Question: When did the Greek Orthodox Church split from the that was central to imperial life in the early fifth century, for the empire that the term 'The West' comes from?

christianity was a major unifying factor between eastern and western europe before the arab conquests, but the conquest of north africa sundered maritime connections between those areas. increasingly the byzantine church differed in language, practices, and liturgy from the western church. the eastern church used greek instead of the western latin. theological and political differences emerged, and by the early and middle 8th century issues such as iconoclasm, clerical marriage, and state control of the church had widened to the extent that the cultural and religious differences were greater than the similarities. the formal break came in 1054, when the papacy and the patriarchy of constantinople clashed over papal supremacy and excommunicated each other, which led to the division of christianity into two churches—the western branch became the roman catholic church and the eastern branch the orthodox church. <SEP> The Eastern Mediterranean was home to the highly urbanized cultures that had Greek as their common language (owing to the older empire of Alexander the Great and of the Hellenistic successors), whereas the West was much more rural in its character and more readily adopted Latin as its common language. The geopolitical divisions in Europe that created a concept of East and West originated in the Roman Empire. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Western and Central Europe were substantially cut off from the East where Byzantine Greek culture and Eastern Christianity became founding influences in the Arab / Muslim world and among the Eastern and Southern Slavic peoples. Roman Catholic Western and Central Europe, as such, maintained a distinct identity particularly as it began to redevelop during the Renaissance. Even following the Protestant Reformation, Protestant Europe continued to see itself as more tied to Roman Catholic Europe than other parts of the perceived civilized world. <SEP> vladimir's choice of eastern christianity may also have reflected his close personal ties with constantinople, which dominated the black sea and hence trade on kiev's most vital commercial route, the dnieper river. adherence to the eastern church had long-range political, cultural, and religious consequences. the church had a liturgy written in cyrillic and a corpus of translations from greek that had been produced for the slavic peoples. this literature facilitated the conversion to christianity of the eastern slavs and introduced them to rudimentary greek philosophy, science, and historiography without the necessity of learning greek (there were some merchants who did business with greeks and likely had an understanding of contemporary business greek). in contrast, educated people in medieval western and central europe learned latin. enjoying independence from the roman authority and free from tenets of latin learning, the east slavs developed their own literature and fine arts, quite distinct from those of other eastern orthodox countries. [citation needed] (see old east slavic language and architecture of kievan rus for details ). following the great schism of 1054, the rus' church maintained communion with both rome and constantinople for some time, but along with most of the eastern churches it eventually split to follow the eastern orthodox. that being said, unlike other parts of the greek world, kievan rus' did not have a strong hostility to the western world. <SEP> However, he had little power in the West, which was ruled almost entirely by various Germanic tribes. In the opinion of Randall R. Cloud, the permanent separation of the Greek East from the Latin West was ``the fundamental reason for the estrangement that soon followed between the Greek and the Latin Christians ''. In 476, when the last emperor of the western part of the Roman Empire was deposed and the western imperial insignia were sent to Constantinople, there was once again a single Roman Emperor. <SEP> For almost a thousand years, Rome was the most politically important, richest and largest city in Europe. Around 100 CE, it had a population of about 450,000, and declined to a mere 20,000 during the Early Middle Ages, reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins and vegetation.