Neither the Patriarch nor his followers had to wait long before the scales fell from their eyes. For no sooner had Scholarios, under the direction of the Sultan, been appointed to the See of Constantinople than Mohammed sent for him and handed him the _berat_-diploma[341]--which defined what were his duties and prerogatives as Patriarch under the Moslem Government. But this was not all. For scarcely had he been invested with the signs of his spiritual jurisdiction than the unfortunate Patriarch was given to understand that he was nothing more than a puppet in the hands of his Moslem master who could depose him at will. Each of his successors since that time in the See of Constantinople has been obliged to submit to the same humiliating ceremony of investiture. To their intense chagrin the Patriarchs soon learned furthermore that their appointment had to be followed by a gift to the Sultan of a large sum of money; that their tenure of office would rarely exceed two years;[342] that they could be deposed to make room for others who were forced to pay similar exorbitant sums for their appointment; that they might be deposed and reappointed no fewer than five times and at each appointment to the office from which they had been deposed, they would be obliged to renew the enormous bribe to their arbitrary and rapacious overlord. The result was simony of the worst kind, for, in order to obtain the money required by the Moslem tyrant for their appointment, the subservient Patriarchs resorted to the selling of benefices to priests and bishops and metropolitans. To such an extent had this sacrilegious traffic in the things of God been carried on that simony has long made the Orthodox Church “a reproach and a scoff, an example and an astonishment among the nations that are round about her.” But the troubles and humiliations of the Œcumenical Patriarch--as the Primate of the Byzantine Church is called--did not end with his degrading investiture by the Sultan, or, as was more frequently the case, by his Grand Vizier and by the payment of an enormous bribe for his appointment. Owing to his subjugation to the Sublime Porte, he soon found himself confronted with untold difficulties based on racial jealousies and antagonisms. These were augmented by the subserviency of the Phanar--the Vatican of the Orthodox Church--and the readiness which Phanariote Greeks always exhibited to become the agents of Turkish oppression of their fellow Christians--especially those in the Balkans. It was because the policy of the Phanar was identical with that of the Porte that the enemies of the Sultan were unwilling to acknowledge any kind of dependence on the Byzantine Patriarch. This was strikingly evinced in the war of Greek Independence, as one of the first acts of the Greek Parliament was to declare the Church in Greece to be autocephalous.