ABSTRACT
When the Latin clergy established their rule in the church of Jerusalem in 1099 they found there, just as their colleagues did at Antioch, a list of Orthodox sees in the patriarchate, dating, it would seem, from before the Arab conquest. This recorded the four metropolitan sees of Caesarea Marítima, with nineteen suffragans; Scythopolis with eight; Rabba Moabitis with twelve and Bosra with thirty-four, as well as the twenty-five syncelloi, bishops who were immediately subject to the patriarch.1 There is no contemporary list of Orthodox bishoprics in the southern patriarchate at the time of the first crusade, but all available evidence suggests that the reality was very different from the archaic precedents which the list recorded.2 In Jerusalem as at Antioch the Franks had to create a new Latin church to take the place of an Orthodox church which at the time of the conquest was largely a paper construct. But as at Antioch they preserved where possible the Orthodox diocesan divisions, except that they amalgamated some of the smaller sees to form larger bishoprics after the western European pattern.
