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By the year 590, then, we see Italy thus divided into seven districts or governments: the Duchy of Istria, the Duchy of Venetia, the Exarchate to which Calabria is attached, the Duchy of Pentapolis, the Duchy of Rome, the Duchy of Naples, Liguria.
The same year an attempt was made to bring the Church of Bulgaria under that of Rome, but, owing to Russian opposition, proved abortive. In 1870, the growing agitation having at last alarmed the Turks, the Bulgarian Exarchate was established.
It had charge of the Upper Adriatic from Ancona to Zara, and of the shore from the Adige to the Arsa. After the Greeks lost Ravenna to the Lombards the station of the fleet was moved to Zara. Shortly before, in 743, the exarchate included the Dalmatian islands, and also the cities of Zara, Traù, Spalato, and Ragusa. The Slavs occupied Dalmatia in 640-642.
Bulgarians, is perhaps the most bitter of all Balkan controversies. I have found it in places transcending far the religious gap between Turk and Christian, and in that particularly stormy North Macedonian corner of the Balkans a Patriarchate man gives first place in his hatred to an Exarchate man and second place to a Turk; and the Exarchate man reciprocates in like manner.
While the Roman Empire of the West subsisted, and even after its fall, so long as the emperor of the East asserted and practically maintained his authority in the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Duchy of Rome, the Popes comported themselves, in civil matters, as subjects of the Roman emperor, and set forth no claim to temporal independence.
So soon as the Franks had gone, the King of the Lombards continued occupying the places in the exarchate and molesting the neighborhood of Rome.
As has been well said, the church of the exarchate was really occupied in creating Bulgarians: it offered to the Slavonic population of Macedonia services and schools conducted in a language which they understood and showed a genuine interest in their education. By 1900 Macedonia had 785 Bulgarian schools, 39,892 pupils, and 1,250 teachers.
If nowhere else in the Cisalpine plain, Latin civilisation and law, then, never failed in Ravenna, and whatever may have happened elsewhere it might seem certain that here in Ravenna and probably throughout the exarchate the curia existed and endured throughout the barbarian confusion. This would explain the early and extraordinary development of communal institutions in Ravenna.
And it is the same with his successor Longinus. All the texts that mention him, including the Liber Pontificalis, call him Praefectus. But the transformation from which the exarchate arose was more obscure and far more slow than any official reform of Justinian's could have been.
Ambrose implies, in the sermon from which extracts were given above, that a persecution, reaching even to the infliction of bodily sufferings, was at this time exercised upon the bishops of the Exarchate. Certainly he himself was all along in imminent peril of his life, or of sudden removal from Milan.
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