Roman Church.” (Source: Francesco Russo, Storia della Chiesa in Calabria. Dalle origini al Concilio di Trento, 1982, p. 128)

This is further proven by the decree of Pope Gelasius addressed to “all the bishops in Lucania, Bruttium and Sicily” (494 AD). It was the Iconoclast Emperor Leo III who in 732-733 AD illegally seized these territories from the bishop of Rome and delivered them to the bishop of Constantinople.

In the next decades the Iconoclast Controversy was eventually resolved; Rome and Constantinople were later reconciled under a different emperor and a different bishop of Constantinople — ones who opposed the Iconoclasm of their predecessors. However, even after Constantinople abandoned Iconoclasm, the territories which had been taken from Rome were never returned by the bishop of Constantinople. The bishop of Rome protested against this, arguing that the emperor did not have any right to transfer ecclesiastical jurisdiction from one see to another and that, therefore, the previous Iconoclast bishop of Constantinople had illegally usurped jurisdiction over churches rightfully belonging to Rome.

Despite this protest and despite the official reconciliation between the Latin and Greek churches, the bishops of Constantinople never relinquished the territories which they had illicitly obtained from the Iconoclast emperor Leo III, and this fact became a point of contention between Rome and Constantinople. And so, in this way, some regions in southern Italy illegally fell under the jurisdiction of Constantinople.

The entire situation was, once again, a result of the Byzantines conflating the temporal and religious spheres; of the Emperor and his loyal patriarch trying to control and intertwine both secular politics and ecclesiastical policy; of using the church of Constantinople and interfering in ecclesiastical matters in order to advance the imperial power of the Byzantine emperor; of bending the church’s doctrine and policy to the imperial will. This was the maximum demonstration of Caesaropapism in action.

Initially the “transfer of jurisdiction” to Constantinople did not have any practical effect, as the Italian population continued to use the Latin rite in their churches. In the subsequent centuries, however, the Byzantines conducted a policy of forced Greekification and de-Latinization in southern Italy; Greek rites were forcibly imposed upon the Latin population; Greek bishops were installed in Latin dioceses. Aside from the aforementioned Leo III the Isaurian, the main protagonist of the Byzantinization of southern Italy was Emperor Nicephorus II (the same emperor whose ambassadors had described the people of Rome as “nothing but vile minions...bastards, plebeians, slaves”). In the year 968 AD he ordered the suppression of Latin churches and demanded that all the dioceses in Calabria and Puglia adopt the Greek rite; the Latin rite was officially prohibited.

This took place in the context of a dispute between the Byzantine Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, which led to the Byzantines being nearly completely driven out of Italy. In response, wishing to consolidate Byzantine hegemony and fearing the influence of the Latin West over the southern Italian population, Emperor Nicephorus II ordered the forced de-latinization of the Italian churches in Byzantine territory. Some cities in southern Italy, such as Taranto, continued to resist these orders until the arrival of the Normans. Taranto was a major city which never celebrated the Greek rite and proudly continued to defiantly celebrate Latin rites. Bari was another major city which opposed the imposition of the Greek rite. The city of Trani only managed to retain its Latin rite thanks to the local bishop Rodostamo (also called Rodostamus), who betrayed the Holy Roman Emperor and surrendered the city to the Byzantines in 983 AD; in exchange Trani was permitted to preserve the Latin rite:

“Emperor Nicephorus Phocas and the Patriarch Polyeuctos made it obligatory on the bishops, in 968, to adopt the Greek Rite. This order aroused lively opposition in some quarters, as at Bari, under Bishop Giovanni. Nor was it executed in other places immediately and universally. Cassano and Taranto, for instance, are said to have always maintained the Latin Rite. At Trani, in 983, Bishop Rodostamo was allowed to retain the Latin Rite, as a reward...” (Source: Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. VIII, 'Italo-Greeks', 1913, p. 207)

These events in southern Italy are very little-discussed, very little-known and very rarely mentioned even by historians, except by those historians who specialize in the subject of liturgical history in Italy. Instead, we are often treated to a Protestant and pro-Byzantine narrative according to which “Latin crusaders invaded Byzantine territory, persecuted the Greek Orthodox Church and imposed foreign Latin rites”, when that is not really the whole story. Preceding this, the Latin Church had been persecuted by the Byzantine emperors and the Greek rite was in fact imposed upon Italians by the Byzantines in the centuries before the arrival of the Normans.

