Latin-Greek disputes

The early history of the church was full of divergent views on theological matters. This is understandable, there being no officially recognized font of authority and Christians were found throughout the empire. New ideas caught on in one place and were rejected in others. By the third century, the bishops were regularly meeting in church councils to hammer out their differences. When Constantine recognized Christianity (he was not actually baptized a Christian until he was on his deathbed), he was the emperor of the western half of the empire. He had to convince his fellow emperor in the east to also tolerate Christianity, and eventually had to defeat him in a civl war. Constantine's base was Italy and Rome. The Roman bishops took this advantage, and others, to make Rome the center of Christianity. The disputes with the bishops in the east came to a head in 1054 when the Patriarch of Constantinople and a visiting representative of the Pope got into an argument which led to a formal break between the eastern and western churches that was not healed until 1965. Thereafter, the eastern "Orthodox") church refused to recognize the supremacy of the bishop of Rome. This one event in 1054 is a convenient date, but actually the split had existed earlier, and there was a great deal of cooperation later. The basic problem was that the "Latin" and "Greek" Christians had drifted apart just as had the two halves of the Roman empire. In the west, Roman rulers were replaced by Germans and the Greeks in the east viewed that development with a great deal of disdain and not a little alarm. The Greek misgivings over the "Frankish" (as they called the Germans) kings became real when, in 1204, an army of western crusaders, on their way to liberate Jerusalem from the Moslems, stopped to pillage Constantinople (in payment to the Venetians, who had supplied transport and wanted their trading rivals in Constantinople taken down a notch or two).