Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-27713488-20180615004848/@comment-31763506-20181017154453

If you want to split hairs, the schisms have already happened, with the High Priestess of Stineford denouncing the Feroholm branch of the Ivalan Church as heretical, and this sort of squabbling being the norm per Simon in Ch1. There are also three distinct schools of theology on the nature of "sin" and redemption, something the medieval Catholic Church would never have tolerated.

The situation on the ground in Arclent is actually more like the chaos that prevailed in the early church between Constantine, the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of Islam, when there was no generally accepted "head" of the church, just a lot of bishops with frequently contradictory opinions. Those disputes were never really formally resolved, what ended up happening is that Arians, Monophysites, Nestorians, and everybody who wasn't what was emerging as the Catholic and Orthodox faiths got conquered by the expanding Islamic caliphate and taken out of the power dynamics equation in terms of arguing bishoprics, and the Eastern Roman Emperor and the early iterations of the Holy Roman Empire found it convenient to prop up the Bishops of Constantinople and Rome to get their support for their political regimes, and then these two most powerful church authorities did some proselytizing of their own. Heretical schisms did happen in the period between final breach between Rome and Constantinople in 1054 and the one that finally did in Papal Supremacy in the West starting with Luther and Calvin, see especially the Cathars and the Hussites, but the civil power kept stamping the heretics into the dirt because the clerics had a near monopoly on education and the kings and barons needed them to keep the ox carts running on time.

That metaphor may have gotten away from me at some point.

If you want to see what the theological free for all of early Christianity was like, you can check out Extra History's videos on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1ZZeCDGHJE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZsZXHPDwsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d2lOQpuqd4