ABSTRACT
The visual and occasional verbal signals emanating from papal and western imperial circles are tantamount to the storm clouds of weather systems in the process of formation. Given the dearth of priests and other persons duly ordained to perform religious offices, any more or less credible dispensers of the sacraments were liable to be accepted, from whichever quarter they might appear, east or west. Western enthusiasm for the Holy Sepulchre differed in accent and terminology from easterners’ veneration of ‘the holy places’ and ‘the church of the Anastasis’. Gregory the Cellarer highlights the youthful Lazaros’ yearning for ‘the holy places of Christ’s passions’ and treats the arrival of monks from Jerusalem in western Asia Minor as more or less routine. Religious ‘orthodoxy’ itself appears more labile than previously supposed, with the ‘thunderclap’ of excommunications between Michael Keroularios and the papal legates liable to relegation to the level of a freak storm, virtually a ‘non-event’.
