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Lesser Known Byzantine Empire Facts

Khalid Elhassan September 11, 2020 35 min

Byzantine Empire - Constantinople — Procession of Emperor Manuel I Komenos in Constantinople. Imgur

36. The Religious Squabble Behind the West’s Disdain of the Byzantines

The Great Schism. Encyclopedia Britannica

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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.