But he did a great deal more and a worse thing not noted by Theophanes. By an arbitrary act of secular despotism he severed from the jurisdiction of the Roman patriarch not only Calabria and Sicily, but the ten Illyrian provinces, Epirus, Illyricum, Macedonia, Thessaly, Achaia—that is present Greece—Dacia, Mæsia, Dardania, Prævalis, and attached them to the patriarchate of Constantinople. By this act its jurisdiction became co-extensive with the eastern empire, and the patriarch ecumenical in that sense of the Greek word which considered their own empire as pre-eminently the world, the land that is inhabited by men, as contra-distinguished from the land foraged by barbarians. The patriarch to whom this honour accrued was that Anastasius who had been put by force into the place of the deposed Germanus, and was afterwards scourged and deposed by the same force under Leo’s son and successor, Kopronymus. Calabria and Sicily returned to the jurisdiction of the Pope as patriarch when the eastern emperor lost his dominion in them. The other provinces remained under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, the gift of an heretical emperor to a patriarch raised by him as his instrument to the ecumenical throne and at last deposed by his son as an instrument of little value. In this act we see the completion of the aggression begun in the year 381, which attempted to give to the see of Constantinople the second rank in the Church. The sees of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem have sunk under it, but they have fallen into Saracen domination, and are little more than names; the diminished empire has in its capital the only real patriarch, and seeks to indemnify him for eastern losses by severing ten provinces from the patriarchal jurisdiction of Rome, under which they had been from the beginning of the Christian hierarchy. And Nova Roma, halved it is true in its secular extension, and trembling at the perpetual aggression of the Mohammedan chalif, beholds at length its patriarch standing over against the elder Rome as the chief instrument of imperial despotism in spiritual things. Leo III. consciously completes the structure which Theodosius unwittingly began. The exaltation of the see of the capital is from beginning to end the work of imperial power, and this special character bears out to the full the denunciation of it by St. Gregory the Great in his own time, when he called the bishop’s assumed title “a name of blasphemy and diabolical pride, and a forerunner of anti-Christ”.(180)