Orientale, nor how the Orientale could be founded in the midst of the "useless massacre" of World War I, 1917. The question to which the creation of the Orientale was meant to be the answer had been long in coming. Known as la question d’Orient, the question was first posed after the Ottoman’s humiliating defeat at the hands of the Russians in 1774 (cf. the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainarji), becoming ever more poignant ever since Napoleon set foot in Egypt in 1798: what was to be done with the millions of Christians under the Ottomans once the Ottoman empire would disappear? The question reached its acme in the Eucharistic Congress of Jerusalem in 1893, when the Eastern Catholic Patriarchs made the grievances of their communities known to the papal legate, Cardinal Benoît Langenieux, who forwarded them to the pope. Leo XIII at once convoked an assembly of Eastern Catholic Patriarchs for the following year (1894), from which emerged the apostolic letter Orientalium dignitas, known as the Magna Charta of the rights of Eastern Catholics. With the collapse of the Russian empire a reality after the February revolution of 1917 and the demise of the Ottoman empire in sight, the pope decided to act. With the motu proprio regarding the Eastern Congregation, Providentis Dei (1.05.1917), the pope created the Oriental Congregation; with the other motu proprio Orientis catholici(15.10.1917), he created the Orientale. The pope reserved to himself the prefecture of the new Congregation, whose head was therefore only a Secretary, although a cardinal (cfr. canon 257 of the Pio-Benedictine Codex Iuris canonici of 1917 specified precisely this). Already three years after founding the Orientale, Benedict XV granted it, through the apostolic constitution, Quod nobis in condendo, the right to confer degrees. From the start the pope insisted on the necessity of a richly supplied Eastern library to second the study and the research of the Orientale population. At the beginning the professors were chosen from various orders and even among lay people. These were a White Father, Antoine Delpuch (1868-1936), who served as pro-president in the first year of the Orientale's functioning (1918-1919); two Benedictines, including Ildefonso Schuster; three Assumptionists, including Martin Jugie (1878-1954), a professor at the Orientale for only the first few years, but who was to write a monumental synthesis of the history of Eastern theology; a Dominican; a Mechitarist; four Jesuits, including Guillaume de Jerphanion (1877-1948), a famous