Most Orthodox accounts, at least in English, of why the Union of Florence was rejected center on St Mark of Ephesus’ singular stand against the council, and the rallying of the laity of Constantinople against the union. Equally important, however, is the response of Orthodoxy outside the Byzantine Empire and the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Russian rejection of Isidore of Kiev’s unionism is well-known, and the Serbs’ non-participation and the Georgian delegates’ refusal to sign the union are significant events, but the case of the ‘Eastern’ or ‘Melkite’ Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem is of particular interest. Given the significance of these ancient and apostolic sees, a meaningful union could not be achieved without their assent, but the political situation under Mamluk rule prevented the patriarchs from attending the council in person. Moreover, they lacked the political incentives for pursuing union that so animated the Byzantine emperor and their resistance to dogmatic compromise presented a significant challenge to the plan for union.

The Patriarchs’ Representation at Florence

In the fall of 1436, an imperial representative, Paul Macrocheres was dispatched to the Eastern Patriarchs with letters from the Emperor John VIII Palaeologus and Patriarch Joseph II of Constantinople informing them of the planned council and evidently (the letters are not extant) requesting that they delegate representatives to attend in their names. The patriarchs selected two representatives each, chosen from a list of names provided by Macrocheres and under his advice. When the patriarch of Constantinople learned of this, he expressed his consternation that he was not the one to appoint the representatives, but the emperor explained to him the importance of the choice of representatives being at least formally the patriarchs’ responsibility.

Macrocheres returned to Constantinople on March 1, 1437, bearing the patriarchs’ letters appointing their representatives. Although these letters are no longer extant, we have separate eyewitness accounts of them from Sylvester Syropulus (who participated in the council but later opposed the union) and from the papal emissary in Constantinople at the time, the Dominican John of Ragusa. According to Syropulus’ memoirs, the letters state that if the council “is done legally, canonically and according to the traditions of the holy councils and the holy teachers of the Church, and if nothing is added to the faith and no change or innovation is made, then they would embrace it and accept what is done.”[1]

As for John of Ragusa, in his report to the Council of Basel made on January 29, 1438 about his three-year papal mission to Constantinople, he recounts:

When I saw these letters, I judged them to be insufficient and greatly insulting to our Church and to the Apostolic See. They were insufficient because they did not give the representatives full and free authority to take part in the ecumenical council and to accept those things that may be decided in it. Instead, they refer them to the Holy Scriptures, the previous ecumenical councils, and to the traditions of the Apostles and of their own holy Fathers. This is because they pretend that there is no statement to be found about procession in the Holy Scriptures literally attributing it to the Holy Spirit from the Son; nor do they think that it can be found to be clearly and conclusively declared in the previous ecumenical councils that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son. They refer to the declaration of their own holy Fathers in order to exclude Augustine and the other holy Latin Doctors and Fathers, and so that they might cling to the words, but not the manner of thinking, of John of Damascus, who is held to have great authority and sanctity among them. Where they refer their representatives to the aforesaid things according to their intention, it is nothing other than to say that they should remain in the opinion or credulity in which they are. I deemed them insulting because they assert that the Roman Church made an addition in the Creed and thus withdrew from the Church and caused division, while they remain in a sincere and unblemished profession of faith.[2]

Upon reading the letters, John immediately went to the emperor and patriarch of Constantinople to declare that they were unacceptable. At first, the emperor tried to defend the patriarchs, after a fashion, excusing them “on account of their roughness and inexperience in fast-moving matters,” and explaining that “they are very uneducated in those parts, where they are not accustomed to taking this sort of action or for this sort of representative to be appointed.”[3] John insisted that the patriarchs were obliged to come themselves, but if that was impossible, they must send representatives who have been granted full authority to make decisions on their own. He further offered to pay the costs of sending messengers to the patriarchs, but warned that if the representatives were not given full powers, it would be pointless for the emperor to bother coming to Italy at all. After a month of hesitation, the emperor finally sent a messenger bearing a letter that he personally drafted for each of the patriarchs to copy and sign, along with verbal instructions to be conveyed to them.

