the artistic Greeks the place of the relics among the rude Western nations. Images were made to
do service as sponsors in the name of the saints whom they represented. Fabulous stories of their
wonder-working power were circulated and readily believed. Such excesses naturally called forth
a reaction.
Leo III., called the Isaurian (716–741), a sober and energetic, but illiterate and despotic
emperor, who by his military talents and successes had risen from the condition of a peasant in the
mountains of Isauria to the throne of the Caesars, and delivered his subjects from the fear of the
Arabs by the new invention of the "Greek fire," felt himself called, as a second Josiah, to use his
authority for the destruction of idolatry. The Byzantine emperors did not scruple to interfere with
the internal affairs of the church, and to use their despotic power for the purpose. Leo was influenced
by a certain bishop Constantinus^536 of Nakolia in Phrygia, and by a desire to break the force of the
Mohammedan charge against the Christians. In the sixth year of his reign he ordered the forcible
baptism of Jews and Montanists (or Manichaeans); the former submitted hypocritically and mocked
at the ceremony; the latter preferred to set fire to their meeting-houses and to perish in the flames.
Then, in the tenth year (726),^537 he began his war upon the images. At first he only prohibited their
worship, and declared in the face of the rising opposition that he intended to protect the images
against profanation by removing them beyond the reach of touch and kiss. But in a second edict
(730), he commanded the removal or destruction of all the images. The pictured walls were to be
whitewashed. He replaced the magnificent picture of Christ over the gate of the imperial palace by
a plain cross. He removed the aged Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, and put the iconoclastic
Anastasius in his place.
These edicts roused the violent opposition of the clergy, the monks, and the people, who
saw in it an attack upon religion itself. The servants who took down the picture from the palace
gate were killed by the mob. John of Damascus and Germanus, already known to us as hymnists,
were the chief opponents. The former was beyond the reach of Leo, and wrote three eloquent
orations, one before, two after the forced resignation of Germanus, in defence of image-worship,
and exhausted the argument.^538 The islanders of the Archipelago under the control of monks rose
in open rebellion, and set up a pretender to the throne; but they were defeated, and their leaders put
to death. Leo enforced obedience within the limits of the Eastern empire, but had no power among
the Christian subjects of the Saracens, nor in Rome and Ravenna, where his authority was openly
set at defiance. Pope Gregory II. told him, in an insulting letter (about 729), that the children of the
grammar-school would throw their tablets at his head if he avowed himself a destroyer of images,
and the unwise would teach him what he refused to learn from the wise^539. Seventy years afterwards
the West set up an empire of its own in close connection with the bishop of Rome.
(^536) Not Theophilus, as Baronius and Schlosser erroneously call him. See Hefele, III. 372. Theophanes mentions also a
renegade Beser, who had become a Mohammedan, and then probably returned to Christianity and stood in high honor at the
court of Leo.
(^537) There is considerable confusion about the beginning of the conflict and the precise order of events. See Hefele, III.
376 sqq.
(^538) See summaries of hisλόγοιἀπολογητικοίin Schrceckh and Neander.
(^539) According to older historians (Baronius), the pope even excommunicated the emperor, withdrew his Italian subjects
from their allegiance, and forbade the payment of tribute. But this is an error. On the contrary, in a second letter, Gregory
expressly disclaims the power of interfering with the sovereign, while he denies in the strongest terms the right of the emperor