Here is the major point though: just because the Greek rite was imposed in southern Italy does not mean that the population was “Greek Orthodox”. In the first place, the Catholic Church had always been sub-divided into various different liturgical rites: Roman Rite, Byzantine Rite, Ambrosian Rite, Aquileian Rite, Gallican Rite, Mozarabic Rite, Alexandrian Rite, etc. In the second place, the Eastern Orthodox religion — though it traces its theological origins to the 9th century bishop Photius — did not reach its full doctrinal development until the period following the Great Schism of 1054. Prior to that schism, the Latin Church and Greek Church were still in union with each other, together constituting one Church and one faith under the bishop of Rome. The emperors’ imposition of the Greek rite, therefore, meant the imposition a different liturgical rite, not the imposition of a different religion. Once more, at that time the emperors and bishops of Constantinople still belonged to the same Church in union with the pope. 

One can mark the Great Schism as the more or less ‘official’ beginning of Eastern Orthodox Church, even if it took several years to fully establish and assert itself.

The Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople took place in 1054.

The Norman conquest of Byzantine-controlled Calabria took place between 1050 and 1061.

The Norman conquest of Byzantine-controlled Puglia took place between 1053 and 1071.

Just by consulting the dates, it is clear that “Eastern Orthodoxy” never even had a chance to take root in southern Italy. It was only a handful of Byzantine-appointed bishops and monks living in southern Italy who enthusiastically supported Constantinople after the 1054 schism; the general population had little to do with this. What did take root, instead, was the Greek rite, which had been forcibly imposed on the population in Calabria and Puglia from 968 AD onwards by the Byzantine emperors. The different rite, however, was a rite which was recognized by — and was in communion with — the Catholic Church. And it was this same rite which was gradually substituted by the Latin rite following the Norman conquest (1050-1071 on the mainland; 1061-1091 in Sicily), after which these lands were returned to the direct jurisdiction of Rome.

In summary:

Eastern Orthodox revisionists speak of a “Latinization” of southern Italy and “persecution of the Greek Church” by the Normans. But the actions of the Normans in Italy was in fact a “re-Latinization”.

Up until the 8th century the whole of southern Italy belonged to the Latin Church under the jurisdiction of Rome; in 732-733 AD the Iconoclast Emperor usurped parts of southern Italy and illegally placed them under the jurisdiction of Constantinople; despite this, up until the 10th century the Italian population still adhered to the Latin rite; beginning in 968 AD the Byzantine Emperor began to close Latin churches and forcibly impose the Greek rite; in the 11th century some cities in southern Italy were still resisting the Byzantine attempt to supplant the Latin rite with the Greek rite; between 1050-1091 the Normans conquered southern Italy and began to reintroduce the Latin rite which had been previously prohibited and suppressed by the Byzantines; Rome and Constantinople were still in union prior to the Great Schism of 1054; southern Italy therefore was never “Eastern Orthodox”.

Greek Orthodox revisionists, however, continue to maintain that southern Italy was Eastern Orthodox since the first century AD and did not become Roman Catholic until after the Norman conquest.

Chapter 7 — Celtic Church was Orthodox

Following the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, when King Henry VIII took over the English church and declared it separate from papal authority, thus leading to the formation of the Church of England and Church of Scotland, Protestant controversialists in Britain began to recognize how untenable their religious claims were and sought new ways to justify their separation from Rome. They sought to demonstrate not only the antiquity of their churches, but also that these purported ancient churches were proto-Protestant in doctrine and, more importantly, independent from the bishop of Rome.

Beginning in the 19th century, therefore, Protestant controversialists formulated the idea of an indigenous “Celtic Christianity” and postulated the existence of a supposed “Celtic Church” in Ireland and Britain which in ancient times had been independent and opposed to the “foreign Roman Church” prior to becoming “corrupted by Romish doctrines” in later centuries. The Anglicans and Presbyterians both employed this claim, not only in opposition to the Catholic Church but also against each other. The Scottish Presbyterians sought to depict the early Scottish church as proto-Presbyterian and independent of both Rome and England, so as to justify their independence from the Church of England. Meanwhile, in Ireland, the English rulers utilized this fantasy of an “ancient anti-Roman Celtic Church” in an attempt to uproot the Catholic religion of Ireland and coerce the population into becoming Anglican (an attempt which failed).