The content of this letter does not survive and John of Ragusa implies that he was only informed that they were sent after the fact.[4] According to Syropulus, however, the emperor’s instructions were as follows:

The representatives’ letters should be written out in all things identically to the one that we are now sending you, for the sake of the honor both of the council and of the representatives, and they should be signed by you, for order requires that they should be written out this way. Know that we will do nothing other than that which you have written, for we do not desire to change or transgress that which we have received from the holy and ecumenical councils and the holy teachers of the Church, nor to add or subtract anything from that which we hold, believe and profess until now, but rather we will unequivocally abide in them. Do not let any other thought trouble you, but make the letters as we instruct, since you have assurance that we will do nothing contrary to what you desire.[5]

The messenger returned in late September 1437, in time to meet the emperor’s delegation before it left for Italy. At the council itself, the assignments of representatives to specific sees were shuffled arbitrarily by the emperor and patriarch of Constantinople. For example, while St Mark of Ephesus was originally named as Alexandria’s representative, when he arrived in Italy he was (much to his annoyance) assigned to Jerusalem and by the end of the council he was representing Antioch. Nor was there any communication with the Eastern Patriarchs during the council’s proceedings.

There nevertheless exist letters from one of Alexandria’s representatives, Gregory Mammas (later, Patriarch Gregory III of Constantinople) and from Emperor John VIII Palaeologus to Patriarch Philotheus of Alexandria, informing him of the union declared in July 1439.[6] There is also a Latin letter dated September 1, 1440, extant in a contemporary manuscript, purporting to be from the patriarch of Alexandria to Pope Eugenius in which he declares his acceptance of the council in extremely hyperbolic terms, but it seems to be a rather artless forgery.[7] There does not, however, seem to be any evidence about whether or how Antioch and Jerusalem were informed about the union.

Remarkably, despite this lack of communication, the Patriarchate of Antioch was still able to exert some influence on the proceedings of the council. At the point when it became clear that union with Rome would be declared, one of the Georgian delegates presented to the rest of the Byzantine delegation a letter to the Georgians from the patriarch of Antioch, enjoining them not to agree “to adding or subtracting a single jot or tittle” to the Creed.[8] According to Syropulus, this Georgian bishop was so distraught by the compromise to the faith that was about to occur that he distributed his belongings to the poor and wandered about as a mendicant until he was found in Modena, where the metropolitan of Tarnovo, moved by his plight, took him and brought him to Venice. In any case, no Georgians signed the union, evidently due to Antioch’s influence.[9]

The Council of 1443

The most well-known account of an early response by the Eastern Patriarchs to the Union of Florence, however, is the acts of a council held in Jerusalem in April 1443. The reason for this council was the arrival of the metropolitan of Caesarea in Cappadocia, Arsenius, in Jerusalem on pilgrimage. He complained about the Unionist inclination and uncanonical actions of Patriarch Metrophanes II of Constantinople, and so a council was called with the participation of Patriarch Joachim of Jerusalem, Philotheus of Alexandria and Dorotheus of Antioch to discuss the matter. The patriarchs declared ordinations of Unionists made by Metrophanes to be null and void pending further investigation, excommunicated those who resisted, and authorized Arsenius to preach Orthodoxy wherever he went without regard for the Latin-minded patriarch and emperor.

While the acts of this council were widely published and assumed to be authentic in the early modern period, its authenticity came to be questioned in Roman Catholic scholarship of the mid-20^th century. The most-cited English-language analysis of the council is that of the Jesuit Joseph Gill, published in his 1964 volume Personalities of the Council of Florence. In it he attempts a comprehensive refutation of the historicity of the council, beginning with a list of features of the council’s acts that appear questionable to him:

1. The Greek style is poor and in places ungrammatical.

2. The tone is one of haughty superiority and condemnatory.

3. The order of the patriarchs is given as Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch.

4. In a genuine title, the Council of Florence would not be called the ‘Eighth synod’, since it is claimed that it was not a synod at all.

5. The council is said to have ‘allowed us to sacrifice in unleavened bread and by that means to commemorate the Pope’, and

6. ‘to have written the addition on to our divine and blameless symbol of the faith’ (these are stated as the reports brought by Arsenius).

7. The Emperor is referred to as ‘Latinophron’.

8. The document suspends all those who have received any Orders ‘not on account of virtue and right doctrine, i.e. from unionists, and

9. excommunicates the disobedient.

