The Latin (or Roman) Church is a term used to designate that part of the universal Christian church in the Middle Ages that used Latin as its liturgical language and recognized the pope, or bishop of Rome, as its highest earthly authority. The Greek Orthodox (Byzantine) Church, by contrast, used Greek in its liturgy and recognized the pope only as co-equal with the patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem.
Despite differences over doctrine and questions of authority, the Latin and Greek Orthodox churches generally regarded each other in principle as valid members of the universal church. An important effect of this circumstance in the states established by the crusades in Outremer, Cyprus, and Frankish Greece was that the Latin Church there used the new ascendancy of the Franks to take possession of the organizational structures and property of the Greek Orthodox Church. Thus, after the First Crusade (1096-1099), Latin patriarchs were installed in Antioch and Jerusalem in succession to their former Greek incumbents. After the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire by the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204), a Latin was elected to replace the incumbent patriarch of Constantinople, who fled to Nicaea in Greek-held territory. Similar developments occurred at diocesan level in these countries, although numbers of Greek monks, priests, and, in some cases, bishops were allowed to minister to Orthodox congregations.
The Latin Church had a quite different relationship toward the various Eastern (oriental) Christian churches, which it regarded as heretical and generally left alone. However, some initiatives were undertaken to bring about union between the Latin Church and individual Eastern churches, notably in the cases of the Armenian Orthodox Church and the Maronite Church.
-Alan V. Murray
Bibliography
Bayer, Axel, Spaltung der Christenheit: Das sogenannte Morgenlandische Schisma von 1054 (Koln: Bohlau, 2002).
Congar, Yves, After Nine Hundred Years: The Background of the Schism between the Eastern and Western Churches (New York: Fordham University Press, 1959).
Hamilton, Bernard, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church (London: Variorum, 1980).
Lock, Peter, The Franks in the Aegean (London: Longman, 1995).
Setton, Kenneth M., The Papacy and the Levant (1204-1571),
4 vols. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976-1984).
World History
