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

December 5, 2025December 7, 2025

Laycus of Amalfi on the Azymes

As a continuation of sorts to my last post, on Peter Damiani’s reaction to the events of 1054, I’ve decided to take a look at another churchman writing on the same topic a few years later, a certain Laycus of Amalfi, who undertook to compose a defense of the use of unleavened bread (azymes) in the Eucharist around the year 1070 [1]. His work took the form of a letter, addressed to Sergius, a Latin-rite abbot living in Constantinople. According to the text, Laycus had been motivated to write by reports from his correspondent and from other Latins that they had been completely surrounded by those who were trying to persuade them to abandon the Latin liturgical usage in favor of the Greek [2].

Other than his name, virtually nothing else is known about the author of the text. The sole surviving manuscript witness (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale 1360 / 9706-25, 116v-119r) gives only the identification “a letter of Laycus, cleric” (“epistola layci clerici”), a seeming contradiction in terms that leaves us with the assumption that “Laycus” is a given name. Anton Michel, who edited the text in 1939, notes further that monastics of the time tended to identify themselves as such: the absence of a word like “frater” in self-reference suggests that the author was not in monastic orders [3]. Even the origins of the author in the city of Amalfi are conjectural, and they are based more on his presumed links to Abbot Sergius, who was likely the leader of the monastery of St. Mary of the Amalfitans in Constantinople, an establishment attested by Peter Damiani around the same time[4].

The famous bronze doors of the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Amalfi, manufactured in Constantinople around the year 1060. Photo credits Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The manuscript that preserves this text is also one of the few early copies of the work of Humbert, Cardinal of Silva Candida, and, as it happens, it is from Humbert’s writings that our Laycus drew most of his arguments in favor of the azymes. The core argument, in Laycus as in Humbert, was an appeal to the example set by Christ at the institution of the Eucharist during the Last Supper. According to the argument, Christ, who came to fulfill the Law of Moses, would have used unleavened bread at the Last Supper since the synoptic Gospel accounts place the event on the first day of the celebration of Pascha (Pesach), when leavened bread was prohibited in observant Jewish households. This act of institution was reinforced during the supper at Emmaus, which likewise occurred during the days of Pascha and is regarded in the text as a celebration of the Eucharist [5]. This practice was preserved by the Roman Church, according to Laycus, who cited Popes Anacletus, Clemens, and Sylvester as uniquely instrumental in this effort [6].

Especially for the period of the pre-Gregorian Reform, the tone of the text is fairly mild. The introductory paragraphs make reference to the “most pious, holy, and wise fathers and doctors [of the Greeks]” who themselves used leavened bread in the Eucharist (but who didn’t, though, attack the Latin use) [7]. And the letter of Laycus appears all the more gentle in comparison with the source material: gone is the spirited, “listen up, stupid” (“audi, stulte”) style of invective found in Cardinal Humbert [8]. Instead, we find almost a plea to avoid rending the garment of Christ by provoking division between the two rites, coupled with an emphatic statement that the one faith could contain various customs within the churches [9].

Does the work of Laycus of Amalfi change our understanding of the azyme debate or the conflict between the Eastern and Western churches more broadly? In terms of theological content, to put it bluntly, not really. The arguments advanced by Laycus were the same as those put forward by Humbert some fifteen years prior, and, while the text written by Laycus was itself copied by Bruno of Segni in another epistle in the early twelfth century, this branch of the post-Humbertine literary tradition does not leave any substantial mark in the theological framework of the Latin church. On the other hand, the very existence of this letter, along with the fact that a Greek prelate took the time to respond to it, does indeed broaden our insight into the East-West conflict more generally [10]. It emphasizes, first of all, that the Humbertine legation in 1054 was not a one-off attempt to open lines of communication between the two churches. Rather, communication was happening, even without the intervention of popes and patriarchs, and it was based on pre-existing and well-established ties connecting East and West. A Latin-rite monastery in Constantinople, staffed by Amalfitans, would naturally be in contact with friends, relatives, and fellow clerics back home.

