Savvas Neocleous's monograph is the first study to focus solely and comprehensively on the historical evidence about Latin religious attitudes toward Greek Christians in the “long twelfth century”(1070s–1220s) and is an important revisionist history of the all-too-popular conceit that the fracture between Greek East and Latin West was inevitable given a broader cultural and political estrangement that began in late antiquity. The central argument of the book is that the vast majority of Latin Christians never stopped thinking of the Greeks as fellow Christians, even if certain Latins opportunistically exploited religious difference. Indeed, Neocleous makes clear that neither the so-called Schism of 1054 nor even the events of the Fourth Crusade did much to change the view of Latins that the Greeks were Christians, albeit somewhat disobedient ones.

The book proceeds chronologically with six chapters: (1) “From Pope Gregory VII to the Eve of the Second Crusade,” (2) “From the Second Crusade to the End of Manuel's Reign,” (3) “The Last Two Decades of the Twelfth Century,” (4) “From the Preaching of the Fourth Crusade to the Latin Conquest of Constantinople (1198–1204),” (5) “Reaction to 1204 and Attitudes toward the Conquered Greeks: The Official Latin Church,” and (6) “Reaction to 1204 and Attitudes toward the Conquered Greeks: Evidence from Latin Writers,” which addresses the broader European reaction to the Fourth Crusade. There is an introduction, a brief conclusion, appendix, an ample bibliography, and an index.

Methodologically, this is a historical work in the mold of an amassing and contextualizing of reliable documents. The introduction provides a historiographical framework for the period, but the chapters themselves are not overly concerned with historiography or direct critique of other scholars. Instead, the chapters offer an almost encyclopedic discussion of the surviving voices reflecting Latin attitudes toward Greek Christians, supplemented by Neocleous's own analysis.

The benefit of this approach is demonstrated by the preponderance of evidence that Neocleous is able to harness to support his thesis regarding Latin attitudes toward the Greeks. The wide variety of sources also allows him to make a series of astute observations about some noteworthy peculiarities. For example, he identifies the fact that William of Tyre caricatures the Greeks of Cyprus in ways altogether differently (i.e., more positively) than he does the Greeks of the empire. Later, he wryly points to the fact that the most negative statements about the content of Greek Christianity among the chroniclers of the Fourth Crusade came from Western European authors who were not eyewitnesses to the encounter between Greeks and Latins. The actual eyewitnesses, such as Robert de Clari and Geoffrey de Villehardouin, may have been critical of the Greeks but not with respect to the expression of their Christianity.

While I find myself in complete agreement with Neocleous's thesis, and I welcome this publication as a boon for future research, I do find myself in disagreement with two minor points. The first concerns the scholarly debate over the question of whether or not the Greeks in this period required Latin aristocrats to be “rebaptized” prior to an arranged marriage with a member of the Byzantine aristocracy. I do not doubt that some influential Latin churchmen believed that the Greeks did this; what I doubt is whether or not the Greeks actually did it. I place myself in the camp best articulated by Tia Kolbaba (“1054 Revisited: Response to Ryder,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 35, no. 1 [2011]: 38–44), who believes that the recycled Latin critique began as a misunderstanding of the practice of adult Chrismation.

Second and, to my mind, more importantly, I do not agree with Neocleous's unexpected conclusion that the members of the Fourth Crusade only agreed to take the city for themselves after the clergy within their ranks encouraged them to do so on the basis of Greek heresy. Neocleous first advances this position on pages 160–162 and then returns to it in the conclusion on page 239. Not only were the very few accounts that assert this written years after the fact—and, thus, their authors were looking for reasons to justify the siege—but only one of the main sources noted by Neocleous, Gunther of Pairis, consistently criticizes the Greeks on the basis of their supposed heresy. Perhaps Neocleous overrelies on a single sentence in Robert de Clari (a sentence that can be understood differently) to conclude that the army took the city only after it was encouraged to do so by the clergy. As Neocleous affirms elsewhere, Greek religious difference was not something that concerned de Clari. To my mind, a more reasonable conclusion, which is also more consistent with the overall argument of the book, is that the crusaders chose to take the city for themselves with little thought to Greek religious difference; it was only after the fact that some chroniclers of the event justified the siege on the basis of Greek theological error.

Whatever my concerns about these two minor elements, this is an excellent historical account of Latin attitudes toward Greek Christians that helps us to reframe not only our understanding of medieval religious identity but even our own scholarly and theological biases.