Empire of God, page 25
460 Ibid.
461 Skylitzes, Byzantine History 811–1057, op. cit., 353.
462 Ibid.
463 Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, op. cit., 64.
464 Ibid., 67.
465 Skylitzes, Byzantine History 811–1057, op. cit., 359.
466 Ibid.
467 Psellos, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, op. cit., 67.
468 Ibid., 69.
469 Ibid.
470 Ibid., 70.
471 Ibid.
472 Ibid., 75.
473 Ibid., 138.
474 Ibid., 157.
475 Ibid.
476 Skylitzes, Byzantine History 811–1057, op. cit., 397.
477 Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, op. cit., 158.
478 Ibid., 165.
479 Ibid., 179.
480 Ibid.
481 Ibid.
482 Ibid., 253.
483 Ibid.
484 Ibid.
485 Skylitzes, Byzantine History 811–1057, op. cit., 416.
486 Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, op. cit., 253.
487 Ibid., 177.
488 Ibid., 173.
489 Ibid., 173-4.
490 Markopoulos, “Education,” op. cit., 790-1.
491 Michael Attaleiates, The History, Anthony Kaldellis and Dimitris Krallis, trans. (Harvard University Press, 2012), 37.
492 Ibid.
493 Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, op. cit., 251.
494 Skylitzes, Byzantine History 811–1057, op. cit., 444.
495 Ibid.
496 Ibid.
Chapter Nineteen
The Final Rupture
The Great Schism
In the meantime, other seeds long since planted were bearing bitter fruit. It is striking that both Michael Psellos and Michael Attaleiates—who were present in Constantinople when it all happened—and John Skylitzes—who wrote about events of the time just a few decades later—pass over in silence what is today considered to be one of the most momentous events in the entire history of the world, with consequences that continue to this day. Skylitzes writes: “The patriarch Michael struck the pope of Rome from the diptychs as soon as he was appointed, for raising the question of the unleavened bread. Peter, Patriarch of Antioch, and Leo, archbishop of Bulgaria, and all the better-educated churchmen supported him.”497
This, however, was referring to an earlier incident. The diptychs were the listing of the bishops with whom one was in communion; removing the pope from the diptychs meant that Constantinople and Rome were in schism with one another, with the patriarch of Antioch and the archbishop of Bulgaria supporting Constantinople. The “question of the unleavened bread” was the controversy over whether leavened bread should be used for the Holy Eucharist, as in Constantinople and other Eastern churches, or unleavened bread, as in Rome. Once again, while this might seem to contemporary post-Christians to be a trivial quibble, each usage was based on theology and symbolism that was derived from that theology, and thus this relatively small controversy was one more sign among many others that the two theological traditions were growing incompatible.
The problem with Skylitzes’s statement is that the “patriarch Michael” to whom he refers, Michael Keroularios, became ecumenical patriarch in 1043. If he struck the pope from the diptychs as soon as he was appointed, they quickly reconciled—at least superficially—for eleven years later, the Churches of Rome and Constantinople were still in communion with one another, despite centuries of rising tension.
Those tensions came to a boiling point when the Normans closed churches in southern Italy that followed the rites of the Church of Constantinople, and Keroularios in retaliation closed the Latin churches in Constantinople.498 Michael explained that this was because they used unleavened bread in the Holy Eucharist, ignoring the words of Christ himself: “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” (Luke 13:20–21) In the East, the leaven in the bread represented the transformation of the believer—and the world—in Christ; in the West, the unleavened bread represented Christ as “our paschal lamb,” in the words of St. Paul (I Corinthians 5:7).
The mutual suspicion between the churches, however, was not just a matter of competing symbolisms. In Constantinople, the ecumenical patriarch and his clergy were suspicious of the growing assertiveness and aggressiveness of the pope in Rome, as the bishops of Rome had begun to claim not just primacy among the patriarchs of the church but absolute power and total jurisdiction over all other churches. The collegial and conciliar character of the church of the first millennium was being lost amid these claims. In August 1053, Leo of Okhrida, the bishop of Bulgaria, wrote sternly to the pope in language that appeared intolerably insolent amid Rome’s expanding understanding of its own power and prerogatives: “Straighten yourself out!” Leo of Okhrida exhorted the pope. “Correct your errors! Abandon unleavened bread and observance of the sabbath to the Jews, use of meat with blood in it to the pagans and the barbarians, in order to put yourself in accord with us in true orthodoxy!”499
Seven hundred years before this, when Pope Victor excommunicated the churches of Asia for not following his lead regarding the date of the celebration of Easter, Eusebius of Caesarea noted that Victor’s action “did not please all the bishops. And they besought him to consider the things of peace, and of neighborly unity and love. Words of theirs are extant, sharply rebuking Victor.”500 But the days when the pope’s fellow bishops could sharply rebuke him without fear of severe consequences had long passed. Livid, Pope Leo IX determined to punish the Easterners for this insolence.
