answer was clear: God was angry with them for their sins. What recourse did they
have but to seek new avenues to access divine favor? While still depending on relics
to protect and fortify them, many Byzantines sought the aid of holy images as well.
Monks were especially enthusiastic patrons of these powerful works of art.
Soon there was a backlash against these new-fangled ideas. Emperor Leo III the
Isaurian (r.717–741) agreed that the crises were God’s punishment for the sins of the
Byzantines. But he thought that their chief sin was idolatry. In 726, after a terrifying
volcanic eruption in the middle of the Aegean Sea, Leo seems to have denounced
sacred portraits publicly. Historians used to report that Leo also had his soldiers tear
down a great golden icon of Christ at the Chalke, the gateway to the imperial palace,
and replace it with a cross. Newer research notes that no contemporary sources
record this incident. Most likely it was a legend invented much later. Nevertheless,
around 726, or perhaps a bit before it, Leo erected a cross in front of the imperial
palace. It affirmed not only the Cross’s salvific place in the lives of all Christians but
also its unwavering role in imperial victories. The two events around 726 may be
taken to signify the beginning of the “iconoclastic” (anti-icon or, literally, icon-
breaking) period. In 730, Leo required the pope at Rome and the patriarch of
Constantinople to subscribe to a new policy: to remove sacred images, or at least to
marginalize them, if they inspired the wrong kind of devotion.
Leo was the harbinger of a new religious current. There had always been
churchmen who objected to compassing the divine in the limiting form of a material
image, but they had been in the minority. By the end of Leo’s reign, a majority was
inspired to criticize images. At the Synod of 754, a meeting of over 300 bishops and
Emperor Constantine V (r.741–775) held in Constantinople, sacred images were
banned outright. Its decrees made clear how material representations threatened,
according to iconoclasts, to befoul the purity of the divine. Christ himself had
declared he should be represented through the bread and wine—and in no other way.
As for the saints, they (in the words of the Synod)
live on eternally with God, although they have died. If anyone thinks to
call them back again to life by a dead art, discovered by the heathen, he
makes himself guilty of blasphemy.... It is not permitted to Christians.
.. to insult the saints, who shine in so great glory, by common dead
matter.^3
