The patriarchate of Antioch (mod. Antakya, Turkey) was one of the four ancient patriarchates of the Greek Orthodox (Melkite) Church. After the conquest of Antioch by the First Crusade (1096-1099), the patriarch was exiled to Constantinople and replaced by a Latin in 1100, but the Byzantine emperors maintained a parallel Greek Orthodox patriarchate throughout the period of Frankish rule.
According to a sixth-century episcopal list, this patriarchate comprised 153 bishoprics in the Near East and beyond, although its organization and Christian community came to be greatly reduced in the course of doctrinal disputes and the Muslim invasions. Antioch itself and much of the territory of the patriarchate were overrun by the Arabs in the seventh century. However, with the Byzantine reconquest of Antioch (28 October 969), the patriarchate was reintegrated into the Byzantine Church. In 970 Emperor John I Tzimiskes appointed as patriarch of Antioch his confessor Theodore of Koloneia, who was then ordained by Patriarch Polyeuktos of Constantinople (956-970). The emperor confirmed the traditional privileges of the patriarch of Antioch; restored his territorial jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical provinces of Isauria, Cilicia I, and Cilicia II; and granted him and his successors the monastery of the Theotokos ton Hodegon as a patriarchal residence in Constantinople.
From 970 to 1204 and also during the second half of the thirteenth century, all Greek Orthodox patriarchs of Antioch were usually nominated by the Byzantine emperor. In January 978 Agapios, the bishop of Aleppo, was appointed patriarch by Emperor Basil II. After his forced abdication in September 996, the emperors chose only members of the clergy of the Hagia Sophia or monks from the leading monasteries of Constantinople and western Asia Minor, for example Nikolaos II Stoudites (1025-1030) and Theodosios III Chrysoberges (c. 1057-c. 1060). Their ordination by the patriarch of Constantinople in the capital was interpreted in Antioch as a violation of the autocephaly of the Antiochene church.
In the mid-eleventh century, the patriarch of Antioch had jurisdiction over twenty ecclesiastical provinces from Syria to Central Asia. From literary and sigillographic sources and information in the colophons of many Melkite manuscripts, we can prove the presence of Greek Orthodox metropolitans and bishops in some fifty cities of the Near East. From 960 the six ecclesiastical provinces in Iraq, Persia, and central Asia were supervised by the catholicoi (in the Greek Orthodox patriarchate of Antioch, a catholicos was a primate with jurisdiction over more than two metropolitans in the regions east of the Euphrates) of Eirenupolis (mod. Baghdad, Iraq) and Romagyris (probably mod. Tashkent, Uzbekistan). The catholicosate of Georgia had been autocephalous since 744/745, but the patriarch of Antioch had the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the Georgian church in cases of doctrinal controversy.
In December 1084 Sulaymān ibn Kutlumush, the Saljūq sultan of Rūm, conquered Antioch and ended Byzantine rule over the city. Patriarch Nikephoros Mauros (1079/ 1080-1089), who was in Constantinople at that time, could not go to Antioch, but his successor, John V Oxeites (ca. 1089-1100), went there via Cyprus in autumn 1091. During the siege of Antioch by the army of the First Crusade from October 1097 to June 1098, John V suffered greatly at the hands of the Turks. After the conquest of the city (4 June 1098), he was at first accepted as legal patriarch by the crusaders. However, after Prince Bohemund I of Antioch was captured by Malik Ghazī, the Dānishmendid emir (August 1100), John V was forced by the Franks to withdraw to Constantinople, where he abdicated in October 1100. In Antioch he was replaced by a Latin, Bernard of Valence. This turn of events was not accepted by the Byzantine emperor, Alexios I Komnenos, or the Orthodox Church. In 1106 Alexios appointed a new patriarch, John VI Haploucheir (1106-after 1134). When Bohemund I was forced to make peace with Byzantium in the Treaty of Devol (1108), he was obliged to accept imperial nomination of the patriarch of Antioch, but Tancred, his regent in the principality, refused to fulfill the terms of the treaty.
The appointment of Latin patriarchs in Antioch meant that John VI Haploucheir and his successors Luke (after 1134-1156), Soterichos Panteugenos (1156-1157), and Athanasios I Manasses (1157-1170) had to reside in the Hodegon monastery in Constantinople. Yet they had intensive relations with the churches in the Near East, where most metropolitan sees and bishoprics were located in Islamic territory and thus beyond the control of the Franks and the Latin Church in Outremer. The commemoration of the patriarchs in the colophons of Melkite manuscripts written in the Near East shows that the local Orthodox clergy and monks accepted the patriarchs in exile as their legal heads. In Constantinople, the patriarchs ordained metropolitans and bishops and sent pastoral letters to Antioch and other parts of the patriarchate.
The restoration of a Greek patriarch in Antioch continued to be an important aim of the foreign policy of the Byzantine emperors. As a condition of a treaty between Manuel I Komnenos and Prince Bohemund III, Patriarch Athanasios I Manasses was finally admitted to Antioch in place of the deposed Latin, Aimery of Limoges. He remained in residence until his death as a result of the earthquake of 29 June 1170, when Aimery was restored.
Athanasios and his successors Cyril II (1170-1183) and Theodore IV Balsamon (1183-before 1204), the leading canonist of the Greek Orthodox Church, participated in the Constantinopolitan synods of 1166, 1173, 1186, 1192, and 1195, and in the negotiations for union with the Armenian church. Theodore IV Balsamon probably died before the capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade (April 1204). His successor, Symeon II (c. 1207-c. 1240), a native of Syria, was the first patriarch since 960 who was elected and ordained in Antioch (with the consent of Prince Bohemund IV). In 1212 he emigrated to Armenian Cilicia, and then in 1217/1218 to Nicaea, the residence of Emperor Theodore I Laskaris. In 1233 he was resident in Antioch, where St. Sava of Serbia visited him. In 1234, again in Nicaea, he participated in the negotiations concerning church union with the legates of Pope Gregory IX. His successor David came to Antioch in 1242, and in 1246 Pope Innocent IV tried to win his approval for a union with the Roman church. Patriarch Euthymios I (before 1258-1273) was elected in Constantinople, but visited Antioch in 1260 with the support of the Mongol Il-Khan Hülagü (1256-1265), suzerain of the principality of Antioch and ally of Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos. During the destruction of Antioch by the Mamlūks in May 1268, Euthymios was not in the city.
Over the next hundred years the Greek Orthodox patriarchs of Antioch had no fixed residence, but resided variously in Constantinople, Cilicia, Cyprus, or elsewhere in the Near East. A letter of Patriarch Pachomios I of Antioch (1365-c. 1375) to Patriarch Philotheos I of Constantinople, written in 1365 in Damascus, is signed by the catholicos of Romagyris and the metropolitans and bishops of Pom- peiupolis, Mopsuestia, Edessa, Apameia, Homs, Beirut, Helioupolis (Baalbek), Tripoli, and Bostra. This letter shows that after the destruction of Antioch the center of gravity of the patriarchate had shifted to southern Syria. From that time the Greek Orthodox patriarchs of Antioch resided in Damascus.