of other causes of disunion, which adverse
circumstances may generate. Such causes there were in the present
instance, political, ecclesiastical, and theological; and the nature of
these it may be well for us to consider, before proceeding to narrate
the history of the disruption.

The office of bishop of Rome assumed to some extent a political
character as early as the time of the first Christian emperors. By them
this prelate was constituted a sort of secretary of state for Christian
affairs, and was employed as a central authority for communicating with
the bishops in the provinces; so that after a while he acted as minister
of religion and public instruction. As the civil and military power of
the Western Empire declined, the extent of this authority increased; and
by the time when Italy was annexed to the Empire of the East, in the
reign of Justinian, the popes had become the political chiefs of Roman
society. Nominally, indeed, they were subject to the exarch of Ravenna,
as vicegerent of the Emperor at Constantinople, but in reality the
inhabitants of Western Europe were more disposed to look to the
spiritual potentate in the Imperial city as representing the traditions
of ancient Rome.

The political rivalry that was thus engendered was sharpened by the
traditional jealousy of Rome and Constantinople, which had existed ever
since the new capital had been erected on the shores of the Bosporus.
Then followed struggles for administrative superiority between the popes
and the exarchs, culminating in the shameful maltreatment and banishment
of Martin I by the emperor Constans--an event which the See of Rome
could never forget.

The attempt to enforce iconoclasm in Central Italy was influential in
causing the loss of that province to the Empire; and even after the
Byzantine rule had ceased there, the controversy about images tended to
keep alive the antagonism, because, although that question was once and
again settled in favor of the maintenance of images, yet many of the
emperors, in whose persons the power of the East was embodied, were
foremost in advocating their destruction. Indeed, from first to last,
owing to the close connection of church and state in the Byzantine
empire, the unpopularity of the latter in Western Europe was shared by
the former. To this must be added the contempt for one another's
character which had arisen among the adherents of the two churches, for
the Easterns had learned to regard th