Throughout the high middle ages, Christian civilization was notoriously divided. In one
camp was the Catholic west, where the Pope in Rome reigned spiritually supreme, in the
other, the Orthodox East, dominated by the Holy Patriarch of Constantinople. In this
video, we will explain how the Eastern and Western halves of the Christian World drifted
apart from one another, and ultimately, became two of the most bitter rivals of the medieval
world.
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In the year 285AD, the Roman Empire stretched from Northern England to the Upper Nile. The
Imperium was becoming too big to rule, and the Crisis of the Third Century had nearly
seen it buckle under its own weight. As a response, Emperor Diocletian made the fateful
decision to split the Empire into administrative halves. It was a divide made on cultural lines,
for the Western Roman Empire was comprised of a predominantly Latin speaking population,
while in the Eastern Roman Empire, known posthumously as the Byzantine Empire, classical Greek was
the language of prestige. Meanwhile, a young religion born in Judea
was rapidly spreading throughout the Mediterranean. While the early Christian movement endured
wanton oppression at the hands of various Roman emperors, especially Diocletian, their
fortunes changed when Constantine the Great arose as Emperor of both East and West, and
legalized their faith. Christianity quickly supplanted the pagan Gods of old, and became
the dominant religion of the Empire. By the 4th century, the four most important Christian
Churches existed in Antioch, Alexandria, the old capital of the west in Rome, and the shining
new capital of the east - Constantinople. In 476, after decades of decline, the Western
Roman Empire fell not with a bang, but a whimper. Presiding over its corpse was a panoply of
Germanic tribes, long considered by the Romans to be the barbaric bogeymen beyond the borders
of civilization. These tribes settled into their newly conquered lands with relative
ease, adopting the Christian Faith and the Latin language of their subjects.
Meanwhile, the Eastern Roman Empire remained wholly intact, while their capital in Constantinople
[became?] a hub of classical culture and education. Not only did they now consider themselves
to be the sole heirs of the Roman Empire, they saw it as their burden to reunify the
lost territories by retaking the west from “Barbarian hands”. In this, Emperor Justinian
was the most successful, as his conquests saw most of the former western Empire, including
all of Italy, brought under his rule. Byzantine supremacy was not to last, as in
the 7th century, an unexpected threat arose out of the southern deserts. The Arabs of
the Rashidun Caliphate, embodying a new religion - Islam - swallowed up the southern half of
the Mediterranean. This had a polarizing effect upon Christendom, for Antioch and Alexandria
were now in Muslim hands. There were now only two major centers of Christianity, one in
Rome, and one in Constantinople, making it inevitable that the two would eventually feud
over which one was the ultimate ecclesiastical authority in Christendom.
While the Holy Patriarch in Constantinople was a massively influential man, formally
speaking, the Bishop of Rome, known otherwise as the Pope, was the highest power in the
Christian world. Established in the era of Imperial Rome, the Papacy had maintained a
relatively peaceful coexistence with the Christianized Barbarians in its midst after the fall of
the Western Empire. Meanwhile, back in the 6th century, the Germanic
Lombards had swept into Italy and conquered most of the Byzantine holdings in the peninsula.
However, the Eastern Emperors had managed to retain the city of Rome, and through it,
political control over the Papacy. The Byzantines hoped that through the Church in Rome, they
could maintain spiritual and cultural primacy over the Germano-Latin west.
For over two centuries, the Pope, for all his spiritual power, dared not defy the will
of Constantinople. In fact, rarely would one become Pope in the first place without approval
from the Emperor. However, this control would not last, and friction soon developed between
the Empire and the Church. In 726AD, Emperor Leo III forbade the worship of images and
icons of Christ. This movement, known as Iconoclasm, was vehemently opposed by the Pope, and served
as a watershed moment in the Papacy gravitating away from Constantinople.
In the year 751, the Lombards conquered Ravenna, the last Eastern Roman holding in the North
of Italy. The fierce Germanic warriors turned their attention south, and threatened to attack
Rome. By now, the Papacy had become thoroughly disillusioned by the Byzantines, so they turned
away from their Greek benefactors, and looked westward for help. It is here that the Franks
enter the story. As one of the many Germanic tribes that had settled in Roman territory
following the collapse of the West, they had quickly risen to eminence. Under the Kings
of the Merovingian Dynasty, the Franks had come to conquer much of modern-day France
and Germany, during which time they had converted to Latin Christianity.
