A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

East-West Conflict Deepens
The conflict between Christian Byzantium and the West deepened over the next
several centuries before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Eastern Church
remained consistently dismayed by what it saw as papal arrogation of greater
jurisdictional authority over all aspects of the Western Church; the clear
implication was that the pope assumed that his jurisdiction should be similarly
accepted in the East. For Constantinople, the pope was little more than the
“Patriarch of Rome” and never had legitimate claim to universal authority over
the entire Christian Church, and never would be allowed to do so.
The struggle for domination thus transformed relatively minor religious
issues into volatile symbols of rivalry. Byzantine Emperor Leo III banned the use
of religious icons in the church in 717 CE in the famous iconoclasm controversy,
in which the Eastern Church came out for a period against all portrayals of
humans in religious art (probably reflecting similar views in Judaism and Islam
as well). The pope in Rome actually attempted to overthrow Leo III over this
issue, and failing, then excommunicated the Eastern patriarch, leading the
Eastern Church to excommunicate the pope in return. This serious rift was later
patched up, but it was symptomatic of bad blood and worse things to come.
In the tenth century, a vicious geopolitical struggle took place over who
would convert the powerful new Bulgarian state to Christianity;
Constantinople’s victory for Orthodoxy was a bitter blow to Rome.
In 1054, the long-simmering theological and political dispute reached the
cataclysmic breaking point in the history of Christianity: Rome and
Constantinople stumbled into the incredible act of mutual excommunication,
marking the start of the “Great Schism” in the Christian Church. The alleged
cause was an unbelievably arcane debate over whether “the Holy Spirit proceeds
directly from the Father,” as Constantinople professed, or, whether the Holy
Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son together” as Rome insisted. Clearly
an abstruse theological issue had become freighted with the weight of centuries
of powerful geopolitical hostility and struggle—a near Cold War. The split has
yet to be healed. The Orthodox Church also rejected the “new” Roman concepts
of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and Rome’s “invention” of the existence
of purgatory—doctrines adopted by Rome many hundreds of years after the time
of Jesus.
Yet even this stunning event of mutual East-West excommunication would
not match the bitter suspicions and ultimately armed conflict between the two
Christian sides during the years of the Crusades (discussed in
chapter 5
) in

---

which Latin (Catholic) crusaders from Europe pillaged the city of
Constantinople itself with incalculable lasting effects. The event was
consummated in 1182 by the immensely emotional so-called Massacre of the
Latins in Constantinople. Anti-Western sentiments ran deep among the general
population, who resented the powerful community of Venetian (Catholic)
merchants who virtually ran the economy of Constantinople. In the ensuing
rioting, a staggering eighty thousand “Latins” were massacred in the city, driving
a further wedge of emotion, blood, and hatred between Rome and
Constantinople.
Today, nearly six hundred years after the Ottoman Turks conquered
Constantinople, this loss of its crown jewel is still remembered and mourned by
the Orthodox world with an intensity not readily appreciated in Europe.
Although Europeans viewed the fall of the city to Islam as a significant setback
to Christianity, they had little stomach for further crusades and precious little
nostalgia or attachment for the old Greek capital of the Eastern Empire. For most
Western Christians, Constantinople and its legacy had come to be seen as little
more than a corrupt Orthodox backwater and a historic anomaly worthy of scant
attention. The poisonous legacy would never be forgotten in the East and would
fatefully affect Russia in particular, as we will see in a later chapter. And who in
the West today really has much sense or awareness of Eastern Christianity?
But Orthodox Christianity in no way perished with the fall of the Eastern
Empire to the Turks; indeed, the patriarch himself remained based in Muslim
Istanbul (even today), from where, with Turkish permission, he continued to
exercise religious, but not secular, authority over portions of the Orthodox world.
Even in collapse, Byzantines maintained such resentment against Rome that they
actually came to feel it was better to be defeated by the Muslim Turks than by
the Christian Latins. For they knew the church would survive and operate under
Muslim rule, as was evident from other Christian areas that had already long
fallen to Muslim power, including the Holy Lands; Orthodoxy would continue to
exist. But conquest by Rome would mean the Latinization of the church—an
abomination—and the end of Orthodoxy forever, a far worse fate. The choice
between domination by Muslim or Latin Christian rule thus remained a no-
brainer for most Orthodox believers.

---