ABSTRACT
When news of Saladin's capture of Jerusalem reached Constantinople it must have seemed natural to the Byzantine emperor, Isaac II Ángelus, to ask the sultan to restore an Orthodox patriarch in the holy city1 and to revert to the position which had existed for centuries under Muslim rulers there before the Latin conquest. The Orthodox claimant at this time was living in the imperial capital. He was Dositheus, a man of Venetian parentage, who had been a monk of the monastery of Studius and had foretold Isaac II's accession, thereby becoming a close friend of the emperor's. At about the time of Isaac's coup d'etat the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, Leontius II, had died,2 and Isaac nominated Dositheus to that office. Saladin did not accede to the emperor's request, and Dositheus was therefore still living in Constantinople when the oecumenical patriarchate itself became vacant. Isaac II consulted the most distinguished Byzantine canon lawyer, Theodore Balsamon, about whether it was lawful to translate a patriarch from one see to another: as Theodore was himself titular patriarch of Antioch he not unnaturally supposed that the emperor was considering his own translation to Constantinople, and submitted an affirmative answer supported by an imposing range of canonical authorities. Armed with this authorisation, the emperor translated Dositheus of Jerusalem to the headship of the Byzantine church in 1189, but so great was the indignation among churchmen that Dositheus abdicated after only a few months.3 Isaac was unwilling to accept this decision and caused him to be reinstated later that year. Meanwhile a new patriarch of Jerusalem was elected, Mark II Cataphlorus.4 The problem remained that if Dositheus's elevation to Constantinople was contested, as it was, on the grounds that a patriarch could not be translated, then he, not Mark, was lawful patriarch of Jerusalem still. But Dositheus still enjoyed no support among the Byzantine senior clergy and in
1191 he formally abdicated from the sees both of Constantinople and of Jerusalem.1 This abdication proved to be final, and Mark was left undisputed patriarch of Jerusalem. In 1192 Isaac II sent an embassy to Saladin requesting that the Orthodox might be granted the Holy Sepulchre and the other churches of Jerusalem, which would have led to the restoration of the titular patriarch there. The sultan, however, refused this demand2 and Mark therefore remained in Constantinople.3
