The Great Schism

After the 4th century when Constantinople emerged as a great capital and church center, tensions sometimes arose between its leaders and the bishop of Rome. After the fall of Rome to Germanic invaders in 476, the Roman pope was the only guardian of Christian universalism in the West. He began more explicitly to attribute his dominance to Rome's being the burial place of Saint Peter, whom Jesus had called the "rock" on which the church was to be built. The Eastern Christians respected that tradition and recognized the Roman patriarch to a measure of honorable authority. But they never believed that this authority allowed the papacy to overrule another church or that it made the pope into a universally reliable figure within the larger church.

The Orthodox tradition asserted that the character and rights of the church were fully present in each local community of Orthodox believers with its own bishop. All bishops were equal, and patriarchs or synods of bishops exercised only an "oversight of care" among the body of coequal bishops. The precedence of honor of individual national churches depended on historical rank. Therefore, the patriarchate of Constantinople understood its own position