The Crusades and the Christian East
In brief
The Crusades were Western military expeditions, beginning in 1095, to recover the Holy Land from Muslim rule. They were launched partly in answer to a Byzantine plea for help — yet they did as much to divide Eastern and Western Christians as to unite them against a common foe. Armed pilgrims marching through Orthodox lands, and Latin bishops installed over ancient Eastern sees, turned the schism from a dispute among churchmen into a wound felt by ordinary Christians on the ground.
An appeal, and an army
In 1095 the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, hard pressed by the Seljuk Turks who had overrun much of Asia Minor, appealed to the West for soldiers to help defend Christian lands. What answered his appeal was not what he had expected. At the Council of Clermont that same year, Pope Urban II preached not a mercenary force but a great armed pilgrimage to liberate Jerusalem, promising spiritual reward to those who went. Tens of thousands took the cross.
The First Crusade (1095–1099) did retake Jerusalem, but the meeting of the two Christian worlds was uneasy from the start. To the Byzantines the Western hosts seemed unpredictable and grasping — even the first, disorderly waves of armed pilgrims had left disorder in their wake as they passed through imperial territory. To the Westerners the Greeks seemed slippery and unwilling to fight, more interested in guarding their own frontiers than in the liberation of Jerusalem. Neither read of the other was wholly wrong, and mutual suspicion grew with every campaign that followed.
Two bishops in one see
The deepest damage was quieter than any battle. As the crusaders conquered ancient Christian cities, they installed Latin bishops and patriarchs in sees that already had Orthodox ones — a Latin Patriarch of Antioch from 1100, a Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem from 1099. For the first time the schism took visible, local form: two rival hierarchies, Greek and Latin, claiming the same ancient thrones, each regarding the other as intruders.
Until then the estrangement of East and West had lived mostly among scholars and hierarchs. Now an ordinary Christian in Antioch or Jerusalem could see the division in his own city, in the person of a foreign bishop set over his church. What had been an argument became a fact of daily life. The Latin crusader states planted along the Eastern Mediterranean coast kept this arrangement in place for generations, so that whole communities grew up experiencing the other Church not as a distant sister but as a rival occupying their altars.
The hardening of hearts
Alongside this ran a coarser stream of violence and contempt — the sack of cities, the slaughter that accompanied the taking of Jerusalem in 1099, and a growing Western habit of regarding the Greeks as mere schismatics. The Orthodox, for their part, increasingly saw the Latins as barbarous and rapacious. Each side’s worst fears about the other were being confirmed in the flesh.
It should be said that not every crusader thought this way, and not every Byzantine welcomed schism; there were Westerners who venerated the Eastern saints and Easterners who longed for the reunion of Christendom. But the general drift of the age was toward estrangement, and the armed encounters of the Crusades accelerated it. All of this prepared the way for the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade, when in 1204 a crusading army turned its swords not on Muslim armies but on Constantinople itself. The Crusades did not create the schism between East and West, but more than any council or controversy they carried it out of the studies of theologians and into the memory of a whole people.