The Greek Church.
Although one Pope, Boniface VIII, issued a Bull decreeing that every human being, including the members of the Greek Church, was bound to obey the Roman Pontiff, a prudent and tolerant attitude was usually maintained towards that unsound but powerful rival. Stray members of the Greek communion who happened to be found in Western Europe were at times persecuted as heretics, and in 1351 all Greeks were ordered once a year to confess and take the sacrament according to the Latin usage. Any person who after this decree violated it was a relapsed heretic, and entitled to no mercy. But to coerce effectively a great religious organization, every member of which was in the eyes of Rome a heretic, proved too arduous a task for orthodoxy, and the Inquisition failed to utilize the glorious opportunities for persecution afforded by Eastern Europe, with its variety of races and religious ideas. The Church was therefore prudent enough to follow a line of policy as mild and tolerant as it was novel.