The current King of the Franks was Pepin the Short, who had deposed the last Merovingian
Monarch to form his own dynasty- the Carolingians. It was to Pepin whom the Pope called for aid
against the invading Lombards. King Pepin was happy to oblige, and with his army drove
back the encroaching enemy. Taking his piety one step further, he declared that the strip
of land from Rome to Ravenna was not to be returned to the Byzantines, but instead gifted
magnanimously to the Papacy, laying the foundation of the Papal states, a sovereign Kingdom ruled
from Rome by the Pope himself. Owing to the Donation of Pepin, the Pope was
now functionally the King of an independent Kingdom in central Italy, albeit under Frankish
purview. This was a seminal moment in the history of Christianity. From here, the Papacy
continued to gravitate towards the Franks for protection, and the Byzantines turned
away from the Pope and towards the Patriarch in Constantinople for religious legitimacy.
The rift between Eastern and Western Christianity was slowly widening.
In the year 797, a fateful figure rose to power in Constantinople. She was Irene, Empress
of the East, and one of the most powerful women in early medieval history. In truth,
she had been in power for 17 years already, ruling as regent for her young son, Emperor
Constantine VI. The relationship between mother and son was anything but harmonious, and the
two were perpetually locked in a bitter struggle for power. In 797, Irene dropped the pretense
of co-rulership, and had her son’s eyes gouged out, deposing him entirely and becoming
sole ruler of Eastern Rome. Irene’s rule was a productive one, and her
most notable act was to end the iconoclasm controversy that had plagued Constantinople
for decades. In theory, this should have pleased the Pope in Rome, but in reality, the reign
of the iron-willed Empress simply provided a catalyst that would further the divide between
the two halves of the Christian world. In the West, the rising star known as Charlemagne
was proving to be a champion of Christianity. The King of the Franks had conquered the Saxons
and the Avars, introducing these pagan peoples to the faith of the Roman Church. While conquering
Italy, Charlemagne had taken territory in the south at the expense of Constantinople,
but had adhered to the will of his father, King Pepin, and respected the sovereignty
of the Pope’s domain. Needless to say, the ambitious warlord was quickly becoming a favorite
of the Papacy. In the winter of 800 AD, Pope Leo III invited
Charlemagne to Rome, and on Christmas Day, crowned him as Augustus - Emperor of Rome.
It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. With support from the Pope, the newly christened
Emperor gained spiritual legitimacy to rule his large, multiethnic domain, while the Pope
gained a powerful protector against any threats to his religious and temporal interests.
There was, however, a small hiccup in this plan. Ever since the fall of the old Western
Empire, the Emperors in Constantinople had been the only sovereigns in Christendom with
the legitimacy to style themselves as Roman Emperors. Their sole ownership of this prestigious
title remained unchallenged by the barbarian Kings of the west for 300 years. Now, however,
there was no Emperor in Constantinople, but an Empress. The Pope argued that, as women
were unfit to rule, the position of “Roman Emperor” was technically vacant, which gave
his champion Charlemagne every right to claim a title that was currently not in use.
Naturally, this development infuriated Empress Irene, but there was not much she could do
to exert her power over the west while struggling to maintain her own Empire’s borders against
the encroachments of Bulgars and raiding Arabs. Allegedly, she tried to enter into a marriage
alliance with Charlemagne to preserve her prestige, but this was foiled by Aetios, her
favored eunuch adviser, who derailed the union in a bid to maintain his power in court.
In 802, Irene was deposed by the nobles of Constantinople, and exiled to Lesbos. She
was replaced by Nikephoros. Naturally, neither the Papacy or the Frankish King relinquished
their claim on the Imperial title following this development, and for the first time since
antiquity, there were two Roman Emperors once more. The Holy Roman Empire, a nation that
would endure for another 1,000 years, existed forevermore an indignation to the Emperors
of Constantinople. In function, Charlemagne’s coronation was the death blow to any hopes
of political unity between the two halves of Christendom.
Although the Eastern and Western Empires were now separated secularly, in theory, the Church
they both adhered to was still one united body, with the Pope in Rome as its ultimate
authority. In practice however, political interference between the Frankish and Greek
Emperors often caused disharmony in religious affairs. In 863, a political rift known as
the Photian Controversy erupted over the right of the Eastern Roman Emperor to depose and
appoint the ecclesiastical Patriarch of Constantinople without the approval of the Pope; after all,
the Pope was the highest Christian authority, and Church positions could not be interfered
with without his input. This event ended in a tenuous compromise, with the Pope recognizing
the Emperor’s chosen Patriarch, and the Emperor paying lip service to the Pope.
