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RETHINKING THE SCHISM OF 1054: AUTHORITY, HERESY, AND THE LATIN RITE By BRETT WHALEN In the year 1053, at the request of the Byzantine patriarch, Michael Kerullarios (1043-58), Archbishop Leo of Ochrid denounced the "priesthood of the Franks and the reverend pope" for observing Jewish rites through their celebration of the Eucharist with azymes, the same kind of unleavened bread used for Passover. Leo made these accusations in a letter addressed to John, archbishop of Trani in southern Italy, a region of coexisting Latin and Greek religious traditions that had been destabilized by the recent invasion of the Normans.1 The epistle was subsequently passed along to papal confidante Humbert of Silva Candida, who translated it into Latin and presented it to Pope Leo IX (1048-54). Around that same time, the two churchmen also heard news that the Greek patriarch had anathematized all those observing the Latin rite in Constantinople. A flurry of inconclusive correspondence ensued between the pope, the patriarch, and the Byzantine ruler, Constantine IX Monomachos (1042-55). In response to this persistent crisis, Pope Leo dispatched a legation to Constantinople that included Humbert, Frederick of Lorraine, and Peter of Amalfi. On 16 July 1054, after a series of acrimonious debates, the legates deposited a bull of excommunication against Kerullarios and his supporters on the high altar at Hagia Sophia. The patriarch responded in kind by excommunicating Humbert and his followers.2 For generations of modern scholars, these events were the "thunderbolt" that caused the formal and lasting division of the Latin and Greek churches.3 Although this evaluation of the eleventh-century confrontation 1 Both the Greek version and Latin translation of this letter are published in Cornelius Will, ed., Acta el scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae Graecae et Latinae saeculo undécimo composita extant (Leipzig, 1861), 56-64. On the Norman invasion of southern Italy and its impact on relations between the Latin and Greek churches, see Richard Mayne, "East and West in 1054," Cambridge Historical Journal 11 (1954): 133-48, and Peter Herde, "Das Papsttum und die griechische Kirche in Süditalien vom 11. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert," Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittlealters 26 (1970): 1-46. This article, which first took shape as part of my Stanford University dissertation, owes a great deal to the insights and assistance of Philippe Buc, Stanford University, Brad Gregory, University of Notre Dame, and Jehangir Malegam, George Washington University. 2 For this exchange of letters and the bull of excommunication, see Will, Acta et scripta, 65-92, 153-54. 3 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (London, 1994), 2:659. There is a rich and sometimes confessional tradition of scholarship on the schism of 1054. Among the more important titles, see the analysis of Louis ? TRADITIO between Borne and Constantinople has been greatly tempered and qualified over the last fifty years, the events of 1054 still assume a place of prominence in the master narrative of Christendom's division. "It was in 1054," noted Bichard Southern about the strained relations between the churches, "that all the elements of disunity which had come to light over the centuries were first concentrated into a single event."4 Even Yves Congar, who persuasively argued that the "estrangement" of the two Christian peoples was the product of a slow cultural, political, and religious alienation rather than the result of a single event, still appraised the date of 1054 as "a fatal one, since it seems to mark one of the greatest misfortunes that have ever befallen Christianity."? To the present day, historians of medieval Europe commonly invoke the schism of 1054 as a symbol of the lasting divergence between the Catholic and Orthodox churches. This development, in turn, contributed to the "birth" or "making" of a distinctly Latin or Western Christian Europe, one which had turned its back on the Eastern empire and the Greek church.6 In this present article, it is not my intention to revisit the origins and causes of the schism between the Latin and Greek churches, or to determine precisely where 1054 fits into the long-term trajectory of their division. Instead, I would...

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