10. Arsenius is bidden preach the truth ‘without respect for the face of the Emperor or the Patriarch’.[10]

It is difficult to see why most of the things listed here would be arguments for inauthenticity of the acts of the council, and, as I will discuss below, some of them appear rather to be evidence that it is genuine. The bulk of Gill’s chapter, however, is taken up with two further arguments for the inauthenticity of the council’s acts: the absence of explicit references to them among anti-Unionist Byzantine authors and a purported lack of early manuscript witnesses to the text. According to Gill, “It is to be found in many manuscripts of uncertain date, but, as far as I know, its first dated appearance was in the De Ecclesiae ocddentalis atque orientalis perpetua consensione published by L. Allatius in 1648.”[11] He then concludes by speculating that the text is a 17^th-century forgery.

The most thorough and systematic examination of Gill’s arguments to date is to be found in a 2014 article by the French Byzantinist Marie-Hélène Blanchet.[12] Her assessment of the Jesuit’s work is anything but positive. According to Blanchet, “Gill’s conclusions are immediately refutable on the basis of a cursory examination of the manuscripts.”[13] Indeed, the fact that Gill, who produced the critical edition of the Greek Acts of the Council of Florence, ignored the manuscript basis for the edition of the text that he cites is as inexcusable as it is inexplicable. Their editor, Georg Hofmann, who himself was ambivalent about the authenticity of the acts, makes clear that his edition depends on MS Vatican Ottobonius Greek 418, the relevant folios of which (55r-57r) he dates to the 15^th century, and furthermore in the same paragraph he notes that Allatius’ 1648 edition was made from MS Vatican Barberinianus 493, dated 1549.[14] Blanchet states that “The text has circulated since the second half of the 15^th century and was abundantly copied, since until now I have been able to find seventeen manuscripts containing it.”[15] Further evidence for the very early and widespread circulation of the acts of the council can be found in its Slavonic translation, already published in 1906,[16] the oldest manuscript of which, MS Holy Trinity-Saint Sergius Lavra 177, dates to the late 1460s.[17]

Ignoring the dating of manuscripts is not the only howler in Gill’s analysis. On the very first page of the chapter, the Jesuit states, “Of these documents the late Archbishop of Athens, Ch. Papadopoulos wrote, ‘As is well-known, this synod did actually meet, but the documents about it that are preserved are not genuine.’”[18] He then goes on to qualify his own rejection of the authenticity of the council’s acts as “more or less the judgement also of Ch. Papadoupoulos.”[19] A simple glance at the footnote from the article by Papadopoulos that Gill cites is enough for one to realize that here the archbishop is not discussing the Council of Jerusalem of 1443, but rather the (now generally recognized as spurious) Council of Constantinople of 1450, while earlier in the article Papadopoulos accepts the authenticity of the acts of the Council of 1443 without question.[20] Such shocking inattention to his sources on matters critical to his argument within such a small span of pages is enough to warrant caution when approaching Gill’s scholarship in general.

To return to Blanchet’s article, she explains that an examination of the Greek manuscript tradition reveals two recensions. One is the recension published by Hofmann, which contains a number of derogatory puns, such as Μητροφόνος (“mother-killer”) for Metrophanes and φατριάρχης (“clan-chief”) for ‘patriarch’.[21] The other was already published, evidently unbeknownst to Hofmann, in 1892 by Ilias Sakkelion on the basis of MS Athens, National Library Greek 142, which dates to the end of the 15^th or beginning of the 16^th century.[22] This text also contains several colloquialisms but appears to be, pending a full critical edition of the text, much closer to the uninterpolated original.

Blanchet is generally dismissive of Gill’s list of reasons internal to the text for regarding it as inauthentic and concludes that “None of Gill’s arguments is convincing. If he had limited himself to the text itself, he could have put forward others which, as he thought, are in favor of the interpolation of certain manuscripts.”[23] That is to say, we are in need of a full critical edition of the Greek and Slavonic versions of the acts before drawing any firm conclusions on the basis of idiosyncrasies of style and wording.

With regard to the acts’ description of the Council of Florence as the “eighth council,” a phrase that Blanchet points out was commonly used in the 15^th century,[24] it is worth noting that in early modern Arabic literature Florence is almost invariably referred to as the “eighth council,” even by authors who were hostile to it and to the Latins in general, such as the 16^th century polemicist Anastasius ibn Mujalla.[25] Thus, its use does not necessarily indicate a given author’s attitude towards the council’s validity.

