schismatics" (Phil. iii. 2), also "hypocrites and liars, who forbid marriage and abstain from foods that God has made"[1] (1 Tim. iv. 1–3).
Cerularius's third move was to make it quite clear that he meant war to the knife. There were a number of Latin churches at Constantinople; the Emperor's Varangian guard, who were all Norsemen and Enghshmen, had one, so also the merchants from Amalphi and the Magyars; there were some Latin monasteries, too, and the Papal Apocrisarius (Nuntius at the Court) had a Latin chapel in his house. Cerularius has all these churches shut up, even the Apocrisarius's chapel, in defiance of the universal respect paid to embassies, and he tells all the Latins in the city to stop being Azymites and to use the Byzantine rite. His Chancellor, Nikephoros, who of course believed in the Real Presence just as we do, bursts open Latin tabernacles and tramples on the Blessed Sacrament, because it is consecrated in Azyme.[2]
One wonders why Cerularius had waited so long before making his attack. He had become Patriarch in 1043. There had been no provocation meanwhile; nothing whatever had happened to irritate him. And now suddenly, after ten years, in 1053, he behaves like this. The only explanation is that he had been waiting for an opportune moment, when the Pope would be in as weak a position as possible. And that moment had come. The Pope's army had just been badly defeated by the Normans at Civitella (1053) and he himself had only escaped because of the reverence that these Normans felt for the person of St. Peter's successor. It is true that the Normans were even more the enemies of Byzantium; it is also true that a feeling of chivalry prevents decent people from launching a wanton attack on any one just when he is in trouble; but of course Cerularius cared nothing about that.
Leo IX then answers the letter of Leo of Achrida.[3] He