Needless to say, this whole idea is completely and demonstrably false; no one spoke of an “independent Celtic Church” prior to the Protestant controversialists; it is an invention of Protestant propaganda, to justify their anti-Romanism and separation from Rome after the 16th century. In reality, there never was a ‘Celtic Church’. The early medieval Christians in Britain and Ireland belonged to Christian communities that followed some distinct practices (meaning they practiced certain disciplines which differed from the typical Roman ones), owing to their relative isolation from mainland Europe at the time caused by the barbarian invasions, but they were indeed in union with the bishop of Rome, differing from the Roman rite only in matters of discipline while adhering to the same Catholic faith as other Western Europeans. This is proven by historical testimonies which I will not enter into now. The point is this: Greek Orthodox immigrants in the English-speaking world have encountered and now adopted these same Protestant claims, but with this caveat: they claim that the imaginary “Celtic Church” was Eastern Orthodox and in union with Constantinople. Protestant revisionists fabricated and popularized the “Independent Celtic Church” myth in order to prove Protestantism, and now Greek immigrants have totally copied their fables, but instead assert that the Irish and British were Eastern Orthodox.

Here is a nice summary by Thomas J. Faulkenbury, who wrote on the subject of ‘Celtic Christianity’:

“One view, which gained substantial scholarly traction in the 19th century, was that there was a “Celtic Church”, a significantly organized Christian body or denomination uniting the Celtic peoples and separating them from the ”Roman” of continental Europe. ... However, modern scholars have identified issues with all of these claims, and find the term “Celtic Christianity” problematic in and of itself. The idea of a “Celtic Church” is roundly rejected by modern scholars due to the lack of substantiating evidence. ... Additionally, the Christians of Ireland and Britain were not “anti-Roman”; the authority of Rome and the papacy were venerated as strongly in Celtic areas as they were in any other region of Europe.”

Similar to all this is a concept known as ‘Western Rite Orthodoxy’, an idea first peddled by ex-Protestants and Orthodox immigrants in the 20th century in order to win over Protestant American converts to Orthodoxy. This revisionist movement is mostly tied to the Russian Orthodox Church and Moscow (especially through the Russian immigrant writer John Meyendorff), but it also has close ecclesiastical ties to the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch (the same which strongly advocates the ‘Orthodox England’ myth). I will refrain from discussing these claims in too much detail. I will limit myself to merely pointing out that what now is called ‘Western Rite Orthodoxy’ never existed before the 20th century.

This comment posted by a user online sums it up well:

“The 'Western Rite' itself was created only in the 20th century specifically to foster a union of Western Christians into Eastern Orthodoxy using a fabricated liturgical form to do so.”

“They mimic traditional Roman Catholic liturgical practices and copy Roman Catholic and usually Anglican texts, sometimes byzantinizing them by adding things like the epiklesis to 'make them Orthodox', an unhistorical bastardization as wrong as Eastern Catholics' self-latinizations (tearing down icon screens and putting up statues to 'make it Catholic'). This dishonest, willy-nilly borrowing from all over history is also characteristic of the undisciplined ways of vagantes. Appropriating things not from one's own church's history and calling them 'Orthodox' is as stupid and arrogant — and perhaps just as born from some kind of inferiority complex? — as the dad in 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' claiming every word in English comes from Greek, or Mr. Chekov on 'Star Trek' claiming Russians invented and discovered everything.”

In short, they appropriate Western Catholic history by calling it ‘Orthodox’ and pretend to be “restoring” liturgical forms which never existed and which never had any connection to the Eastern Orthodox churches.

Chapter 6 — Western Europe was Orthodox

As you may or may or may know, the Eastern Orthodox Church was formed when the Patriarch of Constantinople entered into schism from the Roman Catholic Church in 1054 AD. There were temporary schisms between the Roman and Greek churches prior to this, and multiple short-lived reunions afterward, but 1054 is the officially-accepted date for the permanent schism between Rome and Constantinople.

With the mass immigration of Orthodox peoples — especially Greeks — to countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States in the 20th century, a massive wave of historical revisionism has been unleashed, targeting and attacking Western European history in the Middle Ages. This Eastern Orthodox revisionism first of all touches the religious sphere, though not only: given the very close and inseparable links between religion and society, especially in the Middle Ages, this revisionism naturally touches the secular/political sphere as well, and in very significant ways.

