EXARCH. - In classical antiquity, "e." meant the director of the chorus or the president of a college of priests. In the Eastern Empire the use of the word became predominantly military and served, under Justinian (Novella 150), to designate more particularly the head of a military expedition, the dux of the Romans. Once the exarchate of Ravenna was instituted in 584 and that of Africa in 591, the e. was the lieutenant of the emperor of Byzantium, head of the entire civil, military and jurisdictional administration of the exarchate.
In the Eastern ecclesiastical usage of the first centuries, there were
called e., both the holders of metropolitan sees (can. 6 of the Council of Sardica), and, more frequently, the bishops placed at the head of the major ecclesiastical circumscriptions, called dioceses and comprising several provinces, such as the e. of Asia (Ephesus), that of Pontus (Neocaesarea) and that of Thrace (Heraclea), and also the patriarchs themselves (can. 2 of the First Council of Constantinople, cann. 9 and 17 of the Council of Chalcedon). From the Middle Ages onward, the title, by then merely honorific, was granted by the patriarchs also to the holders of certain more important metropolitan sees. In general modern usage, however, it designates the delegates of the patriarch or of the bishop for a specific matter or for a permanent mission. The most celebrated exarchates were that of Georgia, established in 1862, that of Bucharest before the erection of the patriarchate of the same name in 1925 and, from 1870, that of Sofia. There also exist among Catholics of the Byzantine rite apostolic and patriarchal exarchs, mostly governing ecclesiastical circumscriptions not erected into dioceses, and also episcopal exarchs. Not infrequently, especially in the Patriarchate of Antioch, the e. is at present considered a merely honorific dignity.
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Acacio Cousa