The Latin Empire and the Popular Schism

After 1204 the schism ceased to be a quarrel of hierarchs and became the possession of peoples: a Latin emperor and a Venetian patriarch sat in Constantinople, Latin hierarchies were imposed on Greek churches from Cyprus to the Peloponnese, and in 1231 thirteen monks of Kantara were burned for refusing the azymes. This file traces the occupation-era ecclesiastical order — Fourth Lateran’s demand of Greek obedience, the Bulla Cypria, the exiled patriarchate at Nicaea — and why, after it, reunion of hearts became effectively impossible.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

An Empire and a Patriarchate by Conquest

The partition treaty of March 1204 divided the Byzantine world before it was conquered, and its ecclesiastical clause set the pattern: since a Frank (Baldwin of Flanders) took the empire, the Venetians took the Great Church, and the Venetian Thomas Morosini was installed as Latin patriarch of Constantinople — a see created by conquest, uncanonical in Greek eyes and irregular even in Innocent III’s, though he ratified it after protest (the partition treaty and Innocent’s correspondence in Andrea, Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade, Leiden: Brill, 2000; Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453 A.D., Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994, ch. 6). The lawful Greek patriarch, John X Kamateros, fled; his successors resided from 1208 at Nicaea, where the empire-in-exile of the Laskarids kept the Orthodox patriarchate alive until Michael VIII Palaiologos recovered the city in 1261 (Angold, A Byzantine Government in Exile: Government and Society under the Laskarids of Nicaea, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East, 1994, ch. 6).

Rome’s canonical frame for the conquered churches was fixed at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Its constitution 4 (Licet Graecos) deplored Greek “arrogance” — instancing Greek rebaptism-like practices of washing altars after Latin use — and required the Greeks, now returned “to the obedience of the Apostolic See,” to conform like members to the head; constitution 9 allowed parallel rites but firmly under one (Latin) bishop per diocese (Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, constitutions 4 and 9, in Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, London/Washington: Sheed & Ward/Georgetown, 1990). The occupied churches thus faced, for the first time, the papal claims not as a letter from afar but as an administration: Greek bishops displaced or required to swear obedience, Latin tithes imposed, and the interpolated Creed — everything the polemics had argued about — now backed by feudal lordship (Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East, 1994, ch. 6; Runciman, The Eastern Schism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955, conclusion).

Cyprus and the Thirteen Monks of Kantara

Cyprus, seized by Richard I in 1191 and given a Latin hierarchy from 1196, shows the system at its most documented. The Greek bishoprics were reduced in number and subordinated; the constitution known as the Bulla Cypria of Pope Alexander IV (1260) fixed the arrangement — Greek bishops retained under oath of obedience to the Latin ordinary, the Greek archbishopric abolished on the death of its holder (Schabel, Greeks, Latins, and the Church in Early Frankish Cyprus, Farnham: Ashgate Variorum, 2010, with the documents; Coureas, The Latin Church in Cyprus, 1195–1312, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997).

Within that system fell the martyrdom the Orthodox Church remembers on 19 May. In 1228 two monks of the monastery of Kantara, John and Konon, with their brethren — thirteen in all — publicly maintained that the Latin azyme Eucharist was contrary to the apostolic tradition. Examined by the Latin archbishop’s court as heretics for this teaching, they were imprisoned for some three years and, refusing to recant, were condemned; in 1231 they were tortured and burned. The Greek account, a near-contemporary Diegesis (narrative) of the thirteen holy fathers, presents them as martyrs for the Orthodox Eucharist; the Latin records treat the affair as a routine heresy process (the Diegesis and the documentary dossier are edited and analyzed in Schabel, “Martyrs and Heretics, Intolerance of Intolerance: The Execution of Thirteen Monks in Cyprus in 1231,” in his Greeks, Latins, and the Church in Early Frankish Cyprus, Farnham: Ashgate Variorum, 2010; Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East, 1994, ch. 6, on the episode’s significance). The symmetry with 1054 is exact and terrible: what Humbert and Cerularius had exchanged on paper — anathemas over leavened and unleavened bread — was now exacted in fire. For the Greek world the thirteen of Kantara became what the polemical lists could never be: proof in blood that the Latin communion, as actually administered, required the Greeks to renounce their faith (Schabel, “Martyrs and Heretics,” 2010; per §3.5, the martyrs’ veneration rests on the thirteenth-century Diegesis, the earliest attestation, and the Latin trial context it corroborates).

[Disputed: details of the Kantara martyrdom. The Diegesis and the Latin-side evidence agree on the core (examination over the azymes, imprisonment, execution by burning in 1231), but the account of the tortures and some names and dates rest on the Greek narrative alone, which is a martyrdom text with hagiographic conventions; Schabel's study weighs what each source can bear (Schabel, "Martyrs and Heretics," 2010). The commemoration date of 19 May is the received liturgical date.]

