Great Schism and Sicily

The pilgrims featured in Murder at the Leopard are given a tour of some of the churches of Palermo as Sophia makes various offerings to God to assure her soon-to-be delivered infant is a boy. Two of those churches, La Matorana and San Cataldo, both built in the mid 12th century, lie across the courtyard from one another. In fact, these two churches were built for different communities within what we know as "the Church". La Matorana was a Greek Orthodox church completed in 1151, but San Cataldo was a Roman Orthodox church completed in 1160. As we look at Sicilian history, The Great Schism of 1054 (Pope Nicholas II) which separated the church into Roman and Greek branches, underlies the conquest of Sicily by the Normans.
        The Great Schism was a result of centuries of conflict and divisions between the East and the West, ultimately being traced back to the division of the Roman Empire into its Eastern and Western rulers. Sicily, long a prize for any ruling power, was controlled by the Arabs before the Norman invasion. Normans, and many other groups, had been present in Sicily as crusaders, merchants, and adventurers for years. But Pope Nicholas wanted the island to be under the rule of the Roman church rather than the Greek church, and he wanted the Arabs pushed out due to their friendly relations with Byzantium. Essentially, he made it known that the Normans could take as much of Sicily as they wanted if they wrested it from the Arabs and promised to affiliate with the Roman branch of the church. The stage was thus set for the Norman wars of conquest in Sicily, Roger de Hauteville conquered Messina in 1061 and finally gained Palermo in 1071. Although the golden age of Sicily under the Normans was a tolerant, multicultural society, the island and other parts of Europe gradually became more Latinized, and the Greek Orthodox churches were subsumed by the Roman Orthodoxy.