The Fourth Crusade’s treacherous sacking of Constantinople and temporary dismemberment of the Byzantine Empire was an event whose reverberations are still being felt. The event and subsequent Catholic rule over certain parts of the Byzantine Empire sundered Europe into two parts, a separation that remains open and palpable to this day.
In the districts where Catholic adventurers, whether Venetian seafarers or French, German, or Flemish barons, seized from Byzantium, among their first actions was to dethrone the local Orthodox bishop. This act was a political and ecclesiastical manifestation of the overthrow of Byzantine authority. In the Middle Ages clergy in Europe were often semi-educated at best; only higher officials such as bishops and abbots were able to preserve the doctrine of Orthodoxy as separate from the similar (yet distinct) Catholic doctrine. After either sacking or forcing local bishops to accept papal sovereignty, the Catholics turned their Crusading zeal onto the local population. The Catholic spiritual assault on Orthodox faithful was as tactless as the assault on Byzantine capital; the Catholic clergy, often less than educated, showed no respect for the centuries-old Byzantine traditions. Despite their own ignorance, and the general brutality of the era, the local Orthodox peasantry rejected the attempts of their fellow Christians to change their Eastern Christian orientation.
Most of the Crusader states were ejected, co-opted, or assimilated by the Byzantines within one hundred years of the Fourth Crusade, but Venetian colonies in particular dug deep roots into the Aegean basin. Western (Catholic) help was required by the ailing Byzantine Empire to regain lost territories, to fend off attacks from the West, from fellow Orthodox states such as Serbia and Bulgaria, and, ultimately most importantly, against the Turks. But Western aid always had a price—submission of the Orthodox Church to the Pope and Catholic doctrine. Time and again a beleaguered Byzantine Emperor would journey personally or send envoys to Western Europe to accept papal sovereignty in an attempt to save his empire, and each time portions of his clergy and the vast majority of his people would reject the submission. Other Orthodox kings and princes, Serbian, Bulgarian, Wallachian, and Russian, did the same. The astonishing element to this wholesale rejection by both unlettered peasantry and by politically savvy aristocrats was that the rejection continued even as the Turkish cannon were bombarding the walls of Constantinople in 1453. A saying, attributed to the Grand Duke Notaras, the last Byzantine Chancellor, was that he would rather see “the Turkish Turban in the City [Greek shorthand for “Constantinople’] than the Cardinal’s Hat.”
The Ottomans, after their conquest of the Byzantine Empire, were politically astute enough to allow the defeated Byzantines religious autonomy. The conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmed II, actually found and summoned the leader of the anti-Unionist faction of the Orthodox, the monk Gennadios, and installed him as Patriarch. The Patriarch was to be the spiritual, and to some degree, the temporal head of the Orthodox millet (nation) within the Ottoman realm. While the Orthodox nations of the Balkans were became a subject population, the Turks nonetheless allowed for the Orthodox Church complete internal autonomy, something that Orthodox under Catholic rule were not allowed. Aside from political astuteness, part of the reason for this relative tolerance was to be found in Islamic law and custom. Christians and Jews are respected in Islam as "Peoples of the Book" with a revealed scripture. Peoples of the Book were not subject to forced conversion (though the horrible Ottoman practice of devirshme [blood tribute] of children for the Janissary Corps amounted to essentially the same thing). In addition, Christians were subject to
much higher taxation than Muslims, so there was a strong reason to keep the Christians productive and docile. Finally, the last thing the Ottomans wanted was to push the Orthodox masses, who were the vast majority of the population in most of the young Ottoman realm, into the arms of their fellow Christians in the West. By their (extremely relative) tolerance of Orthodoxy, the Turks helped to keep the Christian Schism alive and wide.
In contrast to Ottoman tolerance, the Catholic States treated the Orthodox as heretic Christians, members of the flock who flouted the law. Catholicism of the late fifteenth century was the Catholicism of the Inquisition and expansionist—viciously intolerant. For the many Byzantines who fled Turkish rule to the West the choice was one of conversion to Catholicism, or practicing Orthodoxy only at sufferance. Thus, while Turkish rule was abhorrent and barbarous to the Byzantines, and the West of the era was advancing technologically and intellectually (and ultimately spiritually), many Byzantines still preferred Turkish Slavery with Orthodoxy to Western Freedom without it.
The Orthodox Church, while in essence supporting the Turkish Regime as a bulwark against Catholicism and the protector of Church privileges, nonetheless instilled in their flock a belief that they were infinitely superior both to the perfidious infidel overlords and to their Western Christian brethren. In the monasteries of the Ottoman-ruled Balkans, icons and frescos of Byzantine Emperors, Serbian Tsars, Bulgarian Tsars, and Romanian Princes remained, inspiring their enslaved flock to take back the glory of their former realm. The Orthodox Church remained an incubator of this awakening spirit, bolstered by ideals of nationalism and classicism flowing back into the Ottoman realm from the West, and by the belief in Orthodox "Mother Russia" as the protector of her Balkan "children."
