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

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.

October 18, 2023October 23, 2023

Why 1054? Dating the Schism for the Church of Constantinople

To the best of my knowledge, no serious historian or theologian working over the last century has been willing to date a definitive schism between the current Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches to the year 1054. This raises some obvious questions: what marks a schism in the first place? When did such a division occur between these two ecclesial bodies? And the topic partially addressed in this blog post: how did the year 1054 rise to such prominence that it appears in virtually every high school-level world history textbook in the present day?

It might be helpful to clarify what happened during the Latin legation to Constantinople in 1054. After a mutually unsatisfactory meeting and some debates over issues of liturgical and church disciplinary practice, the Latin legates excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Keroularios, but the expressly excluded the Eastern Roman emperor at the time, Constantine X Monomachos, as well as the city in general, from this breach in communion [1]. Patriarch Michael responded by convening a council to excommunicate the legates personally, but he took great pains to avoid condemning the bishop of Rome, on the grounds that the legates were imposters who hadn’t been sent by the pope at all. Still less was the whole of the Latin Church implicated in the Greek conciliar statement. It is abundantly clear from the surviving documents that no general division between the eastern and western halves of Chalcedonian Christianity was intended in the exchange of the excommunications, and there is no evidence from the time of the event itself that any such division was achieved.

This is confirmed by sources and events in the years immediately following 1054. In the immediate aftermath, Patriarch Michael Keroularios dispatched letters to the other eastern patriarchs complaining about the legates and about Latin liturgical and ritual practices, but he does so without any notion of a break in communion with the whole of western Christianity. The encomium of Michael Psellos for Keroularios, who died in 1059, praises the late Patriarch’s resistance to the legates. Psellos, ever philosophically-minded, focused on the question of the filioque, which was, in fact, one of the issues least discussed by the respective parties in 1054 itself (rather, they were concerned with whether bread for the Eucharist should be leavened, whether priests could be married, etc.). While admitting that Old and New Rome were in disagreement, and that the Roman position was “impious,” there is again no indication of a formal split in communion [2]. In another example a few years later, this time primarily from Latin sources concerning the great pilgrimage of Gunther of Bamberg, we are told that the Greeks were excessively proud in their dealings with the pilgrims (not an uncommon complaint), but not that they considered each other to be heretics or schismatics [3].

So, then, why the significance of this date? If not in the first-hand accounts, was any significance ascribed to the year 1054 in the works of later theologians and polemicists? I am preceded in this examination by an especially helpful article by Tia Kolbaba, a Byzantinist working at Rutgers, who examined twelfth-century sources with the expectation that the increased political tension between the Latin kingdoms and the Eastern Empire would evoke the historical example of Michael Keroularios in the theological literature [4]. Her conclusion is surprising: she was able to find no firmly-datable sources that considered the role of Michael Keroularios in the schism at all, and only a handful of short texts plausibly belonging to the twelfth century that mention him in passing. In the latter group, there is an interpolation in the history of Scylitzes, a single text in Vat. grec. 2198, a paragraph attributed to a certain Nicetas the Chartophylax, and a handful of anonymous texts collected by Hergenröther. This last item, edited under the collective title “Opuscula de origine schismatis,” is the most substantial of these, and even these short texts mention the role of Keroularios in conflicting terms and only in passing, at the end of rather confused accounts about the supposed errors of the Church of Rome [5].

In virtually all of these texts, the cause of the schism (which is fully recognized by the twelfth century) is attributed to the Latins’ mistaken Trinitarian theology, and specifically the question of the filioque. Although it does get mentioned, much less attention is given to the question of (un)leavened bread, a complete reversal of the 1054 conflict in which ritual questions were given pride of place. This change of emphasis leads most, if not all, of these later commentators to draw upon source material from an earlier rupture between Rome and Constantinople: the ninth-century Patriarch Photios, although he did eventually restore communion with the See of Rome, left behind substantial writings and a strong tradition of critiquing the Latin position, especially in terms of its Trinitarian theology. And it is primarily to Photios, rather than to Keroularios, that later Greek church historians and polemicists turned.

