Constantinople, Rome and the Churches of Greece

Description:

The Christian faith arrived in the lands that make up modern Greece when St. Paul came into Macedonia. This book tells what happened next. Six sections divide the work: the Roman period, the Byzantine, the Latin occupation, the Ottoman Turkish, and modern Greece.

The development of the Balkan churches was complicated by a Greek East and a Latin West that both sought to shape them since the eastern part of the Roman Empire was Greek in language and culture, but under the jurisdiction of the Western Roman papacy until the middle of the eighth century. They were then absorbed into the patriarchate of Constantinople. Five hundred years later, an aggressive Latin invasion of the Greek lands created a Crusaders' Greece with its own Latin churches that have continued until the present as a small but significant minority. The Turkish period challenged the churches, yet produced few conversions to Islam, except on Crete. The final section of the book surveys the history of these two churches in an independent Greece through the twentieth century.

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