In the first place, the entire history of the Catholic Church in Western Europe has been usurped by Eastern Orthodox revisionists. According to them, everyone who lived before 1054 (i.e. before the Great Schism) was actually Eastern Orthodox: kings, queens, emperors, popes, bishops, saints, monks, missionaries, theologians... All of them were Eastern Orthodox — not Catholic.

One of the most commonly-promoted claims among these Orthodox revisionists is that England was Orthodox prior to the Norman conquest of England (1066 AD), and that it was the Normans who transformed England into a Roman Catholic country.

(Even though it was Pope Gregory, bishop of Rome, who led the Gregorian Mission which already converted the Saxons to Christianity nearly 500 years before the Normans, but anyway...)

One of the main websites promoting this claim is called Orthodox England. The very name of the website illustrates its revisionist nature. It is the official site of an Orthodox parish in the UK, under the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch. However, it also hosts a large quantity of historical revisionist content. One of the primary aims of the website is to convert the English people to Eastern Orthodoxy by convincing them that England was an Orthodox country prior to the Norman conquest, and that therefore England should “return to its Orthodox faith”.

The same or similar content can also be found on Orthodox parish websites in the US. And of course, all of these revisionist writings are also filled with vitriolic anti-Catholic propaganda.

They have even gone so far as to literally copy an entire Roman Catholic book filled with short biographies of hundreds of Catholic saints, but just claim that all those saints were actually Orthodox rather than Catholic. These saints are for the most part men and women whom the Eastern Orthodox Church never venerated, never recognized, and never even heard of; they are found only in Latin sources and historically are venerated only in the Catholic Church. Eastern Orthodox immigrants, however, are appropriating these saints in order to incorporate and assimilate Catholic history into an imaginary Orthodox history, in the hopes of converting Westerners to Orthodoxy.

Another proponent of the “Western Europe used to be Orthodox” theory is the previously-mentioned Orthodox priest John Romanides — the same man who claimed that the ancient Romans were Greek and that Latin is a Greek language. Romanides and his disciples also claim that Robin Hood was an Orthodox hero. They have reached a point, therefore, where they are stealing even legendary figures.

Chapter 5 — Early Church: Greek Power Grabs

Prior to the 4th century AD, the city of Constantinople had no particular relevance, neither politically nor ecclesiastically.

In the early Christian world, the Church was headed by the bishop of Rome, who held supreme jurisdiction over the whole Church; second to him in rank and dignity was the bishop of Alexandria, followed by the bishop of Antioch in third place. This order and rank of the churches and bishops was based on the fact that the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul had established the primary see at Rome; St. Mark had established his see at Alexandria; while Antioch had been the original seat of St. Peter before he moved the seat to Rome.

Now, as mentioned, the concept of ‘New Rome’ is very much intertwined with religion, but more specifically with ambitious Greek clergy who sought to make themselves equal to — and even grander than — the Roman Pontiff. And the justification for the religious doctrine was very much interwoven with politics and secular events.

It began, as mentioned, at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD, when an assembly of Greek bishops decreed that the bishop of Constantinople ought to enjoy privileges second to the bishop of Rome, “because it [Constantinople] is new Rome.” The Greek bishops were appealing to the newfound political importance of Constantinople in order to justify elevating their own ecclesiastical status by making Constantinople second in rank after Rome, thereby usurping the place of Alexandria.

This decree was not recognized nor approved by Rome.

In the following century, at the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD), the Greek clergy again attempted to aggrandize themselves, this time going much farther in their claims by asserting that Constantinople has equal authority together with Rome over the Church. This statement has gone down in history under the name of ‘Canon 28’.

When the papal legates found out about this ‘Canon 28’, they flatly rejected it. However, the Greek judges and clergy ignored the objections. When Pope Leo I learned of this, he too rejected the claim and rebuked the bishop of Constantinople, named Anataloius, referring to him as a “prideful self-seeker”. Anataloius then wrote a letter to the pope, apologizing and distancing himself from ‘Canon 28’, claiming that it was the fault of the ambitious Greek clergy under him and that he intends to submit to Rome’s decisions. In the end, Pope Leo refused to approve ‘Canon 28’.

However, in subsequent centuries — and still today — the Greek Church has insisted that the Bishop of Constantinople is equal to the Bishop of Rome. And the theological justification initially relied entirely on the myth of ‘New Rome’ and on the premise that Constantinople was capital of the Eastern Empire. It was therefore an imperial argument connected to politics.

