Rome and the Maronites in the Renaissance and Reformation

The Formation of Religious Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Sam Kennerley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000455816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Rome and the Maronites in the Renaissance and Reformation provides the first in-depth study of contacts between Rome and the Maronites during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This book begins by showing how the church unions agreed at the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1445) led Catholics to endow an immense amount of trust in the orthodoxy of Christians from the east. Taking the Maronites of Mount Lebanon as its focus, it then analyses how agents in the peripheries of the Catholic world struggled to preserve this trust into the early sixteenth century, when everything changed. On one hand, this study finds that suspicion of Christians in Europe generated by the Reformation soon led Catholics to doubt the past and present fidelity of the Maronites and other Christian peoples of the Middle East and Africa. On the other, it highlights how the expansion of the Ottoman Empire caused many Maronites to seek closer integration into Catholic religious and military goals in the eastern Mediterranean. By drawing on previously unstudied sources to explore both Maronite as well as Roman perspectives, this book integrates eastern Christianity into the history of the Reformation, while re-evaluating the history of contact between Rome and the Christian east in the early modern period. It is essential reading for scholars and students of early modern Europe, as well as those interested in the Reformation, religious history, and the history of Catholic Orientalism.

1 Franciscans, Jacobites, and the development of Maronite historiography

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165392-2

I. A summary history of the Maronites prior to the Council of Ferrara-Florence

A lack of sources and several centuries of polemic have made it impossible to provide a comprehensive account of the early history of the Maronites. The very beginning of this history is especially obscure.¹ However, the Maronites often trace their origins to St Maron, a fourth-century monk whose existence is attested in the works of Theodoret of Cyrus and John Chrysostom.² Maron’s followers are thought to have been based at the monastery of Beth Maron near Apamea, from which they evangelised the population of Lebanon and northern Syria.³ The monks of Beth Maron enjoyed some contact with Rome at this time. An archimandrite named Alexander wrote to Pope Hormisdas in 517, to which this pope responded in 518.⁴ Paul, the superior of Beth Maron, also attended the Council of Constantinople in 536.⁵

The first Maronite patriarch, John Maron, was probably elected towards the end of the seventh century.⁶ But even before that time the Maronites were sufficiently integrated into the wider Christian world to have known and agreed with the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius’s Ecthesis (638), a document that sought to solve contemporary Christological controversies by proposing that Christ had one will. This doctrine of ‘Monothelitism’ was condemned at the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680–681).⁷ However, controversy has raged about whether the Maronites held Monothelitism to be orthodox even after this council.⁸ The best that can be said is that some of those who considered themselves to be Maronites probably accepted Monothelitism long after its condemnation. Tūmā, the Maronite bishop of Kafartāb, for instance, is reported to have written a defence of Monothelitism in 1089.⁹

The history of the Maronites becomes somewhat clearer upon the irruption of Latin Crusaders into Lebanon in 1099. Chroniclers such as Raymond d’Aguilers and Jacques de Vitry record that groups plausibly identifiable as Maronites assisted the Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem during the First Crusade (1096–1099).¹⁰ Attempts to renew or create a union between Rome and the Maronites eventually followed. The Maronites may have offered their submission to the papacy in 1139/40, and again in a famous episode recorded by William of Tyre that has been variously dated to 1180, 1181 or 1182.¹¹ That Rome had accepted the Maronites into communion around this time is suggested by the fact that the first papal privilege to the Maronites was issued in 1184.¹² Ties between Rome and the Maronites strengthened during the following century. In the course of a mission to the Levant, dated alternatively to 1203 and 1205, the papal legate Peter Capuano received another submission of loyalty from the Maronites.¹³ A decade later, Pope Innocent III invited the Maronite Patriarch Jeremias El-Amsciti to attend the Fourth Lateran Council. Jeremias accepted this invitation, and on 3 January 1216 received from Innocent III a bull that confirmed the union between Rome and the Maronites.¹⁴

It is widely agreed that the union between Rome and the Maronites has held unbroken after 1216. But in a theme that will run throughout this and later chapters, it is important to stress that this union was not formed without resistance from some Maronites, nor maintained by the entire Maronite community.¹⁵ In 1137, for example, some Maronites assisted local Muslims in capturing the Crusader Count Pons of Tripoli.¹⁶ The successor to Patriarch Jeremias El-Amsciti, Daniel of Shāmāt (1230–1239), encountered so much opposition to union with Rome among local Maronites that he was forced to move his residence to an area in which his flock was happier with their submission to the papacy.¹⁷ Another patriarch, Lūqa al-Bnahrani, simply refused to accept messengers from the pope.¹⁸

