Already by the late thirteenth century, the laudes ceremony had become a weekly feature of civic life on the island, performed each Tuesday in the capital city of Candia in a ritual that symbolized interfaith relations on the island. It was folded into the veneration of icons and encounters with the miraculous, became a site for resolving personal disputes, and was referenced and represented deep within the rugged interior of the island in the decorative programs of rural chapels. Each of these configurations, explored in Chapter 2, reveals a different facet of a political imagination that gave music the power to represent the state in all its members, local and far-flung, visible and invisible, human and divine. Studying the performance of laudes in all its variety gives us glimpses into the chaotic reality out of which Venice’s project of empire was forged in the early years. Both Latin and Greek populations on the island adopted the laudes as a space to negotiate and contest colonial identity. Far from expressing unanimous agreement, the laudes had, by the fourteenth century, become a spectacular arena of dispute on the island.

By the twelfth century, excommunication and interdict were the principal spiritual sanctions of the western Church. Excommunication meant exclusion from the sacraments, notably the Eucharist, and in its harshest form separation from the communion of the faithful. Interdicts, on the other hand, did not cut off members from the body of the Church but did suspend the spiritual benefits of membership, notably participation in most sacraments and other religious rites.

This chapter discusses the evidence for the existence of creeds before Nicaea and the purpose for which they might have been employed. The rival accounts of the origin of the Nicene formula are compared, together with the variants in the wording and the different accounts of its origin. The biblical texts that lie behind each verse of the creed are examined, and Beatrice’s argument for a pagan origin of the term homoousios is weighed against other theories. The anathemas require particular study, since the anathema on the term ktiston (“created”) is not preserved in all sources, but is crucial to the argumentation of Athanasius, who claims that it has the authority of Eusebius. The chapter then asks how the Nicene Creed was regarded after the end of the council, and whether subsequent creedal formulations were meant to reinforce or supersede it, and how it attained the form that is now regularly employed in churches.