However, later they also resorted to inventing fake legends in order to provide additional justifications. For example, they later devised the myth that St. Andrew the Apostle founded the church of Constantinople. Therefore — they argue — the bishopric of Constantinople is an ‘apostolic see’, and this thereby entitles Constantinople to the prestige and authority which it claims for itself. This legend dates back to the 8th or 9th century AD, to a forgery attributed to Dorotheus of Tyre. And together with it was even forged a fictional list of bishops spanning three centuries from St. Andrew to the time of Constantine, in order to advance the pretension that the See of Constantinople was equal to that of Rome and even older than that of Rome. This occurred during a period of heightened tension in which the Church of Constantinople was entering a schism from the Church of Rome and needed to provide greater justification for its position.

In reality, there was no bishop of Constantinople prior to the 4th century AD, or at least none who were historically recorded. The earliest attested bishop of Byzantium was Metrophanes, who was bishop from 306-314 AD, and he was subject to the metropolitan bishop of Heraclea in Thrace. The see of Byzantium/Constantinople was not founded by St. Andrew and it held no special place in the early Christian world; it was a lowly and insignificant bishopric which was subject to the jurisdiction of Heraclea. Only the desperate ambition of the Greek clergy in Constantinople to increase their ecclesiastical power from the late 4th century onward inspired the formulation of these legends, forgeries and historical revisionisms.

For hundreds of years the Greeks have lied about this, and continue to lie about it today.

And it gets still worse. Not content with desiring second place after Rome (381 AD), and not content with claiming equal dignity to Rome (451 AD), by the 12th century the Greeks were even claiming ecclesiastical primacy over Rome. This notion can be found in the writings of the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena, who argued that the bishop of Constantinople holds supreme jurisdiction over the whole Christian world, justifying it once again on the premise of ‘New Rome’ and the supposed ‘imperial transfer’ by Constantine, therefore conflating politics with ecclesiology:

“For when the imperial seat was transferred from Rome hither to our native Queen of Cities, and the senate, and the whole administration, there was also transferred the arch-hieratical primacy. And the Emperors from the very beginning have given the supreme right to the episcopacy of Constantinople, and the Council of Chalcedon emphatically raised the Bishop of Constantinople to the highest position, and placed all the dioceses of the inhabited world under his jurisdiction.” (Source: Anna Comnena, The Alexiad, Book I, Ch. XIII)

First they wanted to be second in rank; then they wanted to be equal in rank; then finally they claimed to be supreme over everyone! The Greeks are a covetous, vainglorious, dishonest people and always have been.

And because the Eastern Orthodox religion and ecclesiological claims are so interwoven with secular Byzantine politics and the mythology of ‘New Rome’, this is another major reason why many Greeks today still insist that they are the ‘real Romans’ and continue to usurp the Roman name and legacy. The Byzantine concept of translatio imperii was and still is intertwined with Orthodox religious doctrine, as the patriarch’s claim to primacy derived from a secular-political event — one which never actually took place.

Again, the basis for the Patriarch of Constantinople’s pretensions to ecclesiastical power rests upon the myth that Constantinople had been divinely chosen as the new political capital of the Roman Empire in the 4th century. This is why Orthodox Greek nationalists are usually at the forefront of proclaiming Roman legitimacy for themselves and for the Byzantine Empire: since without this their whole religion falls apart, and so too does their entire medieval identity — the one which they stubbornly maintained for some 1,500 years before rediscovering Hellenism in the 19th century.

Chapter 4 — Byzantine Empire: The Myth of ‘New Rome’

 I made reference to the fact that the medieval Greeks believed themselves to be the “only true Romans” due to their politico-religious ideology according to which Constantinople was the ‘New Rome’ founded by Constantine in opposition to ‘Old Rome’.

This Byzantine doctrine of translatio imperii was itself an exemplary illustration of historical revisionism employed by the Greeks to justify their exclusive claim to the Roman imperial title. The claim relied on the fabricated story that Emperor Constantine had deliberately abandoned his capital in Italy and transferred the whole apparatus of the empire from Rome to Constantinople, bringing with him the entire Senate and administration, and renaming the city ‘New Rome’. None of which was actually true.

Constantine, in fact, never moved the capital to Constantinople; he merely moved the seat of his own court and primary residence there, a move which was ignored by his immediate successors. At most, Constantinople became one of multiple administrative centers (like Milan, Ravenna or Trier), never the sole capital of the Roman Empire and never equal in status to Rome.

