Eparchy is an anglicized Greek word, authentically latinized as eparchia and loosely translating as 'rule over something', but has the following specific meanings, both in political history and in the hierarchy of eastern churches.

Secular jurisdictions

Imperial administration

Tetrarchy model

Originally eparchy was the Greek term for one of the divisions of the Roman Empire at the third echelon. The Tetrarchy ('rule of four'), an overhaul of the imperial structure by Emperor Diocletian (284-305) and Maximian, divided the empire into four great Pretorian Prefectures, originally sort of a chief of staff to the four co-emperors, but only the prefectures remained after the two junior emperors (each in charge of a quarter of the empire) were soon be taken out of the equation. They were Gaul and Italy in the Western empire, soon again under one Emperor in Rome; furthermore Illyricum, and the so-called Oriens in the Eastern, the later Byzantium.

Each of these was subdivided into (civil) Dioceses, each under a Vicarius, and these again into Eparchies, i.e. Roman provinces (but smaller than before, in many cases resulting from the split of a pre-existing province, and thus more numerous), under governors with different ranks (in many cases praeses provinciae, but also various terms tied into the pre-dominate vocabulary) reflecting the province's intrinsic and/or strategic importance, for which the generic Latin term Rector was used.

Byzantium

In the linguistically often illogical, mixed Greco-Latin jargon of Byzantine administration, eparchy (or its re-latinization eparchia!) is mainly used as the 'literal' Greek version of the Latin praefectura 'prefecture', i.e. the office, term or resort (rather Latin provincia in the widest sense, not necessarily territorial) of any Praefectus,

Modern Greece

The Roman title of Eparch, as governor of a province of Roman Greece, was also used as equivalent to, or represented that of the Roman praefectus. The area of his administration -prefecture- was called an eparchy. The term was revived as one of the administrative sub-provincial units of post-Ottoman independent Greece, the country being divided into nomarchies, subdivided into eparchies, again sub-divided into demarchies.

Russia and USSR

• http://ezh.sedmitza.ru/index.html?sid=66 (Russian)

Church hierarchy

The Christian Church (before the split into Roman Catholic and Byzantine Orthodox) adopted the temporal administrative division since the Tetrarchy in the Dominate, and part of its terminology, as convenient for internal use, but adapted it as follows.

• The Praetorian prefectures of Gaul, Italy (i.e. the whole western empire, largely in economic decline), and Illyricum made up the Roman Patriarchate, under the Pope
• the Prefecture of the East was divided (in the fourth century) between the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch and three deputies styled Exarchs.
• the Diocese of Egypt was the Patriarchate of Alexandria
• the Diocese of the East (not to be confused with the Prefecture of the East) became that of Antioch.
• the Diocese of Asia was under the Exarch of Ephesus
• the Diocese of Pontus under Cappadocia, and Thrace under Heraclea.

Under these patriarchates and exarchates came the eparchies under metropolitans; these had authority over the bishops of various cities. The original ecclesiastical eparchies then were provinces, each under a metropolitan. The First Council of Nicaea in 325 accepts this arrangement and orders that: "the authority [of appointing bishops] shall belong to the metropolitan in each eparchy" (can. iv), i.e. in each such civil eparchy there shall be a metropolitan bishop who has authority over the others. This is the origin of ecclesiastical provinces.

Later in Eastern Christendom, after a process of title-inflation, multiplying the numbers of dioceses, metropolities and (arch)bishops and reducing their territorial size, the use of the word was gradually modified and now it means generally the diocese of a simple bishop.

Thus in Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and Eastern-rite Catholicism, an eparchy is the jurisdiction of a bishop, corresponding to what in the West is called a diocese.

The name Eparchy was, however, not commonly used except in Russia, as the usual term for a diocese. The Russian Church in the early 20th century counts eighty-six eparchies, of which three (Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg) are ruled by bishops who always bear the title "Metropolitan", and fourteen others under archbishops.

Sources and references

• Pauly-Wissowa