الاثنين، 7 أغسطس 2023

Download PDF | Joseph Gill, Byzantium And The Papacy, 1198 - 1400 Rutgers University Press (1979)

Download PDF | Joseph Gill, Byzantium And The Papacy, 1198 - 1400 Rutgers University Press (1979)

358 Pages



Preface

Several years ago I published two books on the history of Greco-Latin relations during the last fifty years of the Byzantine Empire, with a detailed account of the Council of Florence. Thereby I recorded the end of an epoch, which itself was the result and culmination of a beginning and a middle. The beginning and much of the middle had been briefly but adequately covered by G. Every in his Byzantine Patriarchate 451-1204. S. Runciman in his racy The Eastern Schism examined again, but more in detail, the eleventh and twelfth centuries. That left the two centuries before a.p. 1400 in need of closer examination. That gap I am filling in this volume.































I am not the first who has set his hand to this task. In 1903 W. Norden published his Das Papsttum und Byzanz with the subtitle Die Trennung der beiden Mdadchte und das Problem ihrer Wiedervereinigung. It was a scholarly work covering the relations between the papacy and the Eastern Church from the second half of the eleventh century to 1453, though the period from the early fourteenth century to the end is sketched rather than examined in detail. The book has lately been reprinted, but, although a very great deal of new and relevant information has come forth in the last seventy years, it was not brought up to date as it deserved to be. It remains, however, a valuable work in spite of its age and of its noticeable bias against the papacy. There is no other general survey of church relations during the last centuries of the Byzantine Empire, though there have been several excellent monographs and many instructive articles on individuals and particular situations. Most of the books treat primarily of political history. Many of the articles, especially those of V. Grumel, A.A., and V. Laurent, A.A., deal directly with ecclesiastical affairs.




































Most outstanding events have occasioned a significant monograph. The thirteenth century opened with an episode of primary importance, the Fourth Crusade. Its instigator, Pope Innocent III, has been studied from every aspect and in many languages, and his character variously assessed, with a tendency, as the years have passed, towards a more sympathetic appraisal.' Inevitably he figures also in the general histories of the crusades, of which there have been several in the last few years,’ and in other studies confined to discussing in particular the part he played in the Fourth Crusade.’ The political history of the Latin Empire of Constantinople has been told by J. Longnon,‘ and the events that ensued when the Greeks recovered their empire are narrated in two excellent studies, published almost simultaneously, the one, S. Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers (Camb., 1958), viewing the history more from a Western viewpoint, the other, D.J. Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus and the West (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), rather with an Eastern eye. Very recently M. Angold has published his researches into A Byzantine Government in Exile (Oxford, 1974), i.e., the Kingdom of Nicaea, but, though he has a long chapter on relations within it between Church and State, he makes no mention of the Church’s relations with the papacy.




























 On the other hand, a little more than a decade ago B. Roberg produced a work of ecclesiastical history on the Council of Lyons very relevant to the subject-matter of this book.’ A. Laiou (Constantinople and the Latins: The Foreign Policy of Andronicus IT (1282-1328) [Cambridge, Mass., 1972]), U. Bosch (Andronicus III. Palaeologus [Amsterdam 1965]), G. Weiss (Johannes Kantakuzenos— Aristocrat, Staatsmann, Kaiser und Ménch—in der Gesellschaftsentwicklung von Byzanz im 14 Jahrhundert [Wiesbaden, 1969]), D. Nicol (The Last Centuries of Byzantium 1261-1453 [London, 1972]), and J.W. Barker (Manuel IT Palaeologus [1391-1435]: A Study in Late Byzantine Statesmanship [New Brunswick, N.J., 1968]) in their political histories include naturally some reference to Church relations. O. Halecki’s study, Un Empereur de Byzance a Rome (Warsaw, 1930), is purely church history. It is an excellent book and has left little for later enquirers to add to the story of John V’s direct contacts with the papacy.



























The ecclesiastical history of the thirteenth century and of the first half of the fourteenth century is not lacking in published sources. For the Greeks, George Acropolites described the events of most of the thirteenth century, but he rarely mentions ecclesiastical matters. George Pachymeres wrote the histories of Michael Palaeologus and his son Andronicus, and, being a cleric, he dilated on the fortunes of the Church, but of the Church at home rather than abroad, and he says little about relations with Rome. In the fourteenth century Nicephorus Gregoras was closely involved in Church events, but as a protagonist in the purely Greek hesychastic controversy. John Cantacuzenus, emperor then monk, is mainly concerned to defend his own actions. But if these writers say little about relations with the papacy, they are generous in their descriptions of the home background of their Church against which the contacts with the papacy occurred.



















