Medieval Studies Research Blog: Meet us at the Crossroads of Everything

If there’s anything I hope to have conveyed via the handful of articles that I’ve written on the subject, it’s that no definitive rupture occurred, or was perceived to have occurred, between the Greek and Latin churches in the year 1054. Indeed, I don’t know of any historian or theologian over the last hundred years or so who’d be willing to defend that year as the date of the Great Schism. So why does it persist in popular historical accounts of the split? In part, I think that there’s no denying the dramatic image of a cardinal of the Roman Church marching into the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia and slapping a bull of excommunication on the altar. In part, the weight of much older, Western historiography gives gravitas to the date. But I think that most of the reason we continue to use 1054 as a point of reference is that we simply haven’t come up with anything better. So, if not then, when?

Of course, assigning a date to the schism demands a more precise definition of what a schism is. Broadly speaking, it might generally be taken to signify a breakdown in liturgical concelebration, particularly of the Eucharist, but even this is subject to a wide variety of interpretations, and therefore, of dates. For Anton Michel, one of the great scholars of 11th-century, Eucharistic unity was symbolized by the inclusion of the pope’s name in the diptychs, a set of tablets in which were inscribed the names of the various patriarchs with whom the Church of Constantinople was in communion [1]. These names would have been read aloud following the Great Entrance during the celebration of the Eucharistic service, serving as a very public statement of intercommunion [2]. But even if we’re to look only at the diptychs of Constantinople (ignoring the other patriarchal sees of the East), we already run into problems of communication breakdowns, occasional lapses into heresy (on both sides: Iconoclasm, Monothelitism, Nestorianism, etc.), and interference from political authorities, none of which can be taken to indicate a break between the churches as a whole. Indeed, the last mention of a Roman pontiff in the diptychs of Constantinople occurred sometime around the year 1009. If the documents of 1054 so clearly indicate the absence of a generally-felt schism, it certainly can’t be dated to before then.

Conversely, it’s become more popular over the last few decades to point to the year 1204 and the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade as the point of definitive rupture. Defenders of this view typically acknowledge that some level of division existed beforehand, but maintain that the final nail in the coffin, as it were, was the considerable (and justified) animosity generated against the Latins by their behavior during the crusade. I think that this appeal to what we assume was popular sentiment still misses the mark: there is good evidence from the time that the churches already considered themselves in a state of schism, and the barbarity of the Latin army might be better explained as result rather than cause.  It was this longstanding “disobedience” on the part of the Greeks that motivated Pope Innocent III eventually to accept the results of the crusade, in hopes of returning Constantinople to obedience to Rome [3]. If we can say, then, that no schism yet existed in 1054, but that it already existed by 1204, that leaves us a 150-year window to search for something that can be defended as a point of definite rupture.

My own preferred date for the Great Schism is the year 1099. Before discussing the events of that year, though, we need to explore a little bit of canonical history, that is, the development of the laws that guided the internal functioning of the church. The canons promulgated by the ecumenical and regional councils during the first few hundred years of Christianity have generally been understood to indicate a principle of one bishop per city or diocese. This rule was applied even to the point that bishops were prohibited from performing ordinations, liturgical functions, teaching, or even sometimes traveling in another diocese without the express permission of the local hierarch [4]. It is also the violation of this rule, in which two different members of the clergy claimed the same episcopal see, that defined schisms in the early church. To take a particularly well-known example, the Christian community in Rome during the middle of the third century was divided in its support for Novatian, on the one hand, who held that Christians who had sacrificed to idols during periods of persecution could not be readmitted to the community, and Cornelius, who took a more lenient view. Both men were proclaimed as the bishop of Rome by their supporters, and therefore, by virtue of the fact that it was impossible for there to be two bishops of the same diocese, each was compelled to deny the validity of the other. It was only after Cornelius had secured more support (particularly from the influential Cyprian of Carthage), that he could retroactively have been seen to have secured the episcopal office.

Returning to the end of the eleventh century, we find the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, established by the military success of the First Crusade [5]. The (Greek) Patriarch of Jerusalem, Symeon II, who had represented the Chalcedonian Christian community, had been compelled by the Artuqids to live in exile some years before. Although he had been in communication with the Latin military leadership prior to their capture of the city — indeed, even supportive of their cause (presumably with the expectation that he would be restored to his cathedral in the event of their success) — the Crusaders immediately elected Arnulf of Chocques as the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Something analogous happened in the city of Antioch the following year. Antioch had been captured by the Crusaders from the Seljuk Turks in 1098. The city had previously been under the control of the Eastern Roman Empire (until 1084), and so the population was heavily Greek and Greek-speaking, including John Oxeites, the Patriarch of Antioch. Initially tolerated by the Crusader authorities, he was eventually compelled to flee the city, and, in his absence, the Crusaders nominated and had consecrated a second Patriarch of Antioch, Bernard of Valence, in 1100.

In both cases, the Latins attempted to replace the Chalcedonian patriarchs, whom they had previously recognized as holding legitimate office, with prelates of their own choosing, thereby setting up parallel hierarchies. This, as we can see in the history of the early church, is the very definition of schism. Moreover, this state of affairs persisted: the Greek community continued to choose Greek successors for these patriarchates, although they typically resided in Constantinople while the Crusaders controlled their sees, and the Latins maintained their own patriarchal structure, which relocated to Rome after the fall of the Crusader states. The Latin church retained a titular Patriarch of Antioch until the middle of the 20th century; it retains a titular Patriarch of Jerusalem to the present day. And if, as the tradition holds, the one church cannot have two bishops in the same episcopal see, then the presence of two bishops necessarily indicates that there are two, and separated, churches.

Nick Kamas

PhD in Medieval Studies

University of Notre Dame

1. Anton Michel, Humbert und Kerullarios, vol. 1, Quellen und Forschungen 21 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1924), 20–24.
2. Robert Taft, The Great Entrance: A History of the Transfer of Gifts and other Preanaphoral Rites of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 200 (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1975): 227–228.
3. Innocent III, Registrorum Lib VIII, Ep. 274. PL 215.636–7.
4. See Canon 8 of the First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea, 325), Canon 2 of the Second (Constantinople, 381), Canon 12 of the Fourth (Chalcedon, 451), and Canon 20 of the Sixth (Constantinople, 680–1), among others. The Rudder, edited and translated by Ralph J Masterjohn (West Brookfield, MA: The Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 2005), 438–9, 509–10, 608–9, 701.
5. Bernard Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States (London: Routledge, 1980), 12–17.