One of the many deplorable results of the great Eastern schism was that from that time the people of Western Europe—that is the nations that were in every way the leaders of civilization—gradually lost sight of their fellow-Christians on the other side of the Adriatic. The Popes never forgot the ancient Churches now cut off from their communion. We shall see how they tried to close up the breach; always from the 11th century to the 20th Rome has schemed, arranged, worked in every possible way for the re-conversion of the Eastern schismatics. And for a time, after the 11th century, people in the West were still conscious of that wonderful city on the Bosphorus, where in half-mythical splendour reigned the great prince whom they now barbarously called the "Greek Emperor."
The Crusades brought Eastern and Western Europe together for a time, but really only as enemies; already, then, these Greeks were almost as strange to our fathers as the Saracens and Turks whom they went out to fight. Then came the fall of Constantinople, and a thick cloud falls over all the Eastern Churches, till in the 19th century at last the first beginnings of Christian independence in the Balkan Peninsula drew people's attention incidentally to the metropolitans and popes who helped the insurrections.
The period from the schism in 1054 to the beginning of Greek independence in 1821 is cut in half by the fall of Constantinople in 1453. During the first half the facts that will most interest Catholics are the attempts at reunion and the Crusades, as far as they affect the Eastern Churches; concerning the period after 1453, one should have some idea of the conditions under which the Christians subject to the Turk lived, of their relations to the Roman See, of perhaps one or two of their theologians during this time, and especially of the great affair of Cyril Lukaris and the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672.