The issue of the silence of Byzantine authors about the council of 1443 is more interesting. While the absence of explicit references to it is undeniable, even Gill notes that a hymn composed by the anti-Unionist John Eugenicus (the brother of St Mark of Ephesus) mentions “the prayer, blessing and pardon of the patriarchs of the east, as from a common synod and canonical decision,” with reference to their rejection of Florence.[26] Blanchet agrees that it is unclear whether this is specifically a reference to the council of 1443 or whether it refers to another, otherwise unknown synodal decision by the patriarchs, but she states that “this note by Eugenikos tends to reference and confirm several elements: the Eastern Patriarchs supported anti-Unionist initiatives; they came together in a synod; they issued one or more canonical decision on this topic.”[27]

As for the silence about the council on the part of other anti-Unionists, Blanchet wonders, “Is it possible that the anti-Unionists of Constantinople deliberately avoided referring to them? The reasons for such a reticence could be multiple: distrust of these patriarchs who had themselves been implicated in the union, but perhaps also a refusal of any interference from these Eastern hierarchs in Constantinopolitan affairs.”[28] This latter possibility seems very likely, as drawing any attention to the three patriarchs’ assertion of their right to interfere in the affairs of the Patriarchate of Constantinople would have opened up a can of worms almost as large as the controversy over Florence itself, creating unnecessary complications for those opposed to union with Rome in Byzantium. Moreover, the general estrangement and infrequent communication between Constantinople and the Eastern Patriarchates during the Mamluk period should not be forgotten. In any case, the fact that the Eastern Patriarchs actively rejected Florence seems to have been common knowledge in Constantinople. As the anti-Unionist report made to the Emperor Constantine IX Palaeologus in November 1452 states, “It is clear what the most holy patriarchs think and write about the union that occurred.”[29]

Blanchet concludes by stating, “In light of the totality of the information examined in this article, it seems that the Eastern patriarchates did take a position against the council, thus opposing the united Church of Constantinople. Nevertheless, this conflict has left so few traces that it is difficult to measure its impact on the weakening of the See of Constantinople following the Union of Florence.”[30]

The Eastern Patriarchates in Their Context

While Blanchet’s observations are sufficient in themselves to falsify Gill’s hypothesis that the council is a 17^th century fabrication, placing the synod within its social and political context sheds further light on its historical reality. For example, Gill’s objection that the quality of the Greek in the acts is poor is consonant with the fact that in the 15^th century, the everyday working language of all three patriarchates was still Arabic, and it is extremely unlikely that the patriarchs themselves (none of whom were native speakers of Greek) and the first copyists of the acts would have had anything resembling the linguistic proficiency of a scribe from Constantinople. The relatively poor Greek, if anything, speaks to its authenticity, since a Greek-speaking forger would have aimed for a higher linguistic register imitating the language of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Likewise, the fact that “the tone is of haughty superiority and condemnatory” in no way seems inconsistent with the circumstances: not only did these patriarchs see themselves as condemning heretics, they likely also felt that their trust had been abused and their instructions to their representatives disregarded in Florence.

There is at least one very significant precedent for the Eastern Patriarchates not recognizing conciliar decisions made through nominal representatives: despite the fact that the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem both strongly opposed iconoclasm under Islam, as evidenced by the writings of John of Damascus in the 8^th century and Theodore Abu Qurrah in the 9^th, well into the 11^th century authors from these patriarchates consistently refer to the “Six Ecumenical Councils,”[31] evidently because the three Eastern Patriarchates were only nominally represented at Nicaea II by expatriate monks without the knowledge of their home patriarchates, and therefore the council was initially seen as a local, Byzantine affair.

With regard to the political context, it is strange to imagine that the patriarchs would have had any particular respect for an emperor they deemed heretical and that they would have hesitated to call the emperor a “Latinophrone” and instruct Arsenius to preach without regard for him or the patriarch of Constantinople. This is not only because they were not politically subject to the Byzantine emperor. There is also a sustained tradition in the Eastern Patriarchates of opposing heretical rulers going back at a minimum to the time of the Monothelete Emperor Heraclius in the 7^th century and continuing with their opposition to Iconoclasm. In the words of the Byzantinist Phil Booth, by the 7^th century the Patriarchate of Jerusalem had achieved “the elucidation of a post-Roman ideology […] that located success not in the maintenance of a Christian Roman empire, but in the continued power and truth of the ‘orthodox’ Church and its rites.”[32] This prioritization of Orthodoxy over political loyalty to Byzantium would be characteristic of Middle Eastern Orthodox Christians throughout history.