And finally, it appears that this interpretation persisted into the early modern period, even among Greek clergy sympathetic to the Roman position. John Plousiadenos, a fifteenth-century Cretan Byzantine-rite priest in union with the Church of Rome, appears content to attribute the fundamental basis of the schism to Photios, whom he described as “the very maker and the demiurge of the schism and the division” [6]. Charles Yost, a fellow graduate of the Medieval Institute, pointed out in his 2019 dissertation that the historiography of Plousiadenos concerning the schism, as well as that of other high-profile Greek churchmen of his time, was rather garbled, with different authors presenting conflicting accounts of whether Photios, for example, was ever personally restored to communion with Rome. In nearly all accounts, however, Keroularios is conspicuous by his absence: Plousiadenos says nothing about him at all, and Manuel Kalekas, another unionist, downplays his role [7]. At the end of the Middle Ages, then, the Great Schism, to the extent that the Greeks were willing to date it at all, happened in the ninth century, and the examples of intercommunion in the centuries following were, ultimately, just failed attempts at reunion.

So where does this leave our starting question, and can we trace any part of the modern prominence given to the date 1054 to the Constantinopolitan/Greek historical or theological tradition? I think that the answer is no. None of the Greek sources following the events themselves are willing to date a definitive schism to that year. At most, the actions of Michael Keroularios are a (small) episode in a series of conflicts with the Church of Rome that began at least two centuries earlier. Otherwise, his name and his role are omitted entirely from the discourse of later commentors. I have found nothing akin to the modern celebrity given the 1054 conflict until the writings of the Athonite Kollyvades fathers around the turn of the nineteenth century. Other than that, it only within the Latin medieval tradition that we can possibly find a substantial reception of 1054. And these both are very much topics for separate posts.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

[1] The best edition for the documents cited here in relation to the 1054 legation remains Cornelius Will, ed., Acta et Scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant (Leipzig: N. G. Elwert, 1861).

[2] K. N. Sathas, ed., Μεσαιωνική Βιβλιοθήκη Δ‘ (Athens: Koromela, 1874), 348. “Στασιάζει πρὸς τὴν νεωτέραν Ρώμην ἡ πρεσβυτέρα, οὐ περὶ μικρῶν οὐδὲ παρορᾶσθαι ἀξίων, ἀλλὰ περὶ τοῦ πρώτου λόγου τῆς εὐσεβείας, καὶ τῆς περὶ τῆν ἁγίαν τριάδα θεολογίας […].”

[3] Annales Altahenses maiores, ed. altera, ed. E. L. B. von Oefele, MGH SS Rer. Germ. 4 (Hannover: impensis bibliopolii Hahniani, 1891), 67. “Constantinopolitanos vidimus [Latini episcopi] graece et imperialiter arrogantes.”

[4] Tia Kolbaba, “The Legacy of Humbert and Cerularius: The Tradition of the ‘Schism of 1054’ in Byzantine Texts and Manuscripts of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Porphyrogenita: Essays on the History and Literature of Byzantium and the Latin East in Honour of Julian Chrysostomides” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 47-61.

[5] “Opuscula de origine schismatis,” ed. J. Hergenröther in Monumenta graeca ad Photium ejusque historiam pertinentia, (Regensburg: G.J. Manz, 1869). The first of these texts is unusual in reporting (inaccurately) that Michael Keroularios excommunicated the whole of the Latin church (p. 163), but this is corrected by the second text, which follows Keroularios’s own account that Latin legation had been tampered with for political ends (p. 170). The third text does not mention him at all.

[6] Charles Yost, “The Thought and Ministry of a ‘Unionist Priest’ (ἙΝΩΤΙΚῸΣ ἹΕΡΕΎΣ): John Plousiadenos (†1500), the Council of Florence, and the Tradition of Byzantine Unionism” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Notre Dame, 2019), 649, esp. n. 480.

[7] Ibid., pp. 672, 674.