Around 850 east and west were still in full communion with one another and still formed one Church. Cultural and political divisions had combined to bring about an increasing estrangement, but there was no open schism. The two sides had different conceptions of Papal authority and recited the Creed in different forms, but these questions had not yet been brought fully into the open.

In 1190 Theodore Balsamon, Patriarch of Antioch and a great authority on Canon Law, looked at matters very differently:

 For many years [he does not say how many] the western Church has been divided in spiritual communion from the other four Patriarchates and has become alien to the eastern Church. So no Latin Christian should be given communion unless he first declares that he will abstain from the doctrines and customs that separate him from us, and that he will be subject to the Canons of the Church, in union with the Eastern Church.

   In Balsamon’s eyes, communion had been broken. There was a definite schism between east and west. The two no longer formed one visible Church.

But Nicolas (Patriarch of Rome) realized that Photius had submitted voluntarily to the inquiry by the Papal legates and that his action could not be taken as a recognition of Papal supremacy. This (among other reasons) was why Nicolas had cancelled his legates’ decisions. The Byzantines for their part were willing to allow appeals to Rome, but only under the specific         conditions laid down on of the Council of Sardica (343). This Canon states that a bishop, if under sentence of condemnation, can appeal to Rome, and the Pope, if he sees cause, can order a retrial; this retrial, however, is not to be conducted by the Pope himself at Rome, but by the bishops of the provinces adjacent to that of the condemned bishop. Nicolas, so the Byzantines felt, in reversing the decisions of his legates and demanding a retrial at Rome itself, was going far beyond the terms of this Canon. They regarded his behavior as an unwarrantable and uncanonical interference in the affairs of another Patriarchate. The basis for this attitude, you will recall, was how the early Church functioned. While each Church was in union with each other Church, there was no one Church that had supremacy over another. Consider that Peter and Paul, after their dispute about converting Gentiles, held a meeting of all the Apostles to solve the issue.