Moreover, Constantine never called it ‘New Rome’ (a name later invented by the Greeks); he named it Constantinople, after himself. This myth of ‘New Rome’ derives from the fact that: 1) the 4th century poet Porfyrius rhetorically referred to Constantinople as altera Roma (“a second Rome”), a poetic phrase used also in 357 AD by Themistius; and 2) in 381 AD the Greek clergy assembled at the Council of Constantinople informally — and in an ecclesiastical context — described the city as ‘a new Rome’, in an attempt to equate the Bishop of Constantinople with the Bishop of Rome. However, this was never the name of the city; Constantine never called it by that name; and the city was never given any special status or prerogatives by Constantine.

Also, he did not transfer the Roman Senate (which survived all the calamities and continued to exist at Rome until at least 603 AD); what Constantine did was created a secondary senate at Constantinople, which did not have any more authority nor power than the one in Rome, and which was composed by Roman men from the West who spoke Latin — just as Constantine himself did.

For that matter, what existed at Constantinople was not even a ‘senate’ in the proper sense, as its members only held the rank of clari — not clarissimi as the Roman senators, thus was clearly of inferior status to the Roman Senate, whose rank and authority was superior to that of Constantinople. The clari of Constantinople in reality were city councillors, not senators, and they only had authority over the eastern provinces while the Roman senate held authority over the whole empire. The notoriously unreliable Byzantine chronicler John Malalas wrongly ascribed to Constantine the construction of the Senate House of Constantinople; however there is no mention of a senate house (or any senate at all) by Eusebius, nor by Aurelius Victor, nor does it appear in Zosimus’ list of Constantinian monumental buildings. Moreover the city did not have a praefectus urbanus (urban prefect) before 359 AD — 22 years after Constantine’s death.

In his first panegyric to Constantius, dated 356 AD, Emperor Julian said that Constantinople is “inferior to Rome” and “second to Rome”. He also called Rome the “reigning city” or “city that rules over them all”. There can be no doubt that to Julian’s mind, Rome — and not Constantinople — was the capital of the Roman Empire. Even the pro-Constantinian historian Eusebius, writing after Constantine’s death, still refers to Rome as the Imperial City.

From all this it is evident that neither Constantine nor his immediate successors intended for Constantinople to supplant Rome as the capital of the Empire. The development of Constantinople into a new and rival capital is something which occurred in the decades after Constantine. It was only with Emperor Theodosius I and the subsequent administrative partition of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western halves in 395 AD — which, though theoretically one polity, then functioned de facto as two separate states — that Constantinople assumed definitive rank as capital of the Eastern Roman Empire (not of the Western Roman Empire, nor of the whole Roman Empire).

It must be emphasized again that the first time the term ‘New Rome’ appeared in history was at the aforementioned Council of Constantinople (381 AD). The name of Constantinople was never ‘New Rome’. Constantine did not call it that; the Roman emperors never called it that; no state document ever referred to it by that name. It was a title invented by Greek bishops at an ecclesiastical synod; the expression is not found in any documents or historical texts prior 381 AD. And even there, the bishops did not claim that it was named such by Constantine. It was the 5th century Greek historian Socrates Scholasticus who first asserted that Constantine had issued a law which established the name ‘New Rome’. No such edict has ever been known to exist, however.

Later Byzantine authors such as John Malalas invented even greater legends to justify Constantinople’s claims to primacy. It was Malalas, for example, who first asserted that the mythical Trojan Palladium — the symbol of Rome’s claim to eternal power and preservation — had been transferred from Rome to Constantinople by Emperor Constantine, who had it buried beneath the Constantine’s Column, thus passing the eternal power to ‘New Rome’, i.e. Constantinople. This legend is one of the foundational myths of Byzantine hagiography, later repeated by Procopius and by the Chronicon Paschale. Except there is no evidence that this transfer ever occurred; it is an invention of 6th century Byzantine Christian writers. Excavations in the 1930’s turned up nothing; a previous necropolis was unearthed, but no palladium.

(For those who gave credence to the legends, how much it must fluster them to realize that Rome is still here, while the vaunted ‘New Rome’ — Constantinople — has been Turkish for nearly 600 years.)

