Sacellarius

Sakellarios is a redirect to this article. For the Austrian ceramist see Karin Jarl-Sakellarios .

A Sacellarius ( Sakellarios , ancient Greek σακελλάριος ) is an official who is entrusted with administrative and financial duties (from sakellē or sakellion , "stock exchange"). The title was used in the Byzantine Empire with different functions and continues to this day in the Orthodox churches .

In the Byzantine Empire, the emperor's sakellion also included tax lists for imperial monasteries and their lands. Therefore, Sakellarios was also an administrative title, which from the 7th century onwards was given to the chief financial officer of the empire (roughly today's finance minister). Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin sacellus , a purse, the modern Greek word sakoula , bag, has the same origin. The Byzantine Empire was the legal successor to the Roman Empire. That is why many Latin terms were incorporated into the Byzantine administrative language in Graecised form.

Because monasteries also have a financial budget, the same term is used in the Greek Orthodox Church. In later centuries the title was replaced by the Greek ( Megas Thesaurophylax ), but it remains unchanged to this day in the administration of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople . In the Council of Florence (1438-9), whose aim was to unite the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, the Patriarch of Constantinople also found his Megas Sakellarios in the suite .

literature

• Sakellarios. In: The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium . Volume 3 (1991), pp. 1828f.