Church history

The history of the church has always been of central concern for Galician histori­ans and Antin Petrushevych has written an extensive chronological survey cover­ing the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.^[219] As the farthest western Orthodox Rus’ land, Galicia was in constant contact with Roman Catholic Poland and Hungary and it was inevitably exposed to the efforts of Rome to unite the Christian world.

With the transfer in 1299 of the metropolitan seat of the Rus’ church from Kiev northward to Vladimir-Suzdal and then in 1328 to Moscow, Galician rulers became convinced of the need for their own metropolitan. At the same time, the Byzantine Orthodox patriarch feared the movements toward union with Rome that continued to exist in Galicia. Thus, in 1303 he authorized the creation of a Galician metropolitanate, with its seat in Halych. The Muscovite metropolitans feared this new rival, however, and eventually succeeded in having the Galician metropolitanate abolished in 1347. The complex negotiations of secular and religious leaders that led to the creation of the Galician metropolitanate, as well as its short-lived history and the efforts to revive it throughout the rest of the fourteenth century, are treated in detail by I. Tikhomirov and A. Pavlov.^[222]