Charlemagne's Great Schism

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One event that lead to the Great Schism was when the Byzantine Empire split with Roman Catholicism. At this time, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, King of the Franks, as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 CE. From the Byzantine viewpoint, this outraged Empress Irene and the Byzantine Empire itself, as the empire felt that she was a strong and capable ruler to govern; however, Pope Leo III had the opposite view, partly because she was a woman. Charlemagne’s crowning made the Byzantine Emperor redundant, and relations between the east and the west deteriorated until a formal split occurred in 1054. The division between the east and west came about when Cerularius, the patriarch of Constantinople, desired to acknowledge the Byzantine control of the Church.

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