Second, to return to a point that I’ve made before, this letter makes clear that there was no general sense of schism between East and West in the aftermath of the 1054 legation. Indeed, as noted above, the tone of this letter is notably more civil than the polemics of Humbert. Although Laycus was certainly more of an azyme partisan than was Peter Damiani, the work and its date of composition points to an extended window in which ecumenical dialogue, in the sense that both sides still saw each other as part of the same community, was still possible.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

Anton Michel has published the only substantial scholarly treatment of the material and the only edition of the text. Amalfi und Jerusalem im Griechischen Kirchenstreit (1054–1090): Kardinal Humbert, Laycus von Amalfi, Niketas Stethatos, Symeon II. von Jerusalem und Bruno von Segni über die Azymen (Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1939. See also a short summary in Jonathan Shepard, “Knowledge of the West in Byzantine Sources, c.900–c.1200” in A Companion to Byzantium and the West, 900-1204, ed. Nicolas Drocourt and Sebastian Kolditz (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 67.
Laycus of Amalfi, c. 1, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 35.
Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 21.
Peter Damani, Letter 131, trans. Owen J. Blum, The Letters of Peter Damian Peter Damian, Vol. 5, Letters 121–150, The Fathers of the Church: Medieval Continuation 6, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 55. For an assessment on why this monastic house in particular, see Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 18–19.
Laycus of Amalfi, c. 5–11, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 37–42.
Laycus of Amalfi, c. 14–15, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 44–45.
Laycus of Amalfi, c. 2, Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 36. “Licet illorum [Graecorum] religiosissimi, sanctissimi atque sapientissimi patres ac doctores fuerint et studuerint ex fermentato pane omnipotenti domino sacrificium offerre, tamen numquam invenimus illos nostram oblationem evacuantes aut deridentes […].”
Humbert, Cardinal of Silva Candida, Responsio sive Contradictio adversus Nicetae Pectorati Libellum, cap. 13, edited in Cornelius Will, Acta et Scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant (Leipzig: N. G. Elwert, 1861), 141.
Laycus of Amalfi, c. 3, Michel, 36–37. “Numquid divisus est dominus in corpore suo, ut alius sit Ihesus Christus in Romano sacrificio, alius in Constantinopolitano? Quis hoc orthodoxus dixerit nisi ille, qui dominicam non veretur scindere vestem? Nos veraciter tenemus, immo firmiter credimus, quia, quamvis diversi mores ęcclesiarum, una est tamen fides […].”
Probably Symeon II of Jerusalem. Michel, Amalfi und Jerusalem, 25–28.

July 9, 2025August 5, 2025

Greco-Latin Polemic and the Problem of the Single Immersion Baptism

Of the many issues that rose to the fore in the course of the conflicts between the Latin and Greek churches during the Middle Ages, one of the most consistent, and to me, surprising, was the repeated accusation that the Greeks rebaptized Latin Christians when they, for whatever reason, wished to switch their ritual use (what we would now understand as a “conversion” between different denominations). Although the veracity of these claims has been debated, I think, as I have written elsewhere, that there is good reason to believe that the Greeks really did rebaptize Latins. Complaints about the practice began in the mid-11th century with Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, who was elsewhere highly accurate in his claims about liturgical practice, and continue well into the 13th century, including an honorable mention in the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III.

What is less clear, though, is why the Greeks were so keen to rebaptize their Latin cousins. It is tempting to see rebaptism as symptomatic of more ethereal theological topics, in which the perceived differences between the two churches was sufficiently great that the Greek clergy (or at least a subset of them) felt the need to mark the reception of these “converts” from heresy by means of the administration of the sacrament. Certainly this understanding had precedent: as early as 325, the canons of the First Council of Nicaea mandated the reception of Paulianists, who were nontrinitarians, by means of baptism. But I think that this understanding is a mistake with reference to the Latin/Greek conflict. Especially in its earlier phase, in the 11th century, there was no general sense of lasting division: the Greeks generally viewed the Latins as wayward brethren to be corrected, not as heretics utterly outside of the Church, and therefore rebaptism can’t be understood as a requirement resulting from serious deficiencies in the faith on the scale of nontrinitarianism.

Rather, I think that these rebaptisms were because of perceived ritual deficiencies in the Latin rite of baptism, and particularly, in the idea that the Latins were prone to using a single immersion when administering the sacrament. And when looking at this possibility we find a much greater incidence of Latin complaint and Greek explanation. Shortly after Cardinal Humbert complained about rebaptisms, Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, wrote to Peter, the Patriarch of Antioch, that the Latins performed baptism with a single immersion [1]. The two centuries that followed saw repetitions of both: Odo of Deuil, Leo Tuscus, an anonymous Dominican author writing from Constantinople in the mid-13th century, and Jerome of Ascoli (i.e., Pope Nicholas IV) all noted that Latin Christians were being rebaptized. The “Byzantine Lists”, a genre of polemic that enumerated liturgical and cultural “errors” committed by the Latins, again and again returned to the notion that the baptism of the Latin rite was performed through a single immersion [2]. In doing so, the authors of these lists were implicitly invoking another of the canons of the early church, this time from the so-called Apostolic Canons (no. 50): “If any Bishop or Priest does not perform three immersions in making one baptism, but only a single immersion […], let him be deposed” [3]

