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Alexios I Komnenos, one of the greatest Byzantine emperors, was forced to carry out military and fiscal reforms. As a result, state taxes were notably raised; the powers of tax officials (praktors) were enhanced; and cases of confiscating Church land and other real estate appeared. These general tendencies during Alexios I’s reign are fully confirmed by the data laid out in several letters that Theophylact, the Archbishop of Ohrid, wrote. We learn from them, among other things, that a paroikos (peasant) named Lazarus launched a dispute before the emperor himself, accusing the archbishop of setting fire to his property and then of expelling him from the village. Theophylact was also accused of generating excessive income and possessing a costly estate, as well as of usurping a village near Ohrid. Over the course of the long-standing legal case, by sending letters to influential state officials, he tried to diminish and rebut the accusations. In his defence, he pointed out that attempts were being made to spread hostility against him both among the residents of Ohrid and across Macedonia. Also, he complained that state taxes were raised enormously. Although at a first glance it appears unusual that an archbishop should become entangled in a serious and prolonged dispute with a paroikos, the situation becomes clearer on learning that Lazarus’s grudge was in fact spurred and fully taken advantage of by the state’s tax officials. Through the case of Lazarus, who was used as their mouthpiece, they, in fact, undermined the ownership and immunity rights and privileges of the Archbishopric. All of that worked in favour of raising the income of the state at the expense of that of the Church. In other words, it appears that through the said dispute some sort of “interventionism” in favour of the state and at the Church’s expense was at work.

Using a considerable variety of sources (chronicles, hagiography, charters, letters) the author of the present article shows a process of formation of the system of the Breton bishoprics during the Carolingian era, when this land was a part of the Frankish empire. There were no regular episcopal sees in Brittany before the 9th century: Dol and Léon were monastery-bishoprics; Tréguier and Aleth, possibly, had the same nature. Bishops appeared there only from time to time. In the middle of the 9th century there were sees in Aleth, Quimper, Léon, and Dol. And they were substituted regularly. Obviously, an attempt to establish episcopal sees in Tréguier and Saint-Brieuc was vain. Along with a territorial expansion of the power of the Breton duke three others bishoprics founded in the Roman and post-Roman times — Nantes, Rennes, and Vannes — became parts of the Breton church. The sought of duke Nominoe for the independence from West-Frankish kingdom led to the «schism» of 849 which actually meant a separation of the most of the Breton bishoprics from the Gallic Church. King Salomon in 860s tried to promote the see of Dol to a metropolitan grade, but with no success due to determined resistance of the pope Nicolas I and the Frankish bishops. But in spite of the absence of archbishopric in Brittany the church of the region from the last third of the ninth century onwards run its quite different from the rest of the Western Сhurch way of life with its own synods and traditions. In this sense the Breton Church resembled other Celtic Churches of the Early Middle Ages.