Despite this, the illusion of unity continued to weaken, and soon, the last ecclesiastical
tether feebly holding together the Christian world would finally snap. Over the centuries,
eastern and western Church rituals had developed slight deviations from one another. The Latin
rite used unleavened bread to represent the body of Christ, while the Greeks used yeast-risen
bread in their Eucharist. The Latins adopted Filioque [fili o kwee], the theological belief
that God the Son had a role in the procession of God the Holy Spirit, while the Greeks rejected
this interpretation of the trinity, believing the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father
alone. Previously, the two Churches had more or less
tolerated each other’s practices. This changed at the turn of the millennium, when the Normans
ventured down into southern Italy. The Latin speaking Knights conquered the Eastern Roman
holdings in Apulia, and ingratiated themselves with the Pope, who saw in them an opportunity
for political gain. Having formally been Byzantine-run, the Churches in the Normans’ new territory
practiced the Greek rites. In 1053, the Papacy declared that these Churches had to convert
to the Latin rite, or be forced to close. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople
was thoroughly enraged by this, and in retaliation ordered the closure of all Latin Churches
in the Eastern capital. To deal with what was quickly becoming a diplomatic
crisis, the Pope sent Cardinal Humbert [french] of Silva Candida to Constantinople, who, on
July 16th, 1054, laid a letter of excommunication to the Patriarch on the altar of Hagia Sofia,
the greatest Church in eastern Christendom. This was the most extreme insult the Latins
could possibly have delivered. In response, the Patriarch and Emperor Constantine IX excommunicated
Humbert and his legates in turn, and officially divorced themselves from the ecclesiastical
authority of the Pope in Rome. This was the final schism, Eastern and Western Christianity
were officially, and totally severed, while the Latin and Greek worlds had never been
more divided. The chroniclers of the high middle ages described
their religious counterparts with unflattering prose. Eastern authors imagined the hardy
lands of Western Europe producing only the most brutish, backwards and warlike of barbarians.
Western Chroniclers described the wealthy lands of Byzantium as full of hedonistic,
two-timing, no-good schemers, while both sides described the other as schismatic heretics.
With that said, relations between the two peoples after the great Schism were often
cordial as well. At the beginning of the 12th century, the Norman Kingdom of Sicily had
become a unique specimen of a realm where Byzantine Greeks and Northern Latins lived
side by side in relative harmony. It is important to note that the common folk were rarely affected
by the feuding of Popes, Patriarchs and Emperors, and lived peaceful lives unaffected by ecclesiastical
or political conflict. With that said, the turn of the 13th century
would see a deterioration of these public relations. By the late 1100s, there existed
a well-established community of Italian Merchants within the walls of Constantinople, primarily
from the Republics of Genoa, Pisa and Venice. While these Latin traders lived amicably among
the Greeks for a time, relations quickly began to deteriorate. The locals began to resent
the fact that the Italians had a near total monopoly on seabound trade, and were accumulating
vast land estates at the expense of the natives. With their economic livelihood imposed upon,
the Greeks took to dredging up old religious rhetoric, making a row about the Latins’
status as traitors to their church. In 1182, tensions boiled into a riot, and an angry
mob of Constantinople’s population stormed into the city’s Latin quarter, massacring
the Italian population in a racially motivated pogrom. This event led many in Latin Christendom,
who already saw the Eastern Romans as troublesome heretics, to now label them as blatant enemies
of the west. In the year 1204, a Latin Crusade, headed
originally for Egypt, was diverted to Constantinople at the behest of an exiled Byzantine Prince,
who promised them riches in return for their help in reclaiming his rightful throne. The
grim end of this tale is already well known to many, and we have covered it in a previous
video. Suffice to say, when debts were not paid, and diplomacy crumbled, the Latin Crusaders
committed one of the worst human atrocities in medieval history. Remembering the massacre
of their countrymen twenty years earlier, the Crusaders raped, looted and slaughtered
the innocent people of Constantinople for three days, before dividing the Byzantine
Empire among themselves. The Sack of Constantinople was ultimately
the culmination of centuries of deteriorating relations. From that point on, any hope of
reconciliation between the two branches of Christianity was dead in the water. In the
centuries that followed, the two schismatic churches that had dominated medieval politics
turned their attention away from each other. In the east, the Byzantines would later reclaim
their capital, but tired and broken, they were conquered by the rising Ottoman juggernaut,
and the center of the Orthodox church moved North, to Moscow. Turkish domination was a
fate many Eastern Christians accepted duly, for relatively tame Muslim overlordship of
the time was surely better than the atrocities of Latin rule.
In the west, reformations were the order of the day, as the Protestant movement gained
traction, and the Catholic Church found itself rocked to its foundations. In time, western
Europe was too busy tearing itself apart in a revolutionary fervor to concern itself with
the Christians of the East. To this day, the Catholic and Orthodox churches remain separated
from one another, and while modern relations are cordial, it can be safely assumed that
they will forever remain two culturally, linguistically and politically distinct branches of Christianity.
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