The Chronicle of Michael the Syrian (12th century) contains the following information, relating to the year 754: La même année, l’empereur Constant[inus] réunit à Constantinople un synode des évêques chalcédoniens de la province de Rome et de ceux de la Dalmatie, de l’Hellade, de la Cilicie et de la Sicile. Ils s’assemblèrent à propos de l’affaire des images, pour savoir si l’on devait les vénérer ou non. Ils portèrent un décret et une définition (disant) qu’on ne devait absolument pas vénérer les images. Michael’s world chronicle, written in the Syriac language, is the only source on this event which mentions the Dalmatian bishops. Although there is some dispute concerning the exact meaning of the terms ‘adherents of the Chalcedonian dogma’ and ‘Roman ecclesiastical province’, the wording of the sentence he convened (…) a synod of bishops (…) from the Roman ecclesiastical province and those from Dalmatia, Hellas, Cilicia and Sicily seems to unambiguously designate the particularity of the latter provinces in relation to the Byzantine ecclesiastical capital. These provinces are differentially designated in relation to the Patriarchate because they are located beyond the reach of the Byzantine ecclesiastical superior and outside of the real political control of the Byzantine Emperor: Byzantium had only recently deprived the Pope of the jurisdiction over Hellas and Sicily, while Cilicia represented a frontier zone facing the Umayyad Caliphate, outside of the actual imperial authority. One can, therefore, accept the opinion of L. Margetić on the similarity of the position of Dalmatia in the mid-eighth century with that of Cilicia: Byzantine authority is thus only of a periodical nature and of an uneven intensity, and similarly to the other aforementioned provinces, Dalmatia is located outside of the ecclesiastical authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The listed prelates were present at the church synod for two reasons – because it was nominally an ecumenical gathering and because the bishops in question belonged to regions which, at least in that concrete moment (754), found themselves under the more or less direct influence of the Byzantine Emperor, so that the bishops were obliged to participate as his subjects. Nevertheless, the insufficiently meaningful piece of information of the Syrian chronicler regarding the Dalmatian bishops has still not been satisfactorily evaluated in medievalist historiography. In 1878 the formerly unknown list of bishops, the so-called Notitia 3 was discovered; it brought to light the state of the ecclesiastical province of Constantinople before and immediately after the synod in Hieria held in 754. The expansion of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to include other metropolises, as was registered in Notitia 3, proves that, from the standpoint of Illyricum, only the area south of Praevalis belonged to the Patriarchate. The next province whose bishops are listed as the Patriarch’s suffragans was New Epirus; according to the information in the list, this province was comprised of eight bishoprics subject to the metropolitan of Dyrrachium. Therefore, one can conclude that the bishops of Western Illyricum did not figure among the formal dependents of the Patriarch of Constantinople, even if they were present at the church synod in the capacity of imperial subjects. There exists, however, one more possibility – not used in this context until now – in the attempt to identify those ‘Dalmatian’ bishops. Namely, the ‘iconoclastic’ Notitia 3 mentions the island and city of Cephalonia in two places: firstly as the metropolitan bishopric of the province of First Epirus, and then as the ‘province’ of Cephalonia which is headed by the metropolitan of ‘Dalmatia’ (sic). Cephalonia never surpassed the level of an ordinary bishopric; on the other hand, Dalmatia was not a capital but a province, so that it is obviously a case of some sort of an oversight. Recently, V. Prigent attempted to solve this question by hypothesising that the civil administrative network of Byzantium in that period influenced the notion of the importance of islands in the ecclesiastical hierarchy: the compiler of the records would have attached the corresponding level of metropolitan see to the very important capital of a theme, in line with his own estimation of the significance of the place. When it came, however, to the definition of the jurisdictional scope of that non-existent metropolitan see, the writer – finding himself in unexpected trouble – simply attached to the imagined ‘Cephalonian metropolitan’ a part of the bishops of Old Epirus as his alleged suffragans, in an awkward combination with individual bishops of Achaea, i.e. Hellas. The distortion arose from the compiler’s need to find suffragans for the capital of the Cephalonian theme, which was, according to his judgment, a metropolitan see, though he could not have found any list of them (and with good reason because they realistically did not exist). It is indicative for our problem that the unknown compiler listed lands in the nearest zone of the military-administrative influence of the Cephalonian theme – the Ionian Islands, Dalmatia and Epirus. One should add to Prigent’s observations that the adjective ‘Dalmatian’ sometimes appeared in the nomenclature for the province of New Epirus, which could have motivated the writer of Notitia 3, as well as the compiler of the copy which was used by the Syrian chronicler many centuries later, to, perhaps, incorrectly identify the bishops from the area of present day Albania with the Dalmatian bishops. There is no mention of them in the proceedings of the synod.
