History

After the 8th century, most of the area where Christianity was born remained under the rule of Muslims - the Orthodox patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem kept only a shadow of their former glory. Constantinople, however, remained, during most of the Middle Ages, by far the most important centre of Christendom. The famous Byzantine missionaries, Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, translated Scripture and the liturgy into Old Church Slavonic in about 864, and many Slavic nations were converted to Orthodox Christianity. The Bulgarians, a people of mixed Slavic and Turkic origin, embraced it in 864. The Russians, baptized in 988, remained in the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the patriarchate of Constantinople until 1448. The Serbs received ecclesiastical independence in 1219.

The Schism

Between Constantinople and Rome, tensions periodically arose after the 4th century. After the fall of Rome (476) to Germanic invaders, the Roman pope was the only guardian of Christian universalism in the West. He began more explicitly to attribute his primacy to Rome's being the burial place of Saint Peter, whom Jesus had called the "rock" on which the church was to be built (see Matthew 16:18). The Eastern Christians respected that tradition and attributed to the Roman bishop a measure of moral and doctrinal authority. They believed, however, that the canonical and primatial rights of individual churches were determined above all by historical considerations. Thus, the patriarchate of Constantinople understood its own position to be determined exclusively by the fact that Constantinople, the "New Rome", was the seat of the Roman emperor and the Senate.

Eventually, however, conflicts led to permanent schism. In the 7th century the universally accepted Creed (ie..Nicea-Constantinople Creed was interpolated in Spain with the Latin word "filioque" (ie.., meaning "and from the Son"), thus rendering the creed as "I believe ...... in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son". The interpolation, initially opposed by the popes, was promoted in Europe by Charlemagne (crowned emperor in 800) and his successors. Eventually, it was also accepted in Rome in about 1014. The Eastern church, however, considered the interpolation heretical. Moreover, other issues became controversial, secondary in themselves, these conflicts could not be resolved because the two sides followed different criteria of judgment. The papacy considered itself the ultimate judge in matters of faith and discipline, whereas the East invoked the authority of the councils, where the local churches spoke as equals.

It is often assumed that the anathemas (ie..ecommunications) exchanged in Constantinople in 1054 between Patriarch Michael Cerularius and the papal delegates marked the final schism. The schism, however, actually took the form of a gradual estrangement, beginning well before 1054 and culminating in the sacking of Constantinople by Western Crusaders in 1204.

In the late medieval period, several attempts made at reunion, particularly in Lyons (1274) and in Florence (1438-1439), ended in failure. The papal claims to ultimate supremacy could not be reconciled with the conciliar principle of Orthodoxy, and the religious differences were aggravated by cultural and political misunderstandings.

After the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman government recognized the Ecumenical Patriarch of that city as both the religious and the political spokesman for the entire Christian population of the empire. The patriarchate of Constantinople, although still retaining its honorary primacy in the Orthodox Church, ended as an ecumenical institution in the 19th century when, with the liberation of the Orthodox peoples from Ottoman rule, a succession of autocephalous churches were set up in Greece (1833), Romania (1864), Bulgaria (1871), and Serbia (1879).

The Orthodox Church in Russia declared its independence from Constantinople in 1448. In 1589 the Patriarchate of Moscow was established and formally recognized by Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople. For the Russian Church and the tsars, Moscow had become the so-called third Rome, the heir to the imperial supremacy of ancient Rome and Byzantium. The Patriarchate of Moscow never had even the sporadic autonomy of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire.

Except for the brief reign of Patriarch Nikon in the mid-17th century, the Patriarchs of Moscow and the Russian church were entirely subordinate to the tsars. In 1721 Tsar Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate altogether, and thereafter the church was governed through the imperial administration.  The patriarchate was reestablished in 1917, at the time of the Russian Revolution, but the church was violently persecuted by the Communist government. As the Soviet regime became less repressive and finally broke up in 1991, the church regained its vitality. (The Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe had a similar but foreshortened history, restricted by Communist governments after World War II in 1945, but regaining their authority in the 1990s).