The Sack of Constantinople in 1204 has a tremendous significance in both worldly and religious history.

It marks the sad culmination of years of worsening relations between the Eastern and Western Churches since the watershed year of 1054 when mutual excommunications were hurled by representatives of these Churches at each other.

To this day, there is a great debate among religious and secular historians about the actual year that could be considered the year of complete schism between East and West.

Many regard this to be 1054. Others, however, say that what happened in 1054 had to do with personal excommunications that didn't affect the ongoing relations between Eastern and Western Churches. There is evidence to support this in the writings of Eastern Patriarchs at the time.

These historians say that the Sack of Constantinople and its barbarities perpetrated by the Crusaders against the Orthodox ecclesiastical and imperial capital are what finally estranged East from West.

There is evidence to support the view that the Sack of Constantinople itself was done without the knowledge of Pope Innocent at the time.

The outward liturgical unity of East and West at this time was still quite remarkable. We have a defence of the three-finger Orthodox Cross written by this same Pope who, in it, relies on Eastern testimony and writings.

It is also clear that the West in general had lost contact with the Byzantine/Greek world, had stopped even learning Greek and so came to regard the Church of the Eastern Roman empire as something less than fully "Catholic."

The East had also become estranged from the West and had stopped learning Latin.

When the fateful moment came in 1054 when the mutual written excommunications were hurled at Cardinal and Patriarch, the two had to call for translators to understand the documents and what was being said in them.

The "Rum Millet" or Christian Roman people had previously had both Latin and Greek as their national languages.

Earlier, of course, the episode with Rome and St Photios the Patriarch of Constantinople over the "Filioque" in the Nicene Creed left its mark on East-West relations, even though it ended amicably with Pope John VIII acknowledging the Orthodoxy of St Photios, affirming the Creed without the "Filioque" (for all time) and restoring full Communion between the Churches.

Somewhere between 1054 and 1204, the Western peoples had stopped regarding the Greek Church as being one with them in faith.

This is what allowed the Latin Crusaders to attack Constantinople, sack it and commit many sacrileges against the people, churches and cathedrals of the City of Constantine, ancient Byzantium.

Evidence shows that Pope Innocent was horrified at the news of the Sack of Constantinople. However, it was politic to accept the new status quo and a new Latin Patriarch for Constantinople was appointed while (Latin) business went on as usual.

The crusaders or "cross-bearers" had been earlier organized as a quasi-religious monk-warrior movement to liberate the Holy Land and the original Knights were religiously idealistic and often came from the aristocracy.

A semi-monastic Rule of Life was drawn up for the Knights Templars or Knights of the Red Cross by St Bernard of Clairvaux.

The large mass of crusader recruits, however, were neither monastically inclined nor chivalrous and were made up of the more criminal element of society bent on pillage and thievery.

During their attack on Constantinople, the crusaders not only destroyed icons and pillaged churches of their sacred gold treasures, they also committed the ultimate in sacrilege by those professing to be Christians by casting the Holy Mysteries or Eucharist into the streets!

Needless to say, this horrified the Orthodox Christian inhabitants of Constantinople and was deeply imbedded on their minds, even to this day.

Those they thought of as western barbarians were, in fact, such . . .

This is not to say, however, that the Greeks did not commit atrocities against Latins in those times as well.

From the standpoint of East-West relations, the Sack sealed the estrangement that had settled in theologically over time and resulted in the formal breakup of the Churches and coldness of one side toward the other that continues, more or less, to this day.

This is why efforts aimed at overcoming the separation between East and West must be about more than dealing with the Filioque issue or other theological matters. It has to address the estrangement between East and West in the first instance and somehow make a redress in contemporary times.