The Balkans, Late 12th Century

Abstract

In 1054 the formerly unified European Christian church was torn into two halves — western Roman Catholic and eastern Orthodox — by the Great Schism. The break was the culmination of centuries of rivalry between both the Roman papacy and the patriarchate of Constantinople for spiritual supremacy within the church and the Byzantine and Holy Roman emperors for secular hegemony over a theoretical, and nonexistent, universal Christian world state. Although technically a religious matter, the schism sealed a cultural division between east and west expressed in mutual political animosity and ethnoreligious bigotry, the consequences of which have persisted into the present.