Much might have been hoped for from imperial and patriarchal archives, but they no longer exist.* The political Regesten published by F. Dolger for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the Actes des Patriarches of the thirteenth century edited by V. Laurent have each less than two thousand entries. On the other hand, the registers of the letters of the popes of the period have all been published and they are very rich—e.g., for Gregory IX (1227-41) there are 6,183 items and for John XXII (1316-34) no less than 64,421. :




















So, it is not surprising that more information can be gleaned about negotiations for Church union, even those initiated by Constantinople, from papal archives than from Greek archives. The papal archives still have the originals of a few of the more solemn documents received from Byzantium. The registers of papal letters preserve, but only very occasionally, translations of communications from the emperor or patriarch of Constantinople. The same registers, however, contain—with the few exceptions of when a whole volume has been lost—copies of all letters sent out by the Curia.















































 These letters are very valuable, not only because they give papal replies, but because they preface each reply with a résumé of the letter that is being answered. Such records are nearly as useful as the original Greek documents, for the standard of accuracy of the résumés is very high, to judge from the rare examples of originals still extant for comparison. It is, therefore, inevitable that in this book papal documents are quoted or referred to very frequently. This may give the impression that the point of view of the Latin Church is being presented more often or more urgently than that of the Greeks. That is not really the case. Papal documents, in fact, are frequently the only source in existence and they are often as mucha record of Greek diplomacy as of Latin.









































It is, then, from documents of various sorts, enriched by the many insights furnished by learned books and articles written about them, that this history has been written. But, it should be noted, this study is not a political history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is not even a history of the Latin Church or a history of the Greek Church during that period. It isa history of the relations between the two Churches and, since these almost always were concerned with the union of the two Churches, it may be said to be a history of the negotiations about ecclesiastical union from 1198 to 1400. Union of the Churches, however, though eminently desirable in itself and indeed desired by both East and West for its own sake, was usually a live issue only when political circumstances brought it into prominence. The conquest of Constantinople seemed to Innocent III, but not to the Greeks, to have united the Churches, and he acted accordingly.







































 When Michael VIII Palaeologus regained the Byzantine capital in 1261, union of the Churches was his best bargaining counter to restrain Latin projects of reconquest. In the fourteenth century union was inevitably linked with requests for Latin aid to check the advance of the Turks. So, political considerations cannot be excluded from this ecclesiastical history, and they are introduced insofar as they seem necessary to portray the relations between the Churches within their historical context.


Joseph Gill, S.J.

Campion Hall Oxfor



















Chapter I The Twelfth Century

By the beginning of the twelfth century both the Roman Church and the Byzantine state had attained stability after a period of weakness. If it seems strange to compare the eastern state with the Western Church, it should be borne in mind that the Byzantine Church and the Byzantine state were much more of a single entity than was the Western Church, personified as it was in the papacy, and the many independent and often hostile kingdoms of the West.' The firmness of the reforming pope Gregory VII (1073-85) bore fruit in the Concordat of Worms (25 September 1122) and relieved the church of much of the heavy weight of secular domination. Emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118) by heroic efforts checked the rapid decline of the Byzantine Empire. He repelled a determined Norman attack on Corfu and the Greek mainland launched from Italy, defeated the Pechenegs to the north, and checked the advance of the Turks in Asia Minor.









































 In the process he took two steps in his relations with the West whose baleful consequences he did not foresee. To withstand the Norman attack of Robert Guiscard, in return for the support of its fleet, Alexius gave Venice a series of commercial privileges in Byzantine ports that could never be rescinded. This debilitated the commercial activity of Byzantium itself, and ultimately, when Genoa enjoyed at least equal privileges, led to the utter decline of the Byzantine fleet and to Constantinople’s dependence on foreign ships for its food. The other fateful step was Alexius’s request for aid from Pope Urban II which occasioned the crusades, in consequence of which contacts and accompanying frictions between East and West were suddenly multiplied enormously.


































