The Byzantine Imperial Church (Macedonian Era)

With the icons restored in 843, the Byzantine church entered two centuries of confidence. It recovered its learning, sent missions that converted Bulgaria, Moravia and eventually Rus', and put figures back on the walls of Hagia Sophia — the first of them a great gold-ground Virgin and Child in the apse, unveiled in 867, at which the patriarch Photius preached that the imposters who had cast such images down had now been answered. Photius is the age's emblem: a layman raised straight to the patriarchate, an enormous reader who catalogued nearly three hundred books, many of which survive nowhere else, and the man who put in its sharpest form the Eastern objection to the Latin West's addition of one clause, the Filioque, to the Creed. That argument, along with disputes over papal authority and over who had jurisdiction among the newly converted Slavs, hardened across the following century and a half, until in 1054 a papal delegation and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated one another inside Hagia Sophia. The conventional date for a division that neither side at the time understood as final.