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Balkans and Anatolia (11th–12th c.)Religion

East–West Schism: the excommunications of 1054

On 16 July 1054 papal legates led by Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida laid a bull excommunicating Patriarch Michael Cerularius on the altar of Hagia Sophia; days later a synod in Constantinople anathematized the legates. The mutual condemnations became the conventional date of the split between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which has never been healed.

Date
16 July 1054exact dateDate in the Julian calendar
Place
Hagia Sophia, Constantinopletoday: Istanbul, Turkey · Balkans and Anatolia
Participants
Humbert of Silva Candida, Michael I Cerularius, Pope Leo IX, Byzantine Empire, Papal States
Threads
Balkans and Anatolia (11th–12th c.)
Also known as
Great Schism; Schism of 1054; Великая схизма; Разделение церквей; Великий раскол; Charta excommunicationis

Rome and Constantinople had long differed over the authority of the pope, the addition of the Filioque to the Creed, the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist and other customs, and over jurisdiction in southern Italy, where the Normans and the papacy were imposing Latin bishops and the Latin rite on Greek churches. In 1053 Cerularius closed the Latin churches of Constantinople, and Archbishop Leo of Ohrid — at the patriarch's instigation, according to J. B. Bury — attacked Latin practices in a letter to the bishop of Trani. Leo IX, who needed the emperor's alliance against the Normans after they had defeated his army at Civitate in June 1053, sent three legates — Humbert, Frederick of Lorraine (the future Pope Stephen IX) and Archbishop Peter of Amalfi — with letters asserting the primacy of Rome and rebuking Cerularius for calling himself ecumenical patriarch.

Emperor Constantine IX received the legates warmly, but the patriarch refused to deal with them. Leo IX died on 19 April 1054, and with his death, as many historians hold, their authority lapsed. Nevertheless, on Saturday 16 July, as the liturgy was about to begin, Humbert and his colleagues placed on the altar a charter excommunicating Cerularius, Leo of Ohrid and their followers. On 20 July a synod under Cerularius excommunicated the three legates — only them, not the Church of Rome — and on 24 July the anathema was proclaimed in Hagia Sophia.

Contemporaries did not see the episode as a final rupture: relations continued, and in the 1080s a synod in Constantinople told Alexios I that no formal decision to break with Rome had ever been taken. The schism hardened gradually — with the crusades, the rival Latin and Greek patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem, and above all the sack of Constantinople in 1204 — and historians have proposed other dates for it, from 1009 to 1484. On 7 December 1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I lifted the anathemas of 1054, but full communion has not been restored.

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105411th century

Sources

  1. Wikipedia (English): East–West Schism
  2. Wikipedia (English): Michael I Cerularius
  3. Wikipedia (English): Humbert of Silva Candida
  4. Wikipedia (Russian): Разделение Католической и Православной церквей
  5. Wikipedia (Russian): Михаил Кируларий
  6. Chadwick H. East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church: From Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence. — Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  7. Bayer A. Spaltung der Christenheit: Das sogenannte Morgenländische Schisma von 1054. — Köln: Böhlau, 2002.
  8. Wikidata: Q51648