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Rh forgot the Bishops of Rome. It was therefore natural that the Roman Bishops should be jealous of the prerogatives and honours of their brethren of Constantinople, and that jealousy betrayed itself in the relations necessary to be preserved between them. It was no less natural that the Bishops of Constantinople should show some degree of arrogance toward those of Rome, who had merely the semblance of a primacy and the memories of a glory that each day left more dim.

Such was the beginning of the struggles between the sees of Rome and Constantinople during the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, and the motive that impelled the Roman Bishops to aid in the establishment of a new Western empire, in which, thanks to the new emperors, they might so enlarge their prerogatives, that they should eclipse those of the see of Constantinople.

We must not lose sight of these general considerations if we would comprehend the history of the Papacy and those struggles which led to the rupture between the Eastern and Western churches.

No one denies that the emperors of Constantinople strove to increase the influence of the bishops of that city. They issued numberless decrees for this purpose; and the Emperor Zeno even made the twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon a law of the state. The heads of the new empire of the East thought that they were adding to their own glory when they surrounded the see of their capital with splendour and power. In consequence of his position, the Bishop of Constantinople was the sole medium of intercourse not only between them and the other Oriental, but also the Western bishops. He became so powerful, that there grew up a custom to choose him from the members of the imperial or the most illustrious families.