Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 188, The Great Schism.

On the morning of July 16th, 1054, three papal representatives left their lodgings in Constantinople

and made their way to the Ahir Sophia. The liturgy was taking place inside the church,

but the three men deliberately interrupted proceedings. They announced their intentions and then

entered the sanctuary, a major no-no in itself, and then placed on the altar a formal decree

of excommunication directed at the Byzantine patriarch.

One of the subdeacons hastily grabbed the document and tried to hand it back to the papal ambassadors

who threw it on the ground. The three men marched for the door, pausing only to shake the dust

from their feet as they left, leaving behind a stunned group of Byzantine clergy.

This incident is commonly referred to as The Great Schism, the moment when the Eastern and Western

churches broke apart, formally recognising that they could no longer respect the practices of the other.

The reason this event has drawn so much attention are the geopolitical consequences which follow,

including the Norman takeover of southern Italy and eventually the sack of Constantinople

by the Crusaders. So what happened here? How did it come to this? And what did it really mean?

Over the past decade, the Byzantine government has been consumed by the Pettianeg Wars

and the financial crisis they provoked. Understandably, this meant that Italy received little imperial attention,

and as you might expect, it is in Italy that relations with the papacy were changing.

There is a complex web of interactions to unpack here, but let's start with the catalyst for

The Great Schism, one of our three new destructive peoples on the scene, the Normans.

We last discussed the Normans back in episode 184. They had already started to seize Italian

forts and lands for themselves, but their true threat was not yet appreciated. In the early

1040s, the Byzantines still perceived them to be merely unruly mercenary troops who were angling

...