ESARCA

ESARCH. — In classical antiquity, the term *e.* referred to the director of a choir or the president of a college of priests. In the Eastern Roman Empire, however, the term came to designate, especially under Justinian (Novella 130), the commander of a military expedition, the *dux* of the Romans. With the establishment of the Exarchate of Ravenna in 584 and that of Africa in 591, the *e.* became the lieutenant of the Emperor of Byzantium, exercising supreme authority over the civil, military, and judicial administration of the exarchate.

In the early ecclesiastical usage of the Eastern Church, the term *e.* was applied both to the holders of metropolitan sees (Canon 6 of the Council of Sardica) and, more frequently, to bishops appointed as heads of major ecclesiastical districts called dioceses, comprising several provinces, such as the *e.* of Asia (Ephesus), the *e.* of Pontus (Neocaesarea), and the *e.* of Thrace (Heraclea), as well as to the patriarchs themselves (Canon 2 of the First Council of Constantinople, Canons 9 and 17 of the Council of Chalcedon). From the Middle Ages onward, the title, now purely honorific, was granted by the patriarchs to certain important metropolitan sees. However, in modern general usage, it designates delegates of the patriarch or bishop for a specific task or a permanent mission. The most famous exarchates were that of Georgia, established in 1802, and that of Bucharest before the erection of the patriarchate in 1902.

**Exarch of Italy (of Ravenna).** — After Italy was restored to the Empire following the fall of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, its government was entrusted to the Byzantine general Narses, who had achieved the final victory, with virtually unlimited powers extending even to civil administration. When Narses was dismissed around 568 by Emperor Justin II, no successor with the same powers was appointed, and the Italian peninsula was governed solely by a civil prefect, the *praefectus praetorio Italiae*, seated at Ravenna. The supreme military command over the troops in Italy ceased to exist. Yet it soon became evident that a unified military command was necessary, with authority superior to that of the civil officials, when the rapid Lombard invasion spread to southern Italy, making it clear that a single military direction of operations was essential to mobilize all administrative resources of the peninsula for the needs of the renewed state of war. Therefore, in 584, Emperor Maurice invested a high dignitary of his court with supreme military command in Italy, sending him to Ravenna with the title of exarch.

The exarch (*exarchus*, a Latin transliteration of the Greek ἐξαρχος, "he who is first") also had his permanent seat at Ravenna, in the *palatium* that had successively been the residence of Honorius and the last Western emperors, of Odoacer and Theodoric and his successors. Appointed by imperial authority, he was normally invested with the high dignity of patrician; he exercised military jurisdiction over the Italian peninsula and effective control over civil administration. The exact title of this dignitary was therefore "Exarch of Italy" (*exarchatus Italiae*), not "Exarch of Ravenna" (*exarchatus Ravennae*), as is commonly said. Also unfounded is the generally accepted opinion that the first exarch was named Decius, for in reality the series of exarchs of Italy begins with Smaragdus, while the attribution of this office to a Decius was merely an error. During the 7th century, with the disappearance of the *praefectus praetorio*, the exarch definitively united civil powers in his hands and assumed the role of a true imperial lieutenant in the peninsula; at times, he even had the authority to confirm papal elections. In the first half of the 8th century, the Lombard reconquests under Liutprand reduced the exarch’s authority to a continuous and concrete presence only in those territories of the peninsula still under imperial control that bordered directly on his residence. It was then that the designation "Exarchate of Ravenna" (*exarchatus Ravennae, Ravennae nantium*) first appeared, found for the first time in the biography of Stephen II (752–57) in the *Liber Pontificalis*. This derived from an innovation introduced in official Byzantine terminology but adopted in the circles of the Church of Rome to denote precisely those territories over which the exarch had direct jurisdiction in the last decades—namely, eastern Emilia, between the right bank of the Panaro and the Adriatic, from the Po di Volano–Valdi di Comacchio area to the Pentapolis on the left bank of the Musone. These were the territories that, having largely fallen into Liutprand’s power, were completely conquered in 750–51 by Aistulf, who on 4 July 751 issued a privilege from the *palatium* of Ravenna after having taken the exarch Eutychius prisoner, the last in the series. Most of these territories were transferred to the temporal rule of the Church of Rome as a result of the Carolingian donations beginning with Pepin.

The history of the exarch—no longer of Italy but of Ravenna—from 750–51 onward, no longer Byzantine after 756–57, is a chapter in the history of the temporal dominions of the Church of Rome.

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