Assuming that my conclusion is correct, that Greeks rebaptized Latins with some degree of frequency because they believed their form of the sacrament to be ritually defective, the question that next arises is how the Greeks came to hold that belief. Prior to the widespread adoption of affusion or aspersion in the Latin West, the form of baptism appears to have been similar to that of the Greek East: a full triune immersion, done together with the invocation of the persons of the Trinity. We see this clearly referenced as late as the early 13th century, when Pope Innocent III, writing to the Maronite Church, instructs them to invoke the Trinity only once “while completing a triple immersion” [4]. The great exception to the standard Latin practice was the famous license given by Pope Gregory the Great to the church in Spain to baptize with a single immersion as a way to signify the oneness of the Trinity and thereby to combat Arianism. This practice was further codified by the 633 Council of Toledo and its existence confirmed in the works of Isidore of Seville and Ildefonsus of Toledo [5]. The practice is referenced twice more, toward the end of the eighth century, in the letters of Alcuin of York, who acknowledged that the practice existed in certain parts of Spain only long enough to condemn the people who baptize in this way as “neglecting to imitate, in baptism, the three-day burial of our Savior” [6]. They maintain this custom, according to Alcuin, “contrary to the universal custom of the holy Church” making Spain the “wet-nurse of schismatics” [7].

Returning, then, to the polemics of the Greeks, is it possible that their complaints about a Latin single-immersion baptism stemmed from the Spanish practice? I see no other possible cause, although this feels unsatisfactory as an explanation. At most, the single-immersion baptism was a regionalism confined to the Iberia, and the opposition of Alcuin, the great champion of Romanization in the West, makes it unlikely that it would ever have spread further than its native peninsula. Indeed, the gradual imposition of the Roman rite throughout the Christian West likely reduced the frequency of single-immersion baptisms within Spain itself in the centuries following the initial permission of Pope Gregory. If the practice survived at all by the mid-11th century, when Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Michael wrote their respective complaints – and I haven’t found any evidence from that time for or against – it would probably have been a very rare indeed for someone baptized “incorrectly” to have been found in Constantinople.

Pending further evidence, then, we are left with the Greeks reacting at most to an improbability, and more likely to outdated information. While I fully acknowledge that it’s no more than supposition on my part, my best guess is that the works either of Gregory the Great or of Isidore of Seville (or of both, or of someone else entirely) were received in the theological circles of 11th-century Constantinople, leaving the mistaken impression that the practice of single immersion baptism was common in the West. From there, the notion that the Latins performed this sacrament incorrectly, along with most of the others, proved hard to dislodge.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

Cornelius Will, ed., Acta et Scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant (Leipzig: N. G. Elwert, 1861), 153 (Humbert) and 182 (Michael).
Tia M. Kolbaba, The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2000), 192.
The Rudder, trans. Ralph Masterjohn (West Brookfield, Massachusetts: The Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 2005), 179.
“in trina immersione unica tantum fiat invocatio Trinitatis”. No. 216. Acta Innocentii III, ed. P. Theodosius Haluščynskyj (Vatican, Typis Polyglottis, 1944), 458.
J.D.C. Fisher, Christian Initiation, Baptism in the Medieval West (London: S.P.C.K., 1965), 91.
“triduanamque nostri salvatoris sepulturam in baptismo imitari neglegentes”. Ep. 139. Ed. Ernest Duemmler, MGH Epp. 4 (Berlin: Weidmannos, 1895), 221.
“[…] Hispania – quae olim tyrannorum nutrix fuit, nun vero scismaticorum – contra universalem sanctae ecclesiae consuetudinem […].” “Adfirmant enim quidam sub invocatione sanctae Trinitatis unam esse mersionem agendam.” Ep. 137. Ibid., 212.

February 7, 2024February 9, 2024

The Anti-Latin Polemic of Metropolitan Ephraim of Kiev

While I think it is true, as I have argued before, that the Greek church never considered the events of 1054 as marking any kind of definitive break with the Latin West, this does not mean that the theological writers at the time ignored the sudden and dramatic juxtaposition of Eastern and Western liturgical, ritual, and cultural practices. Indeed, almost the reverse is true: the decades following 1054 witnessed a flourishing of a genre that has been termed the “Byzantine lists,” essentially short treatises outlining a series of objectionable practices that were common (or were believed by the authors to be common) among Latin Christians. Typically inspired by the letter of Michael Cerularius to Peter of Antioch, which added several complaints about the Latins to a list of issues that were under more active discussion between the two sides in 1054, these lists commonly discussed issues that pertained to liturgical or ritual practice. Greek Christians regularly complained that their Latin confrères did not celebrate baptism correctly, did not fast from the correct foods or with sufficient rigor, and did not sing the word “alleluia” during church services at the correct times of the year, among other problems.

St. Peter of Antioch, detail of the mosaic in the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, 6th century.