The very first crusade illustrated the danger. As soon as the crusading armies reached Constantinople, Alexius and the western leaders differed before Alexius could induce them to agree to restore to him all territories — they might capture that had previously been parts of the Byzantine Empire. Bohemond, the son of Alexius’s old enemy Guiscard, took Antioch (1098) and, claiming that the imperial forces had betrayed him by leaving him at the time of his greatest need during the siege, refused to surrender the city to the emperor. Some years later Bohemond returned to the West where he toured the courts of Europe disseminating stories of Byzantine perfidy and laying the foundations for western distrust of the Greeks. Bohemond then directed another Norman attack on the empire but was easily defeated and, according to the terms of the Treaty of Devol (1108), was forced to acknowledge Alexius as his suzerain and to hold Antioch as an imperial fief. But Bohemond never returned to the East.





























The presence of Latin crusaders in Syria and Palestine also brought the churches into contact. Of the five patriarchates, three—Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch—were situated within the territories occupied by the Saracens. Except during one short period, the Muslims had not molested the Christians’ organization and practice, and the Greeks with their patriarchs and the other Christian bodies continued in their normal peaceful existence. The arrival of the Latins brought a new element. Alexandria came into western hands only spasmodically during short periods of active warfare, so there was little occasion for religious contact. When the crusaders took Jerusalem, the patriarchal throne was vacant and they filled it with a Latin. Antioch’s Greek patriarch, John, remained in residence when Bohemond occupied the city, and for a few years the papal legate Adhemar and John both resided there. After the legate’s death, the Greek patriarch was thought too sympathetic with the Greek emperor whom Bohemond was defying. Tension increased until John left the city and took refuge in Constantinople. 






































There he and his successors, elected and consecrated in the Greek capital, remained except for short periods of détente, as a reminder of Latin intransigence more stringent than the fanaticism of the Muslims. In their stead Latin patriarchs were installed. The offense the Greeks felt at the presence of a Latin patriarch in Antioch can be gauged from the fact that a clause of the Treaty of Devol between Alexius and Bohemond stipulated that the patriarch of Antioch should be ‘‘one whom your Majesties shall appoint from among [the personnel of] the Great Church of Constantinople.’’

























































After a long and successful reign Alexius I died and was succeeded by his son John (1118-43), whom ‘‘the verdict of contemporaries and posterity has proclaimed as the greatest of the Comneni.’’? Like his father, John was always aware of the Norman danger from Sicily; he cultivated friendship with the Hohenstaufen princes of Germany and, in spite of his endeavor to lessen the privileges of Venice in Byzantium, in 1126 he had to renew the old treaty. Nevertheless John put an end forever to the attacks of the Pechenegs, imposed himself on Serbia, and was on the point of attacking Antioch at the time of his death. His son Manuel I (1143-80) energetically continued and extended the same general policies. To strengthen the alliance with Germany against Sicily, he married the sister-in-law of the Hohenstaufen Conrad III, a tie which confirmed his personal admiration for many western chivalrous institutions, so that his court took on a western aspect. In addition he filled high posts, especially in the army, with westerners. But the Second Crusade took Conrad to an inglorious campaign in the East and left the field open for King Roger II of Sicily to attack Corfu and mainland Greece. 


















































Then, due to Roger’s diplomacy, Europe became divided into pro- and anti-Byzantine factions. Tension momentarily relaxed when Frederick I Hohenstaufen (‘‘Barbarossa’’) succeeded Conrad (| 1252). When two years later Roger II of Sicily also died, Emperor Manuel, inspired by the traditional Byzantine aspiration for world hegemony and intending to eliminate danger from the West once and for all, attacked Italy in 1255 and was soon in command of the area from Ancona to Taranto in the south. Manuel’s triumph did not last long, however, for King William I of Sicily inflicted a convincing defeat on his forces. His expedition was also a failure in other respects. Venice, afraid of the presence in its home waters of a power capable of interfering with its shipping, moved towards friendship with Sicily. And Barbarossa, who had been crowned holy Roman emperor in 1155 and who considered himself the Christian emperor par excellence, looked on Manuel’s action as an attack not only on his imperial territory but also on his imperial claims. Thus the friendship between Byzantium and Germany was ended.













































Elsewhere, however, the Greek emperor was eminently successful. Manuel accomplished what his father had been about to do at his death when he made the Latin ruler of Antioch acknowledge Byzantine suzerainty. He first brought Armenia to heel and then advanced on Antioch, which quickly yielded. In 1159, arrayed in all his imperial insignia, Manuel rode into the city on horseback while the Latin prince of Antioch walked beside his horse holding the imperial stirrup. And the king of Jerusalem without any insignia followed on horseback far behind. Once more the Byzantine emperor insisted on the restoration of the Greek patriarch.


