Exarch

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This article is about the Byzantine governors and ecclesiastical ranks. For other uses, use Exarch (disambiguation).

In the Byzantine Empire, an exarch was an essentially military viceroy who governed a part of the empire at some remove from the central (oriental) authorities, the Emperor and the Patriarch of Constantinople.

In Eastern Christendom an exarch is a bishop who holds a place between a patriarch and an ordinary metropolitan.

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Byzantine Empire

In the civil administration of the Roman Empire the exarch was the viceroy of a large and important province.

The best-known case is that of the Exarch of Italy, who, after the defeat of the Goths, governed in the name of the Byzantine emperor from Ravenna (552-751) the area of Italy, known as Exarchate of Ravenna, that remained under Byzantine control after the reconquest by Belisarius for Justinian. Ravenna had become the capital of the western Roman Empire in 404 under Honorius. It remained the capital of Italy under the Ostrogoths, and after the reconquest became the seat of the provincial governor (539). Ravenna remained the seat of the Exarch until the revolt of 727 over Iconoclasm. Thereafter, the growing menace of the Lombards and the split between eastern and western Christendom that Iconoclasm caused made the position of the Exarch more and more untenable. The last Exarch was killed by the Lombards in 751.

The Byzantine Exarch of Africa nominally governed Sardinia and Corsica.

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Ecclestiastical Exarchates

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Early tradition

In the ecclesiastical organization of the Empire of the East, the exarch of the political division called a "diocese" was in the 4th and 5th centuries the same as a "primate," a dignity that was intermediate between a patriarch and the metropolitan bishops, the term "patriarch" being formally restricted after 451 CE to the pentarchy: the archbishops of the five most important cities (Pope of Rome, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antiochia, in that order).

The principle became that, since no addition should be made to the fixed number of five patriarchs of he pentarchy, any bishop who was not dependent of any one of these five should be called an exarch. Thus, since the Church of Cyprus was declared autocephalous (at Ephesus in 431), its primate received the title of Exarch of Cyprus.

The short-lived medieval Churches of Ipek (for Servia), Achrida (for Bulgaria) and Tirnova (for Rumania), were governed by exarchs though these prelates occasionally usurped the title of patriarch (Forteseue, Orthodox Eastern Church, 305 sq. 317 sq., 328 sq.). On the same principle the Archbishop of Mount Sinai is an exarchy though in this case as in that of Cyprus modern Orthodox usage generally prefers the (to them) unusual title Archiepiskopos "archbishop". In ecclesiastical language an exarch was at first, a metropolitan whose jurisdiction extended beyond his own (metropolitical) province, over other metropolitans. Thus, as late as the time of the Council of Chalcedon (451), the patriarchs were still called exarchs (can. ix). When the name "patriarch" became the official one for the Bishops of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch (and later of Constantinople and Jerusalem), the other title was left as the proper style of the metropolitans who ruled over the three remaining (political) dioceses of Diocletian's division of the Eastern Prefecture, namely the Exarchs of Asia (at Ephesus), of Cappadocia and Pontus (at Caesarea), and of Thrace (at Heraclea). The advance of Constantinople put an end to these exarchates, which fell back to the state of ordinary metropolitan sees (Fortescue, Orth. Eastern Church, 21-25). But the title of exarch was still occasionally used for any Metropolitan (so at Sardica in 343, can. vi). Since the use of all these titles became gradually fixed with definite technical meanings, that of exarch has almost disappeared in the West, being replaced by the names "Apostolic vicar" and then "primate".

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Modern Orthodox Churches

When the Bulgarians constituted their national Church (1870), not quite daring to call its head a patriarch, they made him an exarch. The Bulgarian exarch, who resided at Constantinople, was the most famous of all persons who bear the title; adherents throughout Macedonia were called exarchists (as opposed to the Greek patriarchists).

Since imperial Russia destroyed the old independent Georgian Church (1802) the Primate of Georgia (always a Russian) sat in the Holy Synod at St. Petersburg with the title of Exarch of Georgia (Fortescue, Orth. Eastern Church, 304-305).

After the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire, which like the Byzantine empire had ruled most of orthodoxy (allowing quite some autonomy under the millet system, cfr. Ethnarch), the pentarchy-number principle gave way to the desire of the now politically independent orthodox nations to see their sovereignty reflected in ecclsiastical autonomy -autocephaly- and the symbolic title to crown it: the 'national' patriarchs, of which there are now about twenty.

In the Orthodox Church, an exarch is still a prelate: an inspector of monasteries, a deputy of the Patriarch or in many cases he rules a foreign Church on behalf of a Patriarchate, e.g. the Serbians, Romanians, Bulgarians, the Jerusalem Patriarchate et. al, all have exarchates in the USA. The style of the exarchs of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem is "Exarch of the Holy Sepulcher".

The closest Roman Catholic analogue of such exarch is a primate.

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Bulgarian Exarchate

On 28 February 1870 the twenty-year old struggle between Greeks and Bulgarians for the control of the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria culminated when the Ottoman Sultan Abd-ul-Aziz created an independent Bulgarian ecclesiastical organisation, known as the Bulgarian Exarchate. The Orthodox Church in Bulgaria had now become independent of the Greek-dominated Patriarchate of Constantinople. For more information see Bulgarian Exarchate and Bulgarian_Orthodox_Church.

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Uses sui generis

  • It was an inaccurate use of this title when Russian Emperor Peter the Great, after abolishing the Patriarchate of Moscow (1702), for twenty years before he founded the Russian Holy Directing Synod, appointed a vice-gerent with the title of exarch as president of a temporary governing commission.
  • Lastly, the third officer of the court of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who examines marriage cases (analogous to the Catholic defensor matrimonii), is called the exarch (ibid., 349).
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Catholic

A few cases in the Latin church, such as that of the Archbishop of Lyons, whom the Emperor Frederick I named Exarch of Burgundy in 1157, are rare exceptions.

However in the Uniate churches, of Eastern tradition but loyal to the Pope of Rome, the title is still commonly used. As in March 2006, they were:

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Apostolic Exarchs

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Patriarchal Exarchs

  • Syrian rite:
    • Bassorah and Kuwait (Iraq viz. Kuwait)
    • Jerusalem (Palestine, Israel and Jordan)
    • Turkey
  • Armenian rite:
    • Damas / Damascus / Damasco / Dimašq / Aš-Šām Syria
    • Jerusalem and Amman / Mont d′Amman (Jordan, Israel, Palestine)
  • Greek-Melkite rite:
    • Iraq
    • Kuwait
  • Maronite rite:
    • Jerusalem and Palestine (Palestine, Israel)
    • Jordan
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Archiepiscopal Exarchs

There are only two, both for the Ukrainian rite in Ukraine:

  • Donets′k – Kharkiv
  • Odessa – Krym
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Sources and references

fr:Exarque it:Esarca nl:Exarchaat fi:Eksarkki sv:Exark uk:Екзарх

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