The Great Schism
Rome and Constantinople excommunicate each other and Christianity splits in two.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
Mutual excommunications in 1054 formalise a divergence that had been widening for centuries over papal authority, the filioque clause, clerical marriage and language. Neither side regarded it as final at the time. The Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204 made it so. The split between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity has never been healed, and it shapes the political geography of Europe to the present.