Manuel never gave up the idea of expansion in the West. His attempt at conquest having failed, he resorted to diplomacy to foil Frederick I’s plans by encouraging Barbarossa’s enemies and generously supplying them with money. Furthermore, he invited the papacy, France, and Sicily to join with him in an anti-German alliance.
















The Latin Church at that time was in disarray because of a contested papal election in 1159. Frederick had supported Victor IV against Alexander III in the election. In consequence Alexander had to take refuge in France where he resided for several years; he regained peaceful possession of Rome only in 1177. Naturally it was to Alexander that Manuel made his overtures, first in 1163-64 and later in 1166 and 1167. Manuel proposed himself as emperor of a united East and West and Alexander pope of a united church. So as not to seem to dismiss the imperial proposal too lightly, the pope sent two cardinal legates to accompany the Greek envoys on their return to Constantinople in both 1166 and 1167. But Alexander was too prudent to give an enthusiastic welcome to Manuel’s proposal, which would have negated all his endeavors to restore peace to Christian Europe.

























In 1176 two decisive military engagements occurred: the defeat of Frederick Barbarossa at Legnano and the annihilation at Myriokephalon of a Byzantine army under Emperor Manuel I. At Legnano the League of Lombard Cities, supported by Pope Alexander III and encouraged (and to some extent financed) by Manuel, broke the German Emperor’s hold on northern Italy. In consequence, peace between the holy Roman emperor and the pope was effected in the following year by the Treaty of Venice. The success of the Seljuk Turks at Myriokephalon was at once a severe blow to the power of the Eastern Empire in Asia Minor and an end to Manuel’s dream of a single vast Christian empire taking in both East and West. Indeed all his many intrigues in the West, on which he had spent immense sums of money that would have been used to better advantage in strengthening his eastern frontiers, failed. Manuel’s efforts to displace Barbarossa had only made that monarch lay firmer claim to the headship of the whole of Christendom and induced him to make contact with the Greeks’ eastern neighbors and rivals, the Turks.


























 Manuel’s plots with Norman nobles of the Two Sicilies against their king, William II, even though backed by a Byzantine army, came to nothing; but they created for him still another enemy in William. Manuel also insulted William by repudiating without a word of explanation the marriage between his daughter Mary and William that had been arranged in 1170. Here Manuel was outwitted by Frederick, who, to upset the Sicilian marriage project with its political prospects, proposed his own son Henry for Mary’s hand and then refused to receive the Greek ambassadors when they came to settle the terms of the arrangement. Manuel disliked the Venetians for their firm grip on eastern commerce, their arrogance, and their opposition to some of his political aims. In 1171 he suddenly had all the Venetians in his empire arrested and their goods confiscated. At the time the Signoria could do little to redress the wrong.














































Manuel died in 1180 leaving only one son, Alexius II, age eleven, who had just married eight-year-old Agnes-Anna, daughter of the king of France. Power passed to the boy’s mother, challenged by his much older stepsister. Constantinople was split into a pro-Latin party supporting the queen mother and an anti-Latin party centering on the princess. Both nobles and populace were involved in the ensuing fighting; the welldisciplined troops of the crown finally checked but did not utterly quell the mob. Manuel’s cousin Andronicus, with bribes, promises, and treachery, profited by the situation and made himself master of the capital. He won the favor of the populace by allowing it to vent its pent-up hatred of the Westerners without restraint. In April 1182 Latins were massacred in Constantinople. They were mostly Pisans and Genoese because the Venetians had not reorganized their quarter of the city after the coup of 1171. The mob, without hindrance from the city’s authorities, raged through the streets murdering men, women, children, the sick in the hospitals, and the clergy as well as layfolk. The papal legate John was beheaded and his head was dragged through the dirt at the tail of a dog. Some four thousand Westerners were sold into slavery to the Turks.’


































