The Great Schism of 1054 split Christianity between Greek East and Latin West. Attempts were made over the subsequent centuries to heal the rift, such as the 1274 Second Council of Lyon and the 1439 Council of Florence, but these failed. More recent attempts to foster closer relations between the churches included the Catholic–Orthodox Joint Declaration of 1965 following the 1964 meeting between Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople in Jerusalem. Following that meeting and declaration, a number of meetings, visits and symbolic events had taken place involving Catholic and Orthodox leaders (including visits by Pope John Paul II, and especially between several popes and Bartholomew I of Constantinople), but never a meeting between a Pope and a leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. The first time a Pope visited a predominantly Eastern Orthodox country was in 1999 when Pope John Paul II visited Romania. Since 1980, regular plenary sessions of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, the latter being led by the Church of Constantinople, had been held.