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Rh conquered by the Normans and made subject to Rome. The final breach came from Rome itself. On July 16, 1054, two Legates of the Pope laid on the altar of S. Sophia the act of excommunication which severed the Patriarch from the communion of the West, and condemned what were asserted to be seven deadly heresies of the Eastern Church." It is hardly necessary to point out all the inaccuracies of this account. The Normans did not conquer Apulia till Roger II (1105–1154); it had always been ecclesiastically subject to Rome. Cerularius's grievance was not the Filioque but Azyme bread. The final breach came from Constantinople. There were three Legates; they did not accuse the Eastern Church of any heresies.

It is because such travesties are all that people seem to have generally heard about the greatest calamity that ever befel Christendom, and especially because of the unfailing assumption that Rome must have been the aggressor, that these two chapters contain so much detail about a story that is itself neither very interesting nor at all edifying.

The story of the final schism in the 11th century is a much worse case of Byzantine arrogance and intolerance than the story of Photius. In 1053 Michael Cerularius suddenly, for no reason whatever except apparently for some private scheme of ambition, declares war against Rome and the Latin West. He makes one of his metropolitans—Leo of Achrida—send an offensive letter to a Latin bishop; himself publishes over the East a treatise against Latins, and shuts all the Latin churches in his patriarchate. The Emperor, Constantine IX, wants peace. The Pope, St. Leo IX, sends three Legates to Constantinople; but Cerularius will have nothing to do with them, and has already struck the Pope's name off his diptychs. At last, in 1054, the Legates lay a bull of excommunication against (not the Byzantine Church but) Cerularius and his adherents on the altar of the Hagia Sophia. Cerularius orders all the other Eastern patriarchs to remove the