ABSTRACT
Before 1095 the permanent Latin presence in the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch was limited to the Benedictine community of St Mary of the Latins in Jerusalem, founded in c. 1070, the nearby convent of St Mary Magdalen, and the adjacent hospital of St John, which were intended to give spiritual direction and pastoral care to pilgrims from the West. They accepted that they were part of a single communion with the Orthodox and therefore did not question, or pose any challenge to the canonical authority of the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem1. They had no need to formulate any independent policy in their relations with the non-Chalcedonian Churches, which, in any case, had few direct dealings with Rome in the eleventh century, except for the Armenian Church which had entered into friendly correspondence with Gregory VII2. Urban II had no wish to change this, and certainly the establishment of a Latin Church in the Levant was no part of his intention when he launched the First Crusade. Indeed, it is arguable that the foundation of independent Frankish states in the Eastern Mediterranean was not part of his plan either. One of his chief aims, revealed in his letter to the people of Flanders, was to aid the Christians of the East who were being attacked by the Turks3. He considered that the legitimate secular authority in the Eastern Mediterranean was the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius I Comnenus, and that the canonical church authorities were the three Orthodox Patriarchs: Nicholas III Grammaticus of Constantinople, John IV, the Oxite, of Antioch, and Symeon II of Jerusalem4.
