Maronite Christianity — the Union Formalized

The Maronites were a Syriac-speaking church of the Lebanese mountains, with a patriarch based in the Qadisha valley and communities on Cyprus as well. The fourteenth century opened badly, with Mamluk campaigns against the Kesrwan around 1305 that displaced Christian populations, and for most of the period the church survived largely by remoteness. Monasteries and rock-cut hermitages tucked into a gorge that armies found expensive to enter. Its relationship with Rome, claimed since the crusader period, was made explicit in this window: at the Council of Florence, in an act of 7 August 1445, the Maronites of Cyprus were formally received into union with the Roman church, and the relationship was affirmed again during the Fifth Lateran Council in 1516. Unlike almost every other Eastern church, the Maronites hold that they were never out of communion with Rome at all — a self-understanding that this era's documents put on paper.