Thus far the ‘inner histor/ of the Byzantine rite. Its ‘outer histor/ also underwent profound shifts. At the beginning of the fifth century evidence from Greece, Cappadocia, and Pontos, shows that the Churches in these Greek-speaking Orthodox regions, even if under the political domination of the capital, did not use the Constantinopolitan rite. But by 691-2, the liturgical canons of the Quinisext Council in Trullo show that this rite had already become cohesive and coherent enough to manifest its intolerance for the different practices of the Latins and the Armenians. From this time other churches begin to adopt this rite, and by the end of the first millennium it had taken over the whole patriarchate of Constantinople and spread to the Orthodox monasteries of Antiochia, Palestine, and Sinai (Taft 1988), gradually extending its usages even to the secular churches of the other Orthodox patriarchates from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries (Taft 1992: 56-8).
The earliest extant manuscript of the Jerusalem eucharistic Liturgy of St James, a ninth-century roll (Vat. gr. 2282), already shows unmistakable traces of this Byzantinization. In the first centuries of the second millennium, the liturgical Byzantinization of the Orthodox patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, weakened successively by Monophysitism, the Islamic conquests, and the Crusades, proceeds apace, fostered especially by Theodore Balsamon (c. ii3o/40-d. after 1195). By the end of the thirteenth century the process was more or less complete in Alexandria and Antioch, though the native hagiopolite Liturgy of St James remained in use longer in the patriarchate of Jerusalem, and Greek manuscripts of the non-Byzantine Melkite liturgies continue to be copied to the end of the Byzantium. The history of this development remains to be written (Nasrallah 1987; Taft 1992: 57, 64 n. 31).
World History
