Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium and the Crusades

Ιnternal affairs under the Comneni and Angeli 

Page 8

Thus Manuel, both in his secular external policy and in his ecclesiastical policy, was wholly unsuccessful. The cause of this failure may be explained by the fact that the Emperor's policy in both fields was only his own personal policy and had no solid and real basis in public opinion. The restoration of the one Empire had already for a long time been impossible and the unitarian tendencies of Manuel met with no sympathy in the masses of the Empire's population.

In the last five years of the rule of the Comneni (1180-85), especially under Andronicus I, the ecclesiastical causes were absorbed in the complicated external and internal conditions. Andronicus, an enemy of the Latin sympathies of his predecessor at the beginning of his reign, could not be a partisan of the union with the western church. In internal ecclesiastical affairs, he dealt harshly with the patriarch of Constantinople and allowed no disputes on faith. A Dialogue against the Jews, which is often ascribed to him, belongs to a later time.

The time of the Angeli, politically full of troubles, was equally disturbed in ecclesiastical life. The emperors of this house felt themselves to be masters of the situation. The first Angelus, Isaac, deposed at his leisure the patriarchs of Constantinople, one after another.

Under the Angeli the vigorous theological dispute of the Eucharist arose in Byzantinum; the Emperor himself took part in it. A historian of that epoch, Nicetas Choniates, said the question was whether the body of Christ, of which we partake, is as incorruptible (ἄφθαρτον) as it became after His passion and resurrection, or corruptible (φθαρτόν), as it was before his passion. In other words, in this dispute the question was whether the eucharist of which we partake, is subject to the common physiological processes to which any food that man takes is subject, or not subject to those physiological processes. Alexius Angelus stood as the protector of the insolently denied truth and supported the doctrine of the incorruptibility of the Eucharist. A similar dispute in Byzantium at the end of the twelfth century can be explained by western influence, which was very strong in the Christian East in the epoch of the crusades. As is known, such disputes had begun in the West a long time before; even in the ninth century there had been men who taught that the Eucharist is subject to the same processes as ordinary food.

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