When, in 879, the patriarch Photius was restored to his seat by the eighth ecumenical council--consisting of four hundred bishops, three hundred of whom had condemned him in the preceding council--he was acknowledged by Pope John as his brother. Two legates, despatched by him to this council, joined the Greek Church, and declared that whoever asserted the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son was a Judas. But the practice of shaving the chin and eating eggs in Lent being persisted in, the two churches always remained divided. The schism was completed in 1053 and 1054, when Michael Cerularius, patriarch of Constantinople, publicly condemned the bishop of Rome, Leo IX., and all the Latins, adding to all the reproaches against them by Photius that, contrary to the practice of the apostles, they dared to make use of unleavened bread in the eucharist; that they wickedly ate blood puddings, and twisted the necks, instead of cutting off the heads, of pigeons intended for the table. All the Latin churches in the Greek empire were shut up, and all intercourse with those who ate blood puddings was forbidden. Pope Leo IX. entered into serious negotiation on this matter with the Emperor Constantine Monomachus, and obtained some mitigations. It was precisely at this period that those celebrated Norman gentlemen, the sons of Tancred de Hauteville, despising at once the pope and the Greek emperor, plundered everything they could in Apulia and Calabria, and ate blood puddings with the utmost hardihood. The Greek emperor favored the pope as much as he was able; but nothing could reconcile the Greeks with the Latins. The Greeks regarded their adversaries as barbarians, who did not know a single word of Greek. The irruption of the Crusaders, under pretence of delivering the Holy Land, but in reality to gain possession of Constantinople, completed the hatred entertained against the Romans. But the power of the Latin Church increased every day, and the Greeks were at length gradually vanquished by the Turks. The popes, long since, became powerful and wealthy sovereigns; the whole Greek Church became slaves from the time of Mahomet II., except Russia, which was then a barbarous country, and in which the Church was of no account. Whoever is but slightly informed of the state of affair in the Levant knows that the sultan confers the patriarchate of the Greeks by a cross and a ring, without any apprehension of being excommunicated, as some of the German emperors were by the popes, for this same ceremony.