Hardening on Both Sides

Occupation radicalized the Greek church as polemic never had. Before 1204 the canonist Theodore Balsamon, writing in Antioch’s name, had already ruled that Latins should not commune at Greek altars unless they renounced their errors — a hard line then still contested (Balsamon’s responsa to Mark of Alexandria, in Rhalles and Potles, Syntagma ton theion kai hieron kanonon, Athens, 1852–59, vol. 4; discussed in Runciman, The Eastern Schism, 1955, conclusion, and Kolbaba, The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). After 1204 the hard line became the common instinct. Anti-Latin literature multiplied and coarsened; the azymes and the Filioque fused with the memory of desecrated altars; and Greek identity itself began to be defined against the Latin (Kolbaba, The Byzantine Lists, 2000; eadem, “The Legacy of Humbert and Cerularius,” in Porphyrogenita, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003; Angold, The Fourth Crusade: Event and Context, Harlow: Longman, 2003). On the Latin side, the crusade’s canonists drew the complementary lesson: the Greeks were schismatics whose reduction to obedience was a legitimate object of holy war — a doctrine applied again in the crusading projects against Nicaea and, later, in the aggressions the failed unions were meant to buy off (Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East, 1994, chs. 6–7; see Lyons 1274).

Runciman’s verdict, written as a historian’s and received by the Orthodox as simple truth, closes his study: the crusades, sent to save Eastern Christendom, ended by completing its alienation; after the Fourth Crusade the schism was no longer a matter of hierarchs and formulae but of two peoples, and “the sack of Constantinople” fixed in the Greek Christian soul a memory that made talk of union thereafter ring hollow (Runciman, The Eastern Schism, 1955, conclusion; cf. Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed., Penguin, 1993, ch. 3: after 1204 the schism was consummated in fact). The proof is the history that follows: when emperors twice signed unions with Rome — 1274 and 1439 — the Church’s body, remembering 1204, refused them (see Section 07).

Assessed from within the Church (METHODOLOGY §4.1), the era’s meaning is this. Schism in the strict sense — broken communion between hierarchies over doctrine — might in principle have been healed by hierarchies agreeing on doctrine, as 879–880 showed. But 1204 and the Latin occupation converted the schism into something no signature could reach: an experienced persecution, with martyrs, in which the papal claims and the azymes were no longer abstractions but the terms of an oath extracted under lordship. From then on, any union negotiated at the top would confront a body of faithful for whom Latin communion meant Kantara and the harlot on the synthronon — and a Church whose instinct that this is what the papal doctrine means in practice was not prejudice but memory (Papadakis and Meyendorff, The Christian East, 1994; Runciman, The Eastern Schism, 1955, conclusion). The strategic context of 1204 belongs to the historians; its ecclesial consequence belongs to the story of the schism as its point of no return.

See Also

References

  • Andrea, Alfred J. Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade. Leiden: Brill, 2000. (The partition treaty; Innocent III’s correspondence on Morosini.)
  • Papadakis, Aristeides, with John Meyendorff. The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994. Chs. 6–7. (The Latin empire and patriarchates; Cyprus; the hardening.)
  • Fourth Lateran Council (1215), constitutions 4 (Licet Graecos) and 9. In Norman Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1. London/Washington: Sheed & Ward/Georgetown University Press, 1990. (Rome’s canonical frame for the Greeks.)
  • Angold, Michael. A Byzantine Government in Exile: Government and Society under the Laskarids of Nicaea (1204–1261). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. (The patriarchate at Nicaea.)
  • Angold, Michael. The Fourth Crusade: Event and Context. Harlow: Longman, 2003. (Byzantine consequences.)
  • Schabel, Chris. Greeks, Latins, and the Church in Early Frankish Cyprus. Farnham: Ashgate Variorum, 2010. Esp. “Martyrs and Heretics, Intolerance of Intolerance: The Execution of Thirteen Monks in Cyprus in 1231.” (The Kantara dossier and its analysis.)
  • Coureas, Nicholas. The Latin Church in Cyprus, 1195–1312. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997. (The Latin regime; the Bulla Cypria context.)
  • Rhalles, G. A., and M. Potles. Syntagma ton theion kai hieron kanonon. 6 vols. Athens, 1852–59. Vol. 4. (Balsamon’s responsa on communion with the Latins.)
  • Kolbaba, Tia M. The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000; and “The Legacy of Humbert and Cerularius,” in Porphyrogenita. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. (The post-1204 hardening of anti-Latin literature.)
  • Runciman, Steven. The Eastern Schism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Conclusion. (The completion of the schism in the peoples.)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. Ch. 3. (Synthesis.)