36. The Religious Squabble Behind the West’s Disdain of the Byzantines
Religion played no small part in the West’s disdain of the Byzantine Empire. As the popes in Rome increasingly asserted their independence from the emperors in Constantinople, a fissure began to emerge between Western and Eastern Christianity.
That eventually led to the Great Schism in 1054, a final break between the Roman Catholic Church in the West, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the east. One of history’s ironies is that it is highly unlikely that either the Catholic Church, or the West for that matter, would have survived without the Byzantines.