Accordingly, the following year, the pope sent a cardinal of the Roman church, Humbert of Silva Candida, to Constantinople. His primary mission was to discuss an alliance between the pope and Emperor Constantine IX to drive the Normans out of Italy, but he was also sent to discuss the widening estrangement between the two churches with Michael Keroularios. The filioque, the issue of Roman primacy and universal jurisdiction, and questions such as the leavened or unleavened bread issue divided the churches. Summing up the contradictory character of their mission were two letters the legates carried from the pope. One was addressed to Constantine; the pope called him his “beloved son, the glorious and devout Emperor of New Rome,” and spoke encouragingly about the prospect of an alliance.501
The other, to Keroularios, was considerably colder. Pope Leo IX addressed the ecumenical patriarch as “the archbishop of Constantinople” and scolded him for offering to commemorate the name of the pope in all the churches if the pope did the same for him. He emphasized that the Church of Rome was the “head and mother of the Churches,” and that no other churches were its equal.502 The pontiff even revived Pope Gregory I’s 450-year-old objection to the title “Ecumenical” for the patriarch of Constantinople.503
Leo IX’s letter makes it clear that Humbert was not sent in order to discuss the matters in dispute in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Rather, he was sent in order to bring a recalcitrant subordinate to heel. The subordinate in question, however, was conscious that the Council of Chalcedon back in 451 had decreed that “the most holy Church of Constantinople, which is New Rome,” should have “equal privileges” to those of the Church of Old Rome, “justly judging that the city which is honored with the Sovereignty and the Senate, and enjoys equal privileges with the old imperial Rome, should in ecclesiastical matters also be magnified as she is, and rank next after her.”504 Michael Keroularios did not believe he was a subordinate and resented the idea that he should be brought to heel. Adding to this was the fact that centuries of difficult relations—marked by the Acacian schism, the Photian schism, and more—had increased suspicions and made negotiations impossible. An irresistible force was about to meet an immovable object.
Michael refused to meet with Humbert. He made it clear to all concerned that he refused to accept dictates from the pope, telling Humbert that he was his equal in the ecclesiastical order, and that there was nothing to discuss if the pope continued to insist that he was a servant to whom orders should be given. Humbert, meanwhile, demonstrated that he was much more the pugnacious polemicist than the conciliatory diplomat; when his positions were attacked by the monk Nicholas Stethatus, Humbert responded by calling Nicholas a “pestiferous pimp,” as well as a “disciple of the malignant Muhammad.”505 Constantine IX, who had been hoping to conclude the proposed alliance with the pope against the Normans, was appalled. When Pope Leo IX died unexpectedly on April 19, 1054, there was no one on the other side who could compel Humbert to apologize.
The death of the pope actually removed all authority from the papal legates. Whether or not they knew that the pope had died and thus their mission had effectively ended, Humbert—overflowing with anger over having been ignored by Michael—entered Hagia Sophia on Sunday, July 16, 1054, while the ecumenical patriarch was celebrating the Divine Liturgy. Dressed in his finest regalia, Humbert stalked with ostentatious anger up to the high altar and laid upon it a bull excommunicating the ecumenical patriarch. Humbert then retreated in the same theatrical manner, shaking the dust off of his feet as he left the cathedral.
The bull was not written by Pope Leo IX, who probably had not known that Humbert planned such an action at all. An unnerved subdeacon—whether confused as to what had just transpired and thinking that Humbert had forgotten his paper or had been ordered by someone at the altar to show the Latins what the ecumenical patriarchate thought of their excommunication—grabbed the bull off the altar and tried to return it to Humbert. The cardinal took this as more insolence and contemptuously let the document flutter to the ground. Someone retrieved it and got it to the ecumenical patriarch, who responded to it by summarily excommunicating Humbert and the other papal legates.
The thousand-year estrangement between the Eastern and Western churches had begun, despite the fact that with Pope Leo IX dead, Cardinal Humbert excommunicated the ecumenical patriarch entirely upon his own authority, and the excommunication actually had no greater standing or significance. John Skylitzes, Michael Attaleiates, and Michael Psellos may not have thought all this unworthy of mention because the excommunications pertained only to those men; no one at the time thought that this was the beginning of a millennium-long schism between the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople.
Only gradually did it become clear to the people in both churches that any rupture had occurred at all. Nonetheless, the break between the churches had been coming for a long time, and after this, it ultimately became taken for granted that there had been a split and that it was final. The world continues to deal with its repercussions.