The reign of Andronicus was a disaster. Filled with a fierce dislike of the noble families, he imprisoned, exiled, or executed them in numbers. Fear of rivals made him murder the boy emperor, Alexius, and contrive the death both of the queen mother and of the princess, Manuel’s only daughter. At the age of about sixty-three, Andronicus married Agnes-Anna, the elevenyear-old widow of the boy he had murdered. Though there were many plots against him, none succeeded and the plotters paid the price of failure. Moreover, the empire was assailed on many sides by external foes. Though he fought to hold them off, the emperor dared not let any general have too big a command, for a successful general was a potential aspirant to the throne. Thus Andronicus’ divided armies achieved little and allowed the Bulgarians to gain independence, the start of a new Bulgarian empire.































Some of the Italians who had escaped the massacre of 1182 by flight took their revenge—and to some degree compensated themselves for their financial losses—by raiding Byzantine settlements and monasteries around the coast. As the years passed there were many others who, with or without a like excuse, followed their example, so that piracy became a chronic, devastating menace to all commerce and to the security and possessions of the seaboard.‘ In 1185 William II of Sicily sent an army to capture Constantinople. It had already reached Thessalonica before serious measures were taken to check it. In consequence the city was captured and mercilessly sacked. Eustathius, metropolitan of Thessalonica and an eyewitness, wrote a long, rhetorical account: houses were pillaged, priests beaten, women— even maidens—assaulted. Churches were robbed of the precious metals adorning the icons; filthy actions were performed in the churches; and monuments and tombs were smashed and despoiled. The people fled in panic, mothers were separated from their daughters, fathers from their sons. Many threw themselves down from the roofs or into wells, and so added to the already great mortality of the citizens.’ Fearful of a popular reaction in Constantinople, the emperor determined to suppress possible leaders of revolt. An agent of his sent to arrest Isaac Comnenus was killed in a panic by his would-be victim, who, fleeing for refuge to St. Sophia, to his amazement and horror found himself hailed as emperor. Andronicus fled, was captured, and despatched with the utmost barbarity as a spectacle for the mob.
















































Isaac II Angelus (1185-95) was a better emperor than Andronicus who preceded him and than Alexius who followed him. But he was too mild, pliable, and pleasure-loving to be a good emperor. He was not lacking in sound sense. He united the armies opposed to the Sicilians under one general, Branas, who checked the Norman advance. So undisciplined were the Norman troops that the check developed into a defeat, the defeat into a panic, and the army hastened back to Durazzo in disorder and even there was defeated again. Then Branas, the successful general, led the most serious of the many revolts against the emperor. With his army he also had the support of the magnates—but he failed. The mob that had put Isaac on the throne ran riot in the city, but when the disorders began to turn into another anti-Latin pogrom, it was found that the would-be victims had learned from their experiences of 1182: they had provided themselves with means of self-defense, which on this occasion as on subsequent ones were effective.




















































Branas was not the only rebel. In Asia Minor there were several pretenders to the throne or magnates striving for independence. In 1186 there began the incessant raids of the Vlach and Cuman allies of the Bulgarians that drained the empire’s resources of men and money. In each of the years from 1187 to 1191 Isaac took the field in person against the raiders—and there were other campaigns entrusted to his generals—but there was little real success. In 1188 Frederick Barbarossa announced his crusade to free the Holy Land, and sent ambassadors to request from Isaac free passage and facilities for buying food for his troops. Isaac was desperately afraid. By a series of embassies he conceded all the holy Roman emperor’s requests and promised friendship, yet at the same time he imprisoned the German envoys at his court and confirmed a treaty with Saladin guaranteeing to delay and destroy the German forces. He succeeded in deceiving Barbarossa for a time until Byzantine guerrilla warfare and indeed formal military opposition opened his eyes. Thereupon the German monarch, who until then had no desire to injure the Greeks, took the offensive. He plundered Byzantine lands and occupied Adrianople. With that city as a center of operations he planned to capture Constantinople with the aid of a fleet which he instructed his son Henry to make ready. Only then did Isaac regret his perfidy and grant Frederick’s requests. Constantinople was saved by his compliance, but Isaac’s devious actions confirmed the Latin conviction that Greeks were unreliable and treacherous, and strengthened the idea that possession of Constantinople was a necessary preliminary for the freeing of the Holy Land.
































