Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/259

Rh shelter Italy from the awful scourge of the Huns—and the success first of Leo, then of Gregory, in stepping into the breach and saving civilisation and the Church, when their professed protector at Constantinople had proved to be an impotent defence. Meanwhile in the East the Church was becoming more and more identified with the empire. Their she was tied hands and feet by the imperial will. Emperors and empresses appointed and deposed patriarchs and bishops. The Byzantine Church was being converted into a department of the highly organised bureaucratic Byzantine Empire. Naturally the West asked. Why should the free Latin Church tie itself down to the servile ways of the subject Greek Church? If the emperor could not protect the Church in the West there was no reason why she should not be independent of his servants in the East. When the pope crowned Charles the Great as emperor at Rome on Christmas Day, 800, he definitely broke with the emperor at Constantinople, in whose eyes the Frank was a usurper. Again the marvellous political insight of Rome proved to be correct. It was useless to look across the Adriatic for protection against the Lombards; then the wise course was to find safety in the rising power across the Alps. But the price for the new alliance had to be paid. Henceforth the papacy, with all its dreams of a universal Church, must content itself in fact with being the dominant influence only in Western churches, and see the other half of Christendom drift wholly out of its sphere of authority.

3. A third influence tending to the severance of the two churches is to be detected in the rivalry between the patriarchates of Rome and Constantinople, and especially in the lofty claims put forth by the papacy. We saw how gravely Gregory the Great had expostulated with John the Faster, when that patriarch had laid claim to the title of "Œcumenical Bishop." Long before this, though not urging precisely the same titular claim, the popes had made great demands on the ground of their succession to the chair of Peter. The council of Sardica ( 344) had