Irrespective of their reception, exchanges between Rome and the Maronites were frequent as long as Latin Crusaders remained in Lebanon. However, the Mamluk expulsion of Crusaders from Lebanon in 1292 brought the Maronites into an Islamic empire once more. There is no sign of direct exchange between Rome and the Maronites for the next century, even though it would appear that the Mamluks were not always concerned by the threat of communication between Catholics and Christians in the Levant. For example, they permitted the Franciscans to re-establish themselves in Beirut in 1345.¹⁹

As we’ll see, the Franciscans of Beirut were essential to the renewal of exchanges between Rome and the Maronites. These exchanges begin with the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1445), the background to which we now turn.

II. The Maronites and the Council of Ferrara-Florence

After the disastrous loss at Manzikert in 1071, and the arrival of the First Crusade in Anatolia in 1096, the Byzantine Empire gradually disintegrated. Its territories were conquered and reconquered by a dizzying succession of Turks, Latins, Slavs, and even rival Byzantine rulers. Constantinople was governed by a Latin dynasty between 1204 and 1261, for example, while Athens served as the capital of a Catalan duchy between 1311 and 1388. However, by the first half of the fifteenth century, the principal threat to the Byzantine Empire were the Ottoman Turks. Their conquests in the Balkans and western Anatolia had surrounded Constantinople, which the Ottomans besieged for seven years in the 1390s, and again in 1422. Such an existential threat turned the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologos (1425–1448) in favour of negotiations for union with Rome, which would have been a precondition to the dispatch of military aid from the Latin west.²⁰

In retrospect, we know now that the assistance that John VIII acquired from the west made little difference. A Latin force led by Cardinal Giulio Cesarini was defeated at Varna on 10 November 1444. Just under a decade later, on 29 May 1453, the Ottomans took Constantinople.²¹ However, these events were not inevitable in 1438, and decision-makers in Rome had good reason to be interested in the Byzantine emperor’s overtures. The crusades are often thought of as a medieval phenomenon, alien to the world of the Renaissance. Yet the notion of a crusade against the Ottomans continued to animate the foreign policy of popes throughout the fifteenth century.²² Besides a desire to keep the Ottomans out of Constantinople, there were also internal reasons for the popes to welcome steps towards a union of churches. The end of the Western Schism in 1417 was followed by the threat of conciliarism, as prelates at the Council of Basel (1431–1449) challenged the authority of Pope Eugenius IV (1431–1447) as head of the Catholic Church. A union between Constantinople and Rome arranged under Roman auspices would have provided a spectacular acknowledgement of papal supremacy, destroying the credibility of the opposition in Basel.²³

The Council of Ferrara-Florence was therefore called with the intention of forging a new era in the history of Christian unity. After decades of wrangling in which cities as distant as Constantinople, Avignon, and Basel were proposed as sites for a council, Byzantine delegates arrived in Italy to conduct negotiations at Ferrara, and later Florence. Union between the Latin and Greek Churches was eventually declared in Florence on 6 July 1439.²⁴ These negotiations with the Greeks were followed by invitations to other Churches to unify themselves with Rome. Union with the Armenians was declared on 22 November 1439, with the Copts on 4 February 1442, and with the Jacobites of Syria on 30 September 1444.²⁵ Of all the eastern Christian groups who visited the Council, only the Ethiopians declined to unify with Rome. Their delegates protested, perhaps disingenuously, that they lacked the authority to make this decision on behalf of their emperor.²⁶

The Maronites were equally entangled in this web of communication. In 1439, their patriarch Johannes al-Ghagi sent to Italy the superior of the Franciscan monastery in Beirut, Giovanni.²⁷ The mission of this Franciscan, however, differed from that commended to the envoys of other eastern Churches. Through his representative, Patriarch Johannes asked not for union to Rome, but rather proclaimed his fidelity to the Holy See, accepted the decisions of the Council of Ferrara-Florence in advance, and requested confirmation of his election as patriarch from the pope. From these promises and demands, we can deduce that Patriarch Johannes believed that his Church was already in union with Rome. As we’ve seen, such a belief was not without foundation. It was apparently common knowledge among the Maronites of the fifteenth century that Patriarch Jeremias El-Amsciti had already unified them to Rome in the reign of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216).²⁸