Whatever their actual juridical force, at the time the mutual excommunications did demonstrate the irreconcilability of the differences between the two churches. Even if they weren’t considered an ultimate break at the time, they heralded an estrangement and mistrust that continued to widen, with results that would ultimately prove catastrophic in ways that no one could foresee as Cardinal Humbert stalked angrily toward the altar of Hagia Sophia on that summer day in 1054.
A Kinder, Gentler Emperor
The split saddened Constantine. Humbert and the other legates left Constantinople on July 18, still on friendly terms with the emperor. There appeared to be no way, however, to bring about reconciliation between the Latins and the ecumenical patriarch. The emperor nevertheless resolved to try to repair the schism, and a few conciliatory letters were exchanged, but Constantine IX Monomachos died in January 1055, a disappointed man, with the breach between the churches unhealed and widening.
Constantine was also the latest in a long line of Roman emperors to commit that greatest of all imperial sins, dying with no son or clear heir. As various factions jockeyed for power, various emperors were too busy fending off challenges to their power to busy themselves with external threats or to ensure that the military remained in a state of readiness to fend off those threats.
One emperor of this period, Constantine X Doukas—who reigned from 1059 to 1067—became convinced of a notion that would not beguile the rest of the world for another thousand years: the idea that all differences between peoples can be solved through appeasement, to which we now often refer as dialogue and negotiation, and that war can and should by every possible means be avoided in all circumstances. Michael Psellos greatly admired him but reminds his readers and perhaps also himself: “I am not composing a panegyric, but a true history, so I must admit here that there were occasions on which his policy fell short of perfection, when he relied on his own judgement and refused outside advice.” As far as Psellos was concerned, the fondness of Constantine X for negotiations at a time when the empire’s enemies did not want to coexist with it but to destroy it utterly was one of those occasions. Psellos continued:
For example, international differences, according to his ideas, had to be settled, not by recourse to arms, but by the sending of gifts and by other tokens of friendship—for two reasons: in the first place, he would avoid having to spend the greater part of the imperial revenues on the army, and secondly, his own manner of life would not be disturbed. Actually he was greatly mistaken in this, for when the military organization broke down, the power of our enemies increased and they became more active in opposition. Of course emperors should be above such foolishness—refusal to accept advice, I mean, and lack of foresight—but selfishness on the one hand, and on the other the flattering speeches of ordinary folk, who persuaded some of them that they could do everything unaided, these for the most part were the things that caused their downfall and led them astray, off the path of duty. If a man speaks his mind in defense of what is good, they suspect him, whereas a warm welcome awaits the parasite: he is allowed to share their secrets. Herein lies the cause of the Roman Empire’s decline.506
Thus, both John Skylitzes and Michael Psellos date the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire to the middle of the eleventh century, when Constantine IX first disbanded a large Roman army in the east, and then Constantine X preferred to rely on paying tribute and reaching out in friendship to the empire’s enemies rather than fighting them.
Often in the life of nations, a decline proceeds slowly and virtually unnoticed for decades and then is revealed suddenly in one overwhelming cataclysmic event. Future historians may look back at the United States’ catastrophically botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021—carried out by a military that was distracted by partisan political issues and insufficiently attentive to what should have been its central mission—as one of those cataclysmic events. And for the Romans, by the time Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes assumed the throne in 1068, the stage had been set for the revelation to the world of their own imperial decline.
* * *
497 Ibid., 408.
498 “Michael I Keroularios,” in John H. Rosser, Historical Dictionary of Byzantium, (Scarecrow Press, 2012), 323.
499 Warren H. Carroll, The Building of Christendom: A History of Christendom, Vol. 2, (Christendom Press, 1987), 479.
500 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, op. cit., 5.24.10.
501 J. M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, (Oxford University Press, 1986), 132-3.
502 Ibid., 133.
503 Rosser, “Michael I Keroularios,” op. cit.
504 “Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451),” Henry Percival, trans., in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 14, Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1900). Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3811.htm.
505 Carroll, Building, op. cit., 481.
506 Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, op. cit., 339.
Chapter Twenty
Catastrophe
The Disaster at Manzikert
As should have been expected, the warriors of jihad were paying close attention to developments in the empire. They could see the sorry state of the Roman military and were aware that the emperors were distracted by other matters. They once again began to advance in Syria and Cilicia. Romanos IV Diogenes resolved to end their threat once and for all, but by then, the imperial forces were not what they had been even just a few decades before, and Romanos himself was no Basil the Bulgar Slayer. John Skylitzes (or whoever the chronicler was who extended his work for another quarter century after his death) records that the army assembled in Phrygia, where “a strange sight met the eye, the famous elite forces of the Romans, who had subjugated all the west and all the east, and their army, now composed of a paltry few. They were stooped by poverty and ill-treatment, deprived of their weaponry, and although it was not a time of peace they carried hunting spears and scythes instead of swords and other weapons of war…and they lacked cavalry and the rest of their equipment.”507