Remarkably, there is even evidence of such anti-imperial ideas circulating in Syria specifically in the first decades of the 15^th century. An anonymous apologetic text in Arabic seeks to explain the name “Melkite” (literally, “royalist”) not with reference to the Byzantine emperor, but rather to “God, the King of Heaven” stating that

If the heretics claim that our affiliation is with an [earthly] king of the Christian faith, [how can this be], for this king himself belongs, together with us, to the [Christian] religion and has the same obligations as any other believer, with the only difference that he has been granted royal status! If they say that a certain emperor who (God forbid!) had left the Orthodox teaching invented this [Chalcedonian] doctrine, [this too is wrong], for [had this been the case] the people would no longer follow him.[33]

As it happens, the earliest known copy of this text is found in MS Balamand 124, which was repaired in the year 1427, on the eve of the Council of Florence.

Conclusion

Finally, there is a fundamental matter of context that is frequently overlooked by Byzantinists, who often have the bad habit of imagining the Eastern Patriarchates to be outposts of Byzantium rather than integral parts of the societies in which they actually existed. After all, the three patriarchs were not subjects of Byzantium, but rather of the Mamluk Sultanate, which was hostile both to Byzantium and Western European powers. Likewise, Metropolitan Arsenius of Caesaraea lived under Turkish rule. They would have had little reason to support a council whose only motivation on the Byzantine side was to secure Western military assistance which, even in the best-case scenario would not have been of direct benefit to the Eastern Patriarchs and likely would have placed them in a precarious situation. Rather, they had every incentive to dissociate themselves from such efforts, lest they endanger themselves by appearing disloyal to their rulers, effectively compromising their dogmatic convictions for no tangible gain.

Thus, the modern scholarly consensus regarding the Council of Jerusalem of 1443 is that, contrary to Joseph Gill’s poorly-founded analysis, it did occur and its acts are authentic (albeit in desperate need of a critical edition!), but it nevertheless seems to have had little impact on debates in Constantinople.[34] In addition to the evidence that this brings to light about the attitude in the Eastern Patriarchates toward union with Rome and Byzantine imperial authority in the pre-Ottoman period, it also provides two important lessons for the practice of church history. First and most obviously, church historians must do philological due diligence on the texts they work with, lest they embarrass themselves as Gill did. The more important point, however, is that one cannot conflate the history of Orthodoxy with Byzantine history or the history of Orthodox-Catholic relations with the history of Constantinople’s relationship with the West. Orthodox history is rather more diverse, complicated and interesting than that!

Endnotes

[1] V. Laurent (ed.), Les « Mémoires » du Grand Ecclésiarche de l’Eglise de Constantinople Sylvestre Syropoulos sur le concile de Florence (1438-1439) (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1971), 166 (Greek) and 167 (French).

[2] Eugenio Cecconi, Studi storici sul concilio di Firenze (Florence: Tipografia all’Insegna di S. Antonino, 1869), diii.

[3] Cecconi, div.

[4] Ibid., dv.

[5] Laurent, 166 (Greek) and 167 (French).

[6] Georg Hoffmann (ed.), Orientalium documenta minora vol. 3, fasc. 3 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1953), 39-46.

[7] Ibid., 51-53. On the inauthenticity of this letter, see Nektarios Karsiotes, Ἡ Σύνοδος Φερράρας – Φλωρεντίας ἀπὸ τῆς ὑπογραφῆς τοῦ ὅρου ἑνώσεως ἕως καὶ τῆς καταργήσεως αὐτοῦ. Μελέτη φιλολογικὴ καὶ ἱστορική. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Athens, 2019, 308-319.

[8] Ibid., 462 (Greek) and 463 (French).

[9] On the significant influence of the Patriarchate of Antioch over the Church of Georgia in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, see Carsten-Michael Walbiner, “Die Beziehungen zwischen dem griechisch-orthodoxen Patriarchat

von Antiochia und der Kirche von Georgien vom 14. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert,” Le Muséon 114 (2001), 437-455.

[10] Joseph Gill, Personalities of the Council of Florence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964), 214-215. For an uncritical restatement of Gill’s conclusions in the service of confessional polemic, see Thomas Crean, Vindicating the Filioque: The Church Fathers at the Council of Florence (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2023), 402-403.

[11] Gill, 220.

[12] Marie-Hélène Blanchet, “Le patriarchat de Constantinople et le rejet de l’Union de Florence par les patriarches orientaux en 1443. Réexamen du dossier documentaire,” in Blanchet, Congourdeau, Mureșan (eds.), Le patriarchat oecuménique de Constantinople et Byzance hors frontières (1204-1586). Actes de la table ronde organisée dans le cadre du 22e Congrès International des Études Byzantines, Sofia, 22-27 août 2011 (Paris: Centre d’études byzantines, néo-helléniques et sud-est européennes E.H.E.S.S., 2014), 309-326.