The Franciscan envoy Giovanni returned to Tripoli in 1439 with gifts for Patriarch Johannes and confirmation of his election. However, Giovanni’s return had the unintended consequence of arousing the suspicion of the Mamluk authorities, who it seems had begun to fear collaboration between local Christians and their co-religionists in the west. Subsequent attacks by the Mamluks forced Patriarch Johannes to retreat to the monastery of Qannubin in Mount Lebanon, which remained the home of later patriarchs throughout the early modern period.²⁹ The papacy certainly intended the Maronites to fulfil the role that the Mamluks had feared that they might play. In a letter of 16 December 1441 that responded to the events of Giovanni’s return, Pope Eugenius IV cast the Maronites as a potential vanguard for the conversion of the Levant, reminding them that “you might preserve not only yourselves in the way of the Lord, but also guide and lead the peoples and nations of neighbouring regions to eternal life, to the benefit of your souls”.³⁰ Such high hopes perhaps explain the papacy’s interest in maintaining close ties with the Maronites. In the same letter that exhorted the Maronites to action, Eugenius sent to them the Franciscans Pietro da Ferrara and Antonio da Troia, in order to instruct the Maronites in the Catholic faith, and to correct any errors into which they may have fallen.³¹ Their mission would appear to have been fruitful, as in 1444 Eugenius wrote again to Patriarch Johannes, noting that Antonio da Troia had informed him of Maronite acceptance of the decrees of the Council of Ferrara-Florence, and had brought to Rome a party of Maronites and Druze.³² A year later, the Maronites of Cyprus joined their fellows on the mainland by declaring union with Rome.³³ The fact that the Maronites of Cyprus declared their union together with the Jacobites of the island, and after the Latin bishop of Rhodes had accused them of holding that Christ had one rather than two wills, has become a prime exhibit in the unresolved controversy about the prevalence of Monothelite beliefs among the Maronites in the fifteenth century that we will discuss in greater detail below.³⁴

The dispatch of this Maronite delegation from Cyprus was apparently independent of the patriarch in Qannubin. Nor was this the only example of Maronite communities beyond Mount Lebanon conducting their own diplomacy with the Holy See. In 1439, the Maronites of Jerusalem sent a representative to the Council of Ferrara-Florence, receiving a letter from Pope Eugenius IV in return.³⁵ Jerusalem was in fact an important point of contact between Europe and the Middle East during the early modern period. This city was home to the Franciscans of the Holy Land, who also maintained smaller communities in other cities of the Levant.³⁶ The Franciscans of the Holy Land served as some of the most influential go-betweens for the Maronites of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, something especially true for the figure to whom we now turn.

III. Franciscans, Jacobites, and the development of Maronite historiography

In late 1442 or early 1443, a Franciscan named Gryphon arrived in Jerusalem. Or that, at least, is the consensus of scholarship about him, which is dependent on a seminal article written over one hundred years ago by Henri Lammens.³⁷ Lammens’s life of Gryphon is made difficult to verify by his erratic citation practice. But from his article and later studies, we can ascertain that Gryphon was Flemish, that he gained a doctorate in theology from the University of Paris, that he joined the Observant Franciscans in Italy, and that he travelled to the Holy Land, where he acquired a solid grasp of Arabic that he used in a lengthy stay among the Maronites of Mount Lebanon.³⁸ We can also be sure that Gryphon represented the Maronites before Pope Paul II (1464–1471), as his mission t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Franciscans, Jacobites, and the development of Maronite historiography
• 2 Centre and periphery: Rome and Mount Lebanon in the reign of Pope Leo X (1513–1521)
• 3 Negotiating a world in motion: Exchanges between Rome and the Maronites from Pope Clement VII (1523–1534) to Pope Marcellus II (1555)
• 4 Collaborations between Maronites, eastern Christians, and Catholic Orientalists in Rome during the cardinalate of Marcello Cervini (1539–1555)
• 5 The Maronites as anti-Ottoman agents: Their correspondence with Emperor Charles V (1519–1556)
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index