Diocese of Lydda (Lod) is one of the oldest bishoprics of the early Christian Church in the Holy Land. Suppressed under Persian and Arab-Islamic rule, it was revived by the Crusaders and remains a Latin Catholic titular see.
Diocese of Lydda (Lod) is one of the oldest bishoprics of the early Christian Church in the Holy Land. Suppressed under Persian and Arab-Islamic rule, it was revived by the Crusaders and remains a Latin Catholic titular see.
In early Christian times, Lydda was a prosperous Jewish town[ citation needed ] located on the intersection of the North – South and Egypt to Babylon roads.
According to the Bible, Lod was founded by Semed of the Israelite Tribe of Benjamin; Some of its inhabitants were led into Babylonian exile, part of them returned, but by mid second century, the king of Syria gave it to the Maccabees, who kept control until the arrival of Roman conqueror Pompei in Judea. Flavius Josephus confirms Julius Caesar gave it in 48 BC to the Hebrews, but Cassius sold the population in 44 BC, Mark Antony released them two years later. The city saw Roman civil wars and Hebrew revolts in the first century, was officially renamed Diospolis, but remained known as Lod or Lydda.
Christians established themselves there after Saint Peter preached there and cured the paralytic Eneas. A church was built when Saint Peter visited the city between 31–36AD. [1] By 120 AD most of the inhabitants were Christian. The episcopal see was established by the first Byzantine emperor Constantin the Great, as suffragan of the Archdiocese of Caesarea in Palestina, in the sway of the original Patriarchate of Jerusalem. In December 415, the Council of Diospolis was held in the bishopric to try British monk Pelagius; he was acquitted but his heresy Pelagianism condemned. The earliest historically recorded bishop is Aëtius, a friend of Arius.
The city was renamed Georgiopolis after local martyr St George, patron saint of England, who was born Lod and buried on the site of the basilica of Georgius, first mentioned about 530 by pilgrim Theodosius.
It suffered gravely under pagan Persian border incursions and faded at the advent of Arab Muslims.
In 1099, during the triumphant First Crusade (1096–1099), Lydda and Arab neighbour town Ramla were assigned to Robert, a Norman known after his natal diocese Rouen (in Normandy, France, where conquering Vikings were christianized only a few generations). [5] This briefly created the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lydda and Ramla. The crusaders seized Ramla without fight on 3 June 1099, because the Muslim garrison had left the town before their arrival. [6] [5] Located at the crossing of two roads, Ramla was a strategically important fortress. [5] The nearby Lydda was the most important shrine of the warrior saint, Saint George. [5] The crusaders held an assembly and decided to establish a bishopric in the town. [5]
Robert was installed as virtual prince-bishop, wielding temporal feudal power as well as religious jurisdiction, obliged to supply a cavalry contingent to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.
In 1110 civil jurisdiction over Ramla was split off as a separate Lordship of Ramla, vested in Baldwin.
Saint George's church was burned by Muslims in 1099, but rebuild larger, shifted to the northeast, in the 12th century by the Crusaders as Latin cathedral, but again destroyed by Saracens in 1191, in the fight against English crusader king Richard Lionheart, the patron saint of both knighthood and England being of great significance to his troops.
As the Crusader kingdom fell to Saladin, Lydda was truly in partibus infidelium . From the 15th century, it was a Latin titular bishopric both under the names Lydda and Diospolis in Palaestina, with a messy proliferation of titular incumbents the next century with up to eleven titular bishops 'on' the see of Lydda.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem is the Latin Catholic ecclesiastical patriarchate in Jerusalem, officially seated in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was originally established in 1099, with the Kingdom of Jerusalem encompassing the territories in the Holy Land newly conquered by the First Crusade. From 1374 to 1847 it was a titular see, with the patriarchs of Jerusalem being based at the Basilica di San Lorenzo fuori le Mura in Rome. A resident Latin patriarch was re-established in 1847 by Pius IX.
Lod, also known as Lydda, is a city 15 km southeast of Tel Aviv and 40 km (25 mi) northwest of Jerusalem in the Central District of Israel. It is situated between the lower Shephelah on the east and the coastal plain on the west. The city had a population of 82,629 in 2019.
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Jisr Jindas, Arabic for "Jindas Bridge", also known as Baybars Bridge, was built in 1273 CE. It crosses a small wadi, known in Hebrew as the Ayalon River, on the old road leading south to Lod and Ramla. The bridge is named after the village of Jindas, which until 1948 stood east of the bridge and may have been the Crusader-period "casal of Gendas" mentioned in a Latin charter dated 1129 CE. It is the most famous of the several bridges erected by Sultan Baybars in Palestine, which include the Yibna and the Isdud bridges.
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Robert of Rouen was the first bishop of Lydda and Ramla from 1099.
Roger was the second bishop of Lydda and Ramla from at least 1112 until 1147.
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