§ 96. Patriarchal Vicars

Patriarchal Vicars.

Given the vastness of the territory that made up a patriarchate, and since it was difficult for the patriarchs to maintain oversight over certain especially distant parts of the patriarchate, they appointed particular men from among the metropolitans as their vicars, who exercised supreme authority in the name of the patriarch within the territories entrusted to them. These vicars are called, in the canonical sources, patriarchal exarchs (πατριαρχικοὶ ἔξαρχοι).[1] Sometimes such exarchs were appointed only for a fixed period, to visit and inspect, in the name of the patriarch, some metropolitanate, or diocese, or certain monasteries, and their commission ended once they had carried out the errand entrusted to them.[2] Usually, however, the patriarchs appointed as their exarchs those metropolitans whose sees enjoyed some historical privilege, or whose metropolitanates, by virtue of their political position, occupied a special standing relative to the other metropolitanates within the jurisdiction of the patriarch concerned. Thus the metropolitan of the Serbian church in the Austrian lands, after the resettlement—namely, at the beginning of the 17th century—was exarch of the Patriarch of Peć;[3] likewise exarch of that same Patriarch of Peć was the metropolitan of Cetinje in Montenegro,[4] and the Metropolitan of Dabar-Bosnia for the Serbian church in Dalmatia.[5]