The primary study of the genre as a whole remains Tia Kolbaba’s monograph The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins, published in 2000 [1]. Kolbaba maintains that the composition of these lists was fundamentally a project of Byzantine cultural consciousness, a way of emphasizing (or constructing) the unity, antiquity, and correctness of Eastern Roman practice by way of comparison to the “other,” in this case, the Latins. These lists were intended as emotional appeals to a broad Greek audience, and were somewhat low-brow in both style and content: theologically difficult issues like the filioque are presented side-by-side with complaints that Latin bishops wear silk rather than woolen robes, with no effort to rank the comparative importance of the various complaints.

Given Kolbaba’s argument that these lists of complaints are fundamentally inward looking, focused more on the Eastern Romans than the Western ones, it is especially interesting that one of the earliest examples of the genre was not written within the oikoumene at all, but rather under the political authority of the Kievan Rus’. Ephraim, the metropolitan of Kiev from around 1055 to the early 1060s, was an ethnic Greek recently transplanted in the eastern Slavic territory when he authored a list of twenty-eight distinct complaints against the Latin Christians [2]. Most of these complaints concern topics that are familiar to students of the East-West conflict: the filioque, the use of azymes (unleavened bread) in the celebration of the Eucharist, the practice of fasting on the Sabbath (Saturdays). Indeed, the complaints in Ephraim’s treatise echo the issues raised in the 1054 conflict so completely that he either had received a thorough report of the events or was still personally resident in Constantinople during the time of the Humbertine legation.

Miniatures from the Kiev Psalter, 1397CE.

Ephraim, however, was also cognizant of his new cultural context, and Igor Čičurov, who first printed an edition of the text, points out instances where Ephraim used words or referenced topics that would have been far more familiar to a Slavic audience. For example, Ephraim attributes the sacramental use of azymes to the Vandals, noting that this group of people are now called the “Nemitzioi” (“τῶν νῦν Νεμιτζίων καλοθμένων”) a native Slavic term for Germans (i.e., non-Slavs): “немитции” or “немцы” [3]. Furthermore, Ephraim deviated from his literary model, Michael Cerularius, in accusing the Latins of not giving baptizands the names of saints, but instead the names of various animals (lions, bears, leopards, etc.) [4]. This complaint, Čičurov notes, is not made in any list of complaints against the Latins composed within the Eastern Roman Empire itself. Instead, it is only from the Slavic context, where the practice of retaining a non-Christian name after baptism was common, that this issue was raised [5].

This complaint brings us back to Kolbaba’s thesis, that the so-called Byzantine lists had more to do with policing cultural practice and ritual purity within the Eastern Christian world than in correcting behavior in the West. Constantinopolitan authors of similar works, although they surely would have objected to this naming practice, apparently did not see the need to mention it among their complaints. In Ephraim’s case, however, we see an ethnic Greek confronted with the very foreign (to him) practice of retaining a non-Christian name. His attack on the Latin practice would equally have served as a critique of the princely families of the Rus’ by whom he was surrounded. We are left, in the end, with a strengthening of Kolbaba’s central argument: “[…] the intended audience was not Latin. There are anti-Latin works which were intended to convince Latins, but the lists are not among them” [6] Instead, we should see Ephraim’s work, at least in part, the effort of a Greek clergyman to enforce the norms of Constantinopolitan orthodox theology and practice in the Eastern Christian hinterland.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

[1] Tia M. Kolbaba, The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2000). See especially chapter 1, pp. 9-19, for the argument on the purpose and context of the lists.

[2] For some biographical details on Ephraim of Kiev, see Gerhard Podskalsky, Christentum und Theologische Literatur in der Kiever Rus’ (988-1237) (München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1982), 285-286. Further details, including a helpful bibliography, are in А. В. Назаренко, “Кое-что о Двух Русских Митрополитах XI в. Ефреме Киевском и Ефреме Переяславском” Древняя Русь: Вопросы Медиевистики 75.1 (2019): 87-90.

[3] “Антилатинский Трактат Киевского Митрополита Ефрема (ок. 1054/55-1061/62 гг.) в Составе Греческого Канонического Сборника Vat. Gr. 828,” Вестник ПСТГУ 19.3 (2007): 127. This publication in Russian is a revision of an earlier German article: I. Čičurov, “Ein antilateinischer Traktat des Kiever Metropoliten Ephraim,” Fontes Minores X (Frankfurt am Main, 1998): 319–356. The edition of the Greek text appears only in the German version.

[4] Traktat 18, in Čičurov, “Ein antilateinischer Traktat,” 344.

[5] Чичуров, “Антилатинский Трактат,” 126.

[6] Kolbaba, Byzantine Lists, 28.