Cristiani entro e oltre gli Imperi: Saggi su Terre e Chiese d’Oriente by Giorgio Fedalto (review)

Giorgio Fedalto, a priest of the Patriarchate of Venice, was a professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Padova from 1975 to 2003. His scholarly output over the years has been prodigious: since 1963, he has published some 38 books in addition to a much larger number of monographs and reviews. Many of these shorter works appeared in relatively obscure publications that are not widely accessible. The present volume brings together sixty-two of these articles and notes that cover a vast range of topics. It should be noted at the start that the focus of Fedalto’s work is the Byzantine Empire and secondarily in the churches to the east of its borders; there are no articles that treat the East Slavic churches in what is now Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus.

The collected articles have been gathered together in seven sections. The first of these is devoted to “general questions” that include studies on the Eastern churches during the first millennium and doctrinal controversies of the time including Christology and the theology of icons. Another article deals with the importance of constructing a reliable list of bishops of all the dioceses in the East, a topic to which he returns at various places in the book because he believes that such a list is essential for assessing the presence of churches in specific places over the centuries.

The second section is the largest and treats the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the fall of the city to the Turks in 1453 to the present day. Here Fedalto is at his best, supplying detailed studies of the fate of the city in the days following the Turkish breach of the city walls, the repopulation of the city, the effects of the “millet” system imposed by the Ottoman authorities, and a brief but fascinating speculative article about the possible influence on the twenty-year-old Sultan Mehmet II of Mara Branković, his Christian stepmother, which may explain his tolerant policy toward Christians and his intense theological discussions with Gennadios Scholarios, the new Greek patriarch appointed by the sultan only three days after the Conquest. Other articles explore the situation of churches within Constantinople’s orbit under Turkish rule in Serbia, Bulgaria, Dalmatia, and Albania.

Articles devoted to the Latin Church in the East are included in the third section. This is a particularly sensitive area for relations between Catholics and Orthodox, because the memory of the domination of the Latin Church in the East following the Fourth Crusade has poisoned the atmosphere between the churches ever since. Fedalto explores the unfolding of the Crusades from various angles, and also looks closely at the fate of Orthodox clergy in different regions conquered by the Latins who knew very little about the local indigenous churches. The Latin policy varied from a complete replacing of the Orthodox hierarchy with a Latin one in some areas, to keeping the Orthodox bishops in place but under the authority of a Latin metropolitan in others. Ironically, since the non-Chalcedonian churches, unlike the Orthodox, were considered to be heretics, they were mostly left alone.

In the next three sections, Fedalto first explores the relationship between Rome and Alexandria in the pre-Chalcedonian period. He then moves on to Antioch and a rather lengthy study of the list of bishops in different regions of the patriarchate in the first millennium. Here he also includes two studies on the churches to the east of Antioch, in India and in the vast interior of Asia, and two others on the Patriarchate of Jerusalem under the Crusaders.

The seventh and final section of the collection is composed of seven articles on Christian unity, specifically on relations between the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Having studied in such detail the breakdown of relations between the two traditions, Fedalto remains hopeful that the divisions...