ESARCA. — In classical antiquity, the term e. referred to the director of the choir or the president of a college of priests. In the Eastern Empire, the use of the word became predominantly military and served, under Justinian (Noealla 150), to designate more particularly the leader of a military expedition, the dux of the Romans. Once the exarchate of Ravenna was established 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 judicial administration of the exarchate.
In the Eastern ecclesiastical usage of the first centuries, there were
ESAPLE—Ps. 36:25–37:20 (Syriac numbering)—Syro-Hexaplar version with variants, in many verses, from Aquila and Symmachus, from the Quinta (Ps. 36:25), from the Septuagint (Ps. 37:3), and from a Syriac version (Ps. 37:8)—Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Syro-Hexaplar Bible, cod. C 313 int. (8th century), fol. 14.
called exarchs were both the holders of metropolitan sees (canon 6 of the Council of Sardica) and, more frequently, the bishops placed at the head of the major ecclesiastical districts, called dioceses and comprising several provinces, such as the exarch of Asia (Ephesus), that of Pontus (Neocaesarea), and that of Thrace (Heraclea), as well as 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, by then merely honorific, was also conferred by the patriarchs upon the holders of certain more important metropolitan sees. In current general usage, however, it designates the delegates of the patriarch or 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 eponymous patriarchate in 1925; and, from 1870, that of Sofia. There are also exarchs among Catholics of the Byzantine rite, apostolic and patriarchal, who generally govern ecclesiastical districts not erected into dioceses, as well as episcopal exarchs. Not infrequently, especially in the Antiochene patriarchate, the exarch is currently regarded as a merely honorific dignity.
BIBLI.: M. Gedcon, 'Υπέττιον και έξοχος, in Νέος Πρωμίν, 2 (1920), pp. 497–512; A. Cousa, Episteme praelectionum de iure exci. orientali, Rome 1948, pp. 207–209. Acacio Cousa