Pure air and portentous heresy

Extract

Anyone who studies the works of those western historians who wrote contemporary chronicles of the first four crusades must surely be struck by one curious fact. Almost without exception, these writings show a complete lack of interest in the teachings and practices of any branch of the Christian church except that of the Roman west. The Nestorians and Jacobites whom the crusaders encountered in Syria aroused in them neither surprise nor interest, nor is there any sign that these people were regarded as more incorrect in their beliefs than were the orthodox Greeks. Although the schism between the eastern and western churches was not yet half a century old when the first crusade reached the walls of Constantinople, and although it was an affair of theological scholarship and high-powered ecclesiastical politics, it seems already to have interposed a complete barrier between the ordinary Frank and his Greek counterpart. The political acrimony displayed a hundred years earlier by Liutprand of Cremona had found a safe anchor in religious prejudice.