came the beginning of the great schism between Constantinople and Rome. No doubt, had it not been for the Norman conquest, which reversed the whole development, these Greek bishops in Italy would have fallen into schism with their new Patriarch. As it was, the Normans prevented that. I do not think we can charge the Greeks in Italy at this time with schism, though we see that many of them were on the high road to it. It is generally difficult to say exactly at what moment an outlying province of the Church becomes schismatical. There is usually a period in which the schism is forming at headquarters, while the provinces hardly, if at all, realize what is happening. At any rate, we can never charge a man with schism till he has broken, and knows he has broken, communion with the Holy See. That does not seem to have happened in Italy or Sicily. In fact, the beginning of the great schism is particularly hard to define in the case of the dependent Byzantine bishoprics.
Did the first schism, of Photius, affect them at all? Certainly, when the synod of 869 deposed Photius, the other Eastern Patriarchs and bishops then declared that they had had no idea of going into schism against the Pope. If they at the time had not also condemned Photius, it was only because they considered that the Pope's sentence alone was enough.[1]
It is even more difficult to define a moment at which the Church in the East became schismatical in the second schism, that of Michael Cerularius in the eleventh century. No Pope has ever excommunicated the Eastern or the Byzantine Church as such. The excommunication of the year 1054 was directed carefully only against Cerularius and his followers. If other bishops in the East have also incurred this excommunication, it is only because, deliberately, they made themselves supporters of the schismatical party at Constantinople.[2] The Patriarch of Antioch, Peter III (1053), though he was in sympathy with Cerularius, certainly did not intend to go into schism with the Pope, nor did he ever do so.[3] In much the same way we may say that the Greeks of Lower Italy and Sicily, though their sympathies were with Constantinople, though many of them had views which would easily have led them into schism, though no doubt they would have been so led in time had the Normans not come, nevertheless were never actually schismatics. They did not, as a matter of fact, break communion with the Holy See. As an example how far some of them went along the