The entire narrative of Constantine and ‘New Rome’ is based on medieval Byzantine fabrications, earlier Greek Christian embellishments and Greek clerical power grabs, fashioned in the context of crafting a new politico-religious ideology around Byzantium. Almost every aspect of the conventional story — from the supposed transfer of the senate by Constantine, to the legend of the palladium, to the name ‘New Rome’ itself — is demonstrably untrue and unsupported by contemporary testimonials. Yet these claims are still repeated ad nauseum on Wikipedia and by lazy historians who accept the Byzantine accounts as fact, without any scholarly criticism.

The mythos surrounding Constantinople has been dealt with in a somewhat indirect way by historians like Muriel Moser. But it seems that the only notable English author to recently tackle this myth in a direct and explicit way is Professor John Melville Jones, in his work Constantinople As ‘New Rome’, in which he concludes the following after critically examining the sources:

“In modern works it is often stated that Constantinople was called ‘New Rome’ (or ‘Second Rome’), with the implication that this was an official title. This incorrect statement is particularly common in works written by scholars whose first, and perhaps only, language is English... Some ancient authors (writing long after the foundation of the city) do in fact say or imply that Constantinople was formally named ‘New Rome’ or ‘Second Rome’, but this claim is, as Franz Dölger wrote a long time ago, ‘auf einer Fiktion beruht’ [based on a fiction]. These expressions belong to laudatory rhetoric and elevated historical prose and poetry, and are never found in official documents or on the coinage. Also, who could believe that Constantine I would ever have allowed any name other than his to be the official name of his new city? The present study examines the relevant evidence in order to demonstrate that it is wrong to say that Constantine’s city was ever officially called anything other than ‘Constantinople’.”

“Did Constantine intend from the first that his new foundation should be an eastern capital for the empire, or even that it should replace. Rome? No contemporary evidence bears on this subject, except for one possible reference in a Latin poem, and there is nothing on Constantine's coinage that supports this suggestion. The supposed 'evidence' is provided by much later [Byzantine] written sources.”

“Not surprisingly, Constantinople is not called 'Nova Roma' in western sources, and this phrase appears in Latin literature only in the work of a sixth century African author who was resident in Constantinople.”

“To recapitulate what I have said, and to state my conclusion, there is no evidence from Constantine's own time to show that he decided to call Constantinople 'New Rome'. The phrases 'second Rome' and 'new Rome' appear (with one possible exception) later, mostly in literary texts written by ecclesiastical writers who were writing in Greek and copied one another.”

“The claim that either of these phrases ['second Rome' or 'new Rome'] was an officially given name for Constantinople, and might have been used in this way in official documents or public inscriptions, should be rejected. This false claim is a result of the emphasis placed on the phrase 'New Rome' in the decision of the Oecumenical Council of A.D. 381 that related to the relative status of the major Christian churches, which led to the use of this phrase by later [Greek] writers. ... But this does not mean that an official title of 'New Rome' was ever given to it. This is an expansion of the facts, partly inspired by the desire of the Church of Constantinople to increase its status in relation to the other major Christian churches.” (Source: John Melville Jones, Constantinople as 'New Rome', 2014)

The only reason why Latin Catholics later partially conceded to the Byzantine myth, is because the Byzantine version of events also indirectly supported the bishop of Rome’s own claims to temporal political power outlined in the ‘Donation of Constantine’ (which itself was an 8th century forgery). Thus you had two opposing sides more or less agreeing to the same fiction: on the one side the Byzantine Greeks, who falsely claimed that Constantine abandoned Rome in order to create ‘New Rome’ as the capital of a new Christian Empire; and on the other side the Latin West which, several centuries later, partly embraced the false Greek account because it served to reinforce the equally false papal claim that Emperor Constantine had transferred the empire to the East and relinquished all western lands to the temporal sovereignty of the pope (thereby establishing his function as temporal prince or political ruler, distinct from his spiritual or religious functions).

The whole narrative, however, is a revisionist fiction which originated with Greek writers and ambitious Greek clergy in Constantinople. And it completely altered the course not only of real historical events, but continues to influence the way history is written and viewed today: incorrectly.

All of this obfuscates the real point here, though: namely that the Greeks are not Romans, yet for nearly 1000 years they usurped the Roman name and robbed the Roman legacy, and still today there are many Greeks and Eastern Orthodox people who seek to define themselves as the “true heirs” of Rome, while at the same time hating Rome and despising the Latins who made Rome.