Demetrios Chomatenos’s argumentation in his letter to St. Sava of Serbia against the imperial legitimacy of the Nicaean Emperor and the making of the Serbian Church
Demetrios Chomatenos’s argumentation in his letter to St. Sava of Serbia against the imperial legitimacy of the Nicaean Emperor and the making of the Serbian Church

Summary/Abstract: In 1219 the Emperor Theodore I Laskaris received St. Sava of Serbia in Nicaea. Sava was at that time a renowned monk, an archimandrite, who has established his spiritual authority in the Byzantine empire, and on Mount Athos before the fall of Constanitnople in 1204. He traveled to Nicaea to obtain imperial approval for the founding of the autocephalous Serbian church, when he was consecrated first archbishop of Serbia. In May 1220 the Archbishop Demetrios Chomatenos of Ohrid penned a letter addressed to St. Sava in which he informed him that his appointment and ordination were uncanonical and contrary to established tradition, insisting that his church was autocephalous and only competent to resolve such issues. In this paper we analyze Demetrios Chomatenos’s argumentation, and investigate the notions by which he tried to persuade St. Sava to accept his authority, insisting that at that time, no one held full imperial power in the Byzantine world after 1204. We conclude that as a renowned expert in Byzantine canon law, Chomatenos could not totally disregard the truth that in Byzantium only emperors could proclaim and make new church organizations. The Archbishop of Ohrid tried to minimize this truth by implying oikonomia by which he as an autocephalous archbishop received the former imperial right to establish new churches since no one held full imperial power in their time. His attempt to rearrange the ecclesiastical rules and imperial traditions in his own favor and to enlarge his ecclesiastical authority did not end with success. The later course of events in relations between the Empire of Nicaea and the State of Epiros, would indeed prove that St. Sava made a proper judgment appealing to the imperial court in Nicaea and the Patriarch of Constantinople exiled in Nicaea.

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