The German king Henry VI had in 1186 married Constance, daughter of Roger II, king of Sicily. On 18 November 1189, Roger’s successor, William II, died childless at the age of thirty-six, and Constance was next in line for the throne. Frederick Barbarossa drowned on 10 June 1190. Thus within the space of less than a year Henry became king of the Germans and, through his wife, claimed the throne of Sicily. He succeeded in establishing himself in Germany, was crowned holy Roman emperor in 1191 by Pope Celestine, and by 1194 had made good his claims in Sicily. In Palermo he found Irene, daughter of the Byzantine emperor Isaac II and widow of Roger III, son of Tancred. Henry had her marry his brother Philip of Swabia and so brought to the House of Hohenstaufen an indirect claim to the throne of Byzantium. He, had, however, no immediate intention of campaigning against Constantinople, for he was planning a crusade to the Holy Land. But he meant to impose a certain dominion over the Greek capital and to make the Greeks pay for their peace and his wars. In 1195 Henry sent an embassy to demand aid for his forthcoming crusade and the cession of the provinces between Durazzo and Thessalonica that King William had won (and lost) in the expedition of a decade before. Emperor Isaac did not think of resisting. Henry agreed to accept money instead of territories and even to reduce to 1,600 pounds of gold the original sum stipulated at 5,000.


































Isaac II Angelus received the demand of Henry VI, but it was Alexius III Angelus who bargained about it. Alexius was the only one of Isaac’s brothers who had not been blinded by Andronicus I. Trusted completely by Isaac, Alexius plotted against him, deposed him, and blinded him. Constantinople lost by the exchange. The empire was crumbling on all its frontiers. Pretenders with Turkish patrons appeared in Asia Minor; Alexius gained temporary security by buying off the Turks. The usual Vlach-Cuman raids continued. Several small principalities were founded by successful leaders, at least two of whom were disposed of when the emperor broke his oath of safe conduct to entrap the leaders. In the south Leo Sgouros, starting from Nauplion, made himself the master of Argos, the Isthmus of Corinth, and Thessaly; but Athens resisted him. Alexius was fortunate when Kalojan, who had succeeded his brothers as prince of the Bulgars, made peace in 1202. Apart from this success Alexius’s ‘‘advent [to the throne] proved a disaster for Byzantium. The circumstances of his accession left him a prisoner of the nobles who had conspired with him: he could deny them nothing, nor did he have the will to resist them. The wealth, offices, and lands of the crown fell into their hands, and their greed was supplemented by that of other powerful groups, the monasteries and the Latins.’’®































By 1200 the Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese who had been robbed and their compatriots massacred in 1171 and 1182 were back in force, occupying and extending their old quarters of the city. Manuel had done little to placate the Venetians for the events of 1171. But Andronicus I, whose reign had been inaugurated by the massacre of 1182, had soon made overtures of peace to them. He agreed to pay as compensation for their losses up to 1,500 pounds of gold, to restore all their old privileges, and to increase their quarter. His successors were still paying the compensation in irregular annual installments when Constantinople fell to Venetian arms in 1204. Genoa and Pisa were likewise conciliated. However, the measures that appeased the Latins enraged the Greeks, because they granted privileges to foreigners at the expense of the natives. Between Latins, therefore, and Greeks there was always tension, and, with the threat of a popular rising against them never far away, the Italians in Constantinople lived in an atmosphere of insecurity.




















On the eve of the Fourth Crusade relations between Eastern and Western Christendom were not happy. On both sides there was a deep-seated antagonism. The Greeks fiercely resented the privileged position of the Latins within their empire, and on more than one occasion showed their feelings violently: the massacre of 1182 was but the most successful outburst. To the Latin mind the Greeks were perfidious. The First Crusade had implanted the idea; Barbarossa’s experience confirmed it: far from being a help, Greeks in Constantinople were a hindrance to the liberation of the Holy Land. For the mercantile Italian states—conscious from firsthand knowledge of the internal debility of the empire, its maladministration and political instability—the Greeks were a constant threat to the security of their citizens and an obstacle to wider commercial activity. Normans and Germans both cast covetous eyes from Sicily on the Eastern Empire. There was, then, little that could act as a bond of peace between Christian East and Christian West, not even religion, because the churches were in schism. All that was needed was an apt occasion to lead to open war. That occasion came with the new crusade that was being prepared.’

































Link
























Press Here















اعلان 1
اعلان 2

0 التعليقات :

إرسال تعليق

عربي باي