EIGHT HUNDRED years ago, in April 1204, the city of Constantinople fell to the forces of the Fourth Crusade. A Western army set out, as other crusades had done before, with the aim of liberating the Christian holy places of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, recently lost again to an occupying Muslim power.

The Byzantine East, which had long seen itself as the Christian heir to the Roman Empire, was put under pressure to aid the crusaders with money and facilities for the crusaders’ ships. Pope Innocent III, asserting the primacy of the Church of Rome, urged the Byzantine Emperor, Alexios III, to put an end to schism by bringing the Byzantine Church back to Rome “like a limb to the head and a daughter to the mother”. The Emperor, said the Pope, would be judged by God, were he negligently to refuse to join the effort to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from Muslim hands.

Political intrigue; rivals for the Byzantine throne; Byzantine policy which focused more on acknowledgement of the position of the Emperor within the Christian order than on territorial acquisition; the financial temptations of a wealthy city to the crusading armies; and the labelling as schismatics of the Greeks with different customs of worship and liturgy: they all played their part in the fall of an imperial city that had endured for almost a thousand years. The pillaging and desecrating of many of the Christian churches and shrines of the city compounded the trauma.

Although Latin rule in Constantinople was to last only until 1261, when the Byzantines recaptured the city, and the empire was restored until it fell to Mehmet the Conqueror some two hundred years later, the events of 1204 have left an indelible imprint on the consciousness of the Christian East. The Byzantine Empire had no concept of holy war. The Eastern Church revered the teaching of St Basil, which allowed Christians to take up arms only in case of necessity, holding that killing, although sometimes justified, could never be praiseworthy, let alone be the ground for remission of sin, as was promised to volunteers for the crusades. The ideology of the crusades, linked as they were with strengthened papal claims for universal authority, could only be a cause of deep suspicion to the Byzantine Church and empire.

If the memory of the crusades is still a distorting one in the context of Christian-Muslim relations, the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade still haunts memories and attitudes in the relationship of the Christian East to the Christian West, and colours the suspicion of many Orthodox Christians towards Christians of the West. Both Catholics and Pentecostals can be seen in very different ways as representative of the ancient aggression of the Latin West.

Eastern Christianity, which has never had the experience of either the Reformation or the Enlightenment has, at its best, a deep awareness of the cosmic dimension of redemption, and a sacramental understanding of the world. The Easter Liturgy, so central to Orthodox worship, proclaims Christ’s victory over death and His liberation of humanity from the imprisonment of the dark, demonic powers of evil. We are called into a new creation and a transfiguration of our life by the grace of Christ.

The healing of memories is necessary if the different traditions of the Christian churches are to find their true unity in Christ. We cannot ignore history, and we must learn to understand the histories of other traditions and communities. In so far as it is possible for a later generation to be penitent for what earlier generations did, Christians in the West need to remember that events can have a terrible afterlife and so be ready to acknowledge the scars and fault lines that have resulted from what happened in Constantinople 800 years ago this month.

If the risen Christ appeared to His disciples still bearing the wounds of His passion, but transfigured, we can surely believe that the wounds of history may by humility, penitence and grace be transfigured in the same way. The peace of the world and the unity of its peoples depend in the end on this Easter reality.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe