ABSTRACT
By the churches of the east the pope did not mean the separated churches, the Armenians, Maronites, Jacobites and Copts. The western church regarded these confessions as heretical and, with the exception of the Armenians,2 the holy see had had little contact with any of them in the centuries immediately preceding the crusades and was probably not very well informed about them. The eastern churches to which the pope referred were the Orthodox patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem which, together with that of Rome, were traditionally believed to make up the Catholic church. To this it might be objected that although the papacy had conceived of the church in these terms in the early years of the eleventh century such a view was no longer tenable after the breach between Rome and Constantinople in 1054. The events of that year had indeed had serious consequences for Rome's relations with all the Orthodox churches, not only with that of Constantinople. The patriarch of Antioch was at that time a political subject of the Byzantine emperor, who was also regarded by the Fatimids of Egypt as the natural protector of their Orthodox subjects in the patriarchates
of Alexandria and Jerusalem. But as recent examinations of the period between 1054 and the first crusade have shown, neither Rome nor the Orthodox regarded the breach as final.1 There had been equally serious divisions between the eastern and western churches before, during the Iconoclast controversy of the eighth century and the Photian controversy of the ninth century, neither of which had proved irreparable, and churchmen in the second half of the eleventh century seem to have been hopeful of finding a solution.
