A History of the Crusades-Vol 1 by Steven Runciman

soon submitted to them; and by 1060 all that was left to the
Byzantines in Italy was their capital, the coastal fortress of Bari. Meanwhile
Robert’s younger brother Roger began the slow but successful conquest of Sicily
from the Arabs.
    So long as Bari held out, the Byzantines kept
some check on further Norman expansion to the east. But the political troubles
in Italy had inevitably led to religious troubles. The arrival of Latin
conquerors in southern Italy brought up the question of the Greek Church in the
province and the ancient dispute between Constantinople and Rome over its
ecclesiastical allegiance. Reforms at Rome had resulted in the Papacy’s
determination to allow no compromise over any of its claims; while the
Patriarchal see of Constantinople was now occupied by one of the most
aggressive and ambitious of Greek Church statesmen, Michael Cerularius. The
unhappy story of the visit of Pope Leo IX’s legates to Constantinople in 1054
should be told in connection with the whole sequence of the relations between
the eastern and western Churches. It ended in scenes of mutual excommunication,
in spite of the Emperor’s attempt to secure a compromise; and it made
impossible any sincere co-operation between Rome and Constantinople as far as
the immediate needs of Italy were concerned. But it did not cause the final
schism which later historians have attributed to it. Political relations
between the imperial courts were strained but unbroken. Cerularius soon lost
his influence. Snubbed by the Empress Theodora, whom he had tried to exclude
from her heritage, and deposed by the Emperor Isaac, he died an impotent exile.
But in the end he triumphed. To subsequent generations of Byzantium he was seen
as a champion of their independence; and, even at a moment when the Emperor and
the Pope wrote to each other with renewed cordiality, the Empress Eudocia
Macrembolitissa, his niece and the consort of Constantine Ducas, secured his
canonization.
    To judge from the contemporary historians of
Byzantium the quarrel was barely noticed by the rulers of the Empire. Trouble
in the West was overshadowed in their eyes by the problems arising in the East.
     
    The Turks move
Westward
    The decline of the Abbasid Caliphate had not
proved entirely beneficial to Byzantium. The growing impoverishment of Iraq
began to alter the trade routes of the world. The far eastern merchant no
longer brought his goods to the markets of Baghdad, from which much was carried
on into the Empire, to be transhipped from the ports of Asia Minor or from
Constantinople itself to the West. He preferred now to go by the Red Sea route
to Egypt; and from Egypt his goods were taken to Europe by Italian merchant ships.
Byzantium no longer lay across the route. Moreover, lawlessness in the outlying
provinces of the Abbasid empire caused the closing down of the old caravan
route from China that ran through Turkestan and northern Persia to Armenia and
the sea at Trebizond. The alternative route, going to the north of the Caspian,
was never secure for long. For the whole Mediterranean world, politically as
well as commercially, the Abbasid power had been a benefactor, in providing an
outer defence against the barbarians of central Asia.
    The defences now were down. Central Asia was
able once again to burst out over the lands of ancient civilization. The Turks
had long played an important role in history. The Turkish empire of the sixth
century had during its short life been a civilizing and stabilizing force in
Asia. Outlying Turkish peoples, such as the Judaistic Khazars of the Volga or
the Nestorian Christian Ouigours, later established on the frontier of China,
showed themselves adaptable and capable of cultural progress. But in Turkestan
itself there had been no advance since the seventh century. A few cities had
grown up along the caravan routes, but the population of Turcomans remained for
the most part pastoral and semi-nomadic; and its growing numbers gave it a