The regime of limited tolerance toward Orthodoxy in the Ottoman realm continued almost until the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early Twentieth Century. To be sure, there were periods of venality and corruption during this time, and the Orthodox were slaves whose limited rights depended on the whim of the Turks. In addition, during some periods forced conversions did occur; many of the Kosovo Albanian Muslims, for example, are descendents of forced converts. The Orthodox Byzantine successor states which hacked themselves free of the Ottoman Empire (Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria) inherited an Orthodox world view almost intact, and Orthodoxy remained inextricably intertwined with Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and, later, Slav Macedonian identity in a manner without parallel elsewhere in Europe. In asserting their separate national identities, the various Orthodox nationalities declared their independent Orthodox Churches. Within the boundaries of the new states, the largest non-Orthodox minority was typically local Muslim converts and Turks resident in the new countries. The Muslims were considered outside the “nation,” barely recognized and encouraged to emigrate. For the small Catholic populations in the re-emerged Balkans, there was a mild sense of “otherness” but a general sense of inclusion into their respective nations. They were considered organic parts of their respective nation, particularly in Greece and Bulgaria but less so in Serbia and Romania due to Serb-Croat and Romanian Orthodox-Romanian Eastern Rite Catholic conflicts.
In a discussion about Catholic-Orthodox relations in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine period, it is impossible to ignore the influence of Venice and
the rest of Italy. Italy was the part of Western Europe nearest to the former Byzantine realm. Indeed, parts of Italy, including the Serenissima Venice, were once part of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine political rule ended in Italy in 1071, but there were (indeed still are) pockets of Greek speech and Orthodoxy in Sicily and Southern Italy. These Italic Greeks, moreoever, considered themselves native to the soil of Italy. The mountains of Calabria during the period of Byzantine rule and for some time thereafter was a center of Orthodox monasticism.
With the end of Byzantine rule, the monks and bishops of ex-Byzantine Italy were forced to recognize papal authority or were replaced by Latin hierarchs or Greeks willing to do so. The same hierarchical replacement was attempted in the Crusader possessions in the Byzantine Empire, but most of these Crusader states were short-lived and the Catholic superstructure collapsed quickly. In Italy Catholic rule was sustained and the overt and subtle Catholicization of the Orthodox masses continued. First, as cited earlier, the church hierarchy was subjected to papal authority, then certain doctrinal adjustments were made to conform to Catholic doctrine. In particular, the Nicean Creed was adjusted to include the “filioque”—that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filoque). Finally, the literate Greek-speaking clergy was progressively replaced with Italian-speakers. By the 1700s, adherents of the “Greek Rite of Catholicism” had retreated to small, usually mountainous South Italian enclaves, where their descendants speak Greek or Albanian to this day. In only the loosest sense can these Greek Rite Catholics be considered Orthodox, and their continued survival is testament to their tenacity, their remoteness, and their forefathers’ willingness to embrace the outward political trappings of Catholicism to salvage what they could of Orthodoxy.
Another important Catholic power in determining Orthodox-Catholic relations was the Austrian Empire. After subduing the Balkans, the Turks turned on Hungary, bringing the borders of the Ottoman realm to the gates of Vienna, which the Turks unsuccessfully besieged twice, in 1529 and 1683. After the second siege, the Austrians and their allies pushed the Turks back to the northern limit of the Balkans, the Danube, and made inroads further south, into Serbia. After the Austrians retreated across the Danube, many Serbs who fought with the Austrians against the Turks followed the Austrians across the Danube. The Austrians, desirous of policing their southern frontier, offered the Serbians the right of settlement and complete freedom of worship in the Austrian border zone, in exchange for military service.
These “Border (Krajna) Serbs” had both the freedom to practice their religion and the access to the European Enlightenment via Austrian citizenship. The ability to contribute economically and militarily to their host nation while remaining Serb and Orthodox contrasts favorably with the plight of Greeks and Albanians under Catholic Italian rule, or, for that matter, with Orthodox Romanians under Catholic Austrian rule. The Serbs did not have to convert to Catholicism or to abridge their doctrine to conform to Catholicism, as did the Greeks of Southern Italy, many Romanians in Austro-Hungarian Transylvania, or Ukrainians under Polish Catholic rule.
In one sense, the Austrians duplicated the Turkish “Millet System,” which allowed religious freedom in exchange for military services and political loyalty. These Krajna Serbs got more than just religious freedom, as Austria, while less progressive than Northwestern Europe, was nonetheless part of the European enlightenment. The contrast between Serbs north of the Danube, which experienced Austrian rule, and those south of the Danube, which suffered Turkish rule, is apparent even today.
The divorce of the two branches of Christianity, brought on by the Fourth Crusade and subsequent Catholic-Orthodox antagonism, was exaccerbated and sustained by the arrival of Ottoman rule over the Orthodox Balkans. The Orthodox peoples were caught between the Turks and the West, and were too weak to defend themselves against both. The natural choice for the Orthodox world was to side with their fellow Christians in the West; the price for this was a renunciation of their ecclesiastical independence and traditions. Faced with this demand, with the Turks at their gates, the Orthodox made an agonizing decision: to become slaves with spiritual freedom. The cost was 500 years of Ottoman servitude wherein their religious freedom came at the cost of economic, political, intellectual, and social development that was beginning in the West. Ottoman corruption, brutality, and poverty arrested the development and health of the Orthodox states that emerged from the long Ottoman night. Orthodoxy survived, not in an atmosphere of pan-European, pan-Christian tolerance, but rather under the sword of Islam.