The
See of Corinth has a long history, and is held to have been founded by the
Apostle Paul. In the
Roman and early
Byzantine periods, Corinth was the capital and metropolitan see of the province of
Achaea (southern
Greece). From the early 9th century, however, the primacy of Corinth over the Peloponnese was challenged by the
See of Patras, and from the 10th century on the jurisdiction of the See of Corinth was restricted to the eastern Peloponnese and certain of the
Ionian Islands. Sgouros' ambitions to create a state of his own were checked by the onslaught of the victorious Crusaders, who captured Corinth in 1210 after a long siege. The Crusaders established a Roman Catholic ("Latin") Archbishopric to replace the Greek Orthodox see, covering the same territory: the seven
suffragan sees of
Cephalonia,
Zakynthos,
Damala,
Lacedaemon/
Monemvasia,
Argos,
Helos and
Zemena. In reality, Monemvasia and Helos were not to come under Latin control until thirty years later, and the Latin clergy had difficulty imposing itself on the rural Greek population and priesthood. As a result, the sees of Damala, Helos and Zemena seem to have never been occupied, and Zemena and one half of Damala came to form part of the diocese of Corinth itself. Along with its rival, the
Latin Archbishop of Patras, the Archbishop of Corinth ranked as one of the two senior ecclesiastic
barons in the
Principality of Achaea, with eight knight's fiefs attached to him (and four each for the suffragan bishops of Argos and Lacedaemon). Nevertheless, despite its ancestry and prestige, Corinth was rapidly eclipsed by Patras during the period of
Frankish rule.
Le Quien (III, 883) mentions twenty Latin prelates from 1210 to 1700, but
Eubel (I, 218; II, 152) mentions twenty-two archbishops for the period from 1212 to 1476. == Residential archbishops ==