The disaster only confirmed the end of the period of radical innovation in Orthodoxy, which had lasted from the iconoclast controversies of the eight and ninth centuries down to the affirmation of Hesychasm in 1351. It is worth speculating on how different the Orthodox mood might have been, how much openness to change and new theological speculation might have developed, if Byzantine Orthodoxy had not been so much on the defensive from the fourteenth century down to modern times.
