With the anathema pronounced on Photius by the papal legates at the false Synod of 869, and with the categorical disavowal of this false Synod by the East in 879, a chill fell on the relations between the Orthodox and the Western Churches, but there was as yet no formal schism. It was not until 1054, when Michael Cerularius was Patriarch of Constantinople and Leo IX. Pope of Rome, that the schism finally became an established fact and the two Churches were irremediably estranged. Cerularius had written a letter to Bishop John of Trania in Italy, enumerating the innovations introduced by the Roman Church, and had begged him to give this letter a wide hearing in order that the truth might prevail. The letter did indeed receive wide publicity, and came to the notice particularly of Pope Leo, who sent its author a very sharp reply, severely rebuking him for presuming to censure a Church which had never before been censured by anybody. The Emperor of Constantinople, Constantine Monomachus, who had need of the Pope to protect his threatened political interests in Italy, sent him a most conciliatory reply, asking him to send his legates to study the position with a view to restoring friendly relations. The Pope did indeed send Cardinal Humbert, but apparently on a mission far from pacific. For when the latter arrived in Constantinople, he not only behaved with great insolence towards the Patriarch, but made his way to the Church of Saint Sophia where he laid on the altar a bull of excommunication against the Eastern Church, stigmatizing her as the repository of all the heresies of the past, and then hastily disappeared. When the Patriarch heard what had occurred, he too drew up a sentence of excommunication against the Western Church, which the other Patriarchs jointly signed. Thus the cleavage between the two Churches has become complete.

The Crusades.

   Thenceforward, various unfortunate occurrences contributed to make this division permanent. The most terrible of all were the Crusades, which, though looked upon by the West as heroic enterprises inspired by sacred zeal for the deliverance of the Holy Land, were to the East nothing less than a scourge and a calamity. The Crusaders, who represented a lower stage of civilization and were inflamed against the Orthodox by intolerance and fanaticism, looted, pillaged, profaned and destroyed everything. Everywhere they left in their wake tokens of their fearful passage. In the Ionian and the Aegean Islands, they deposed the Orthodox bishops, and forced the Greek clergy to submit to Latin bishops. In Cyprus, as we shall see further on, they tied the Orthodox monks to the tails of horses, and thus made them gallop to their death. In Salonica they held orgies. Particularly in Constantinople were outrages committed by the armies of the Fourth Crusade led by Baldwin. They dishonored old men and young girls; they slung the Holy Sacraments out into the streets, and drove donkeys into the Church of Saint Sophia to carry away the looted treasures of the church; they hacked down the diamond-studded altar and set a low woman to sing and dance upon the Patriarch's throne to outrage the holiest feelings of the Eastern Church. The Greek Patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem, in terror of these fierce invasions, were obliged to abandon their dioceses in Syria and Palestine, and to seek refuge within the Byzantine Empire. Eastern Christianity can never forget the behavior of those European barbarians who by their looting and plundering and their sixty years of tyrannical misrule in Constantinople (1204-1261) prepared the way for the destruction of the Byzantine Empire and hastened on its downfall.