The Melkite church, one of the historical Middle Eastern Christian churches with roots in the Orthodox tradition, underwent a schism in 1724, as the Melkite Uniate Church, which enjoys communion with the Roman Catholic Church, was extracted from the Orthodox Melkite body (the Eastern Orthodox Church of Antioch). This book provides the first study of this split, its repercussions and its embeddedness in the economic, political and religious contexts of Europe and the Ottoman Empire from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Based on understudied Arabic and French sources, some of which are made available in English for the first time, this pioneering book explains the schism in the context of the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the decay of the Patriarchate of Antioch after a thousand years of Muslim political domination, and reveals how the two resulting churches engaged with broader historical changes.