[13] Ibid., 312.

[14] Hoffmann, 68-69.

[15] Blanchet, 312.

[16] A. I. Iatsimirskii, Из исторіи славянской проповѣди в Молдавіи : неизвѣстныя произведенія Григорія Цамблака, подражанія ему и переводы монаха Гавріила (St Petersburg: OLDP, 1906), 77-83.

[17] E. Lomize, “Письменные источники о Флорентийской унии на Московской Руси в середине XV в.,” Россия и христианский Восток 1 (1997), 69-85, here, 80-81. A note in the 17^th century manuscript edited by Yatsmirsky indicates that this translation was made in Moldavia in the very year of the council, 1443, but this requires further investigation.

[18] Gill, 213

[19] Ibid., 214.

[20] Chrysostomos Papadoupoulos, “Ἡ κατάστασις τῆς Ὀρθοδόξου Ἐκκλησίας Ἀντιοχείας κατὰ τὸν ΙΔ’ καὶ ΙΕ’ αἰῶνα,” Ἐπετηρίδες – Εταιρεία Βυζαντινών Σπουδών 13 (1937), 123-142, here 140n2. See also idem, Ἱστορία τῆς Ἐκκλησίας Ἀντιοχείας (Alexandria: NP, 1951), 978-979, where Papadoupoulos reiterates his assessment of the council’s acts as authentic and concludes that “These things attest that the Church of Antioch remained in Orthodoxy.”

[21] Blanchet, 318.

[22] Ioannes Sakkelion, Κατάλογος χειρογράφων της Εθνικής Βιβλιοθήκης της Ελλάδος, αρ. 1857-2500 (Athens: Εκ του Εθνικού Τυπογραφείου και Λιθογραφείου, 1892), 24-28.

[23] Blanchet, 316.

[24] Ibid., 313.

[25] On whom, see Constantin Panchenko, “The Antiochian Greek-Orthodox Patriarchate and Rome in

the late 16th c. A polemic response by Metropolitan Anastasius Ibn Mujalla to the Pope,” in Proceedings of the 4th Symposium ‘The Book. Romania. Europe’, Sinaia, 20–23 September 2011 (Bucharest: Editura Biblioteca Bucureştilor, 2012), vol. 3, 302-315.

[26] Gill, 218-219.

[27] Blanchet, 326.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Louis Petit, X. A. Siderides and Martin Jugie (eds.) Oeuvres completes de Gennade Scholarios, vol. 3 (Paris: Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1950), 192. Cf. Blanchet, 324-325.

[30] Blanchet, 326

[31] For example, this is still how the councils are mentioned in the “abbreviated creed for those Orthodox who have no familiarity with learning” composed in the early 11^th century under Byzantine rule by Abdallah ibn al-Fadl al-Antaki. Arabic text and English translation in Alexandre Roberts, Reason and Revelation in Byzantine Antioch: The Christian Translation Program of Abdallah ibn al-Fadl (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2020), 55-56.

[32] Phil Booth, “Sophronius of Jerusalem and the End of Roman History,” in Philip Wood (ed.),

History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013),  1-27, here, 2.

[33] Translated in Alexander Treiger, “Unpublished Texts from the Arab Orthodox Tradition (1): On the Origin

of the Term ‘Melkite’ and On the Destruction of the Maryamiyya Cathedrale in Damascus,” Chronos 29 (2014) 7-37, here 17.

[34] In addition to Blanchet, see the 2023 presentation by Constantin Panchenko available here; Karsiotes, 296-346; Lomize, 79-82; Aleksandr Zanomonets, “К вопросу об историчности и значении Иерусалимского собора 1443 г.,” Byzantinoslavica 67 (2009), 331-336; idem, “В чем значение Иерусалемского собора 1443 г.?,” Византийский Временник 68 (2009), 165-169; Samuel Noble and Souad Slim, “The Patriarchate of Antioch: The Development of Identity and the Quest for Authentic Autocephaly,” in Edward G. Farrugia and Željko Paša (eds.), Autocephaly. Coming of Age in Communion. Historical, Canonical, Liturgical, and Theological Studies (Rome: Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 2023), vol. 1, 209-229, here 213.