ABSTRACT
When they first encountered a bewildering variety of eastern Christians at Antioch in 1098 the crusader leaders made no distinction between the Orthodox and members of the separated eastern,churches. This view did not last, and by the time they decided to establish a Latin church in Syria they had revised their earlier opinion in conformity with the official teaching of the western church which held that the Orthodox, unlike other eastern Christians, were full members of the Catholic communion. The crusaders therefore regarded the Latin bishops whom they appointed as heirs of the Orthodox prelates whom they had dispossessed. Religious animosity played no part in the crusaders' decision to latinise the Orthodox churches for, like pope Urban, they believed that the Orthodox formed part of the one, holy, Catholic church to which they themselves belonged. What they disputed was Urban's contention that it was proper for an Orthodox bishop to exercise spiritual authority over Latins. Had the crusaders regarded the Orthodox as schismatics they would have adopted a different policy towards them and have treated them in the same way as they did the separated eastern Christians, the Armenians, Jacobites and Maronites, to whom they granted virtual religious autonomy. In Antioch, it is true, it might have proved necessary for political reasons to depose Byzantine Greek bishops, but they could have been replaced by bishops chosen from the native Orthodox community rather than by Latins. This did not happen because the Franks made no distinction between Orthodox and Latins in religious terms. For a variety of reasons, all of them secular, the crusaders considered that bishops should be chosen from their own race. In addition to the factors already discussed was the overriding consideration that the Franks had come to Syria as conquerors. The thought of being spiritually subject to Orthodox bishops drawn from a subject race was as little acceptable to them as the appointment of Indians to Anglican bishoprics would have been to the British rulers in nineteenth-century India.
