Map 8 A new world, 800: the Carolingian, Byzantine, and Abbasid empires
In the days of old [wrote a Muslim geographer] cities were numerous in Rum [the East Roman empire], but now they have become few. Most of the districts are prosperous and pleasant, and have each an exceedingly strong fortress, on account of the raids of the [Muslim] fighters of the faith. To each village appertains a castle, where they take shelter.1
By A.D. 700, the former world empire of East Rome, known to the Muslims as Rûm, had become a sadly diminished state. It had lost its eastern provinces and three quarters of its former revenues. For two centuries on end, until around 840, it faced near-annual attack from the Islamic empire – a state ten times larger than itself, with a budget 15 times greater, capable of mustering armies that outnumbered those of the Rûmi by five to one. The most hotly contested frontier of the Christian world lay, not in western Europe, but a little to the west of modern Ankara, in what had been ancient Phrygia. A chain of fortified garrison-towns, their walls rapidly piled up from the spoils of ancient classical monuments, blocked the way which led from eastern Anatolia, where the Muslim armies would gather, to the valleys that led down to the Aegean coast and from there to Constantinople. Every November, a thick blanket of snow gripped the highlands, blocking the passes and turning the fortresses of Phrygia into “cities of Hell” for the Arab invaders. Winter, and the vast distances of an Anatolian plateau skillfully defended by East Roman generals, stood between ever-present Muslim armies and the densely populated villages of the Aegean that were the heart of what remained of the Christian empire.
Map 8 A new world, 800: the Carolingian, Byzantine, and Abbasid empires
THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE ca. 700–ca. 843
| Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchies ca.500 | |
| John of Damascus ca.665–ca.749 writes Defense of Holy Images 726/733 | |
| Leo III, emperor 717–741 Constantine V 741–775 | |
| Lombards conquer Ravenna 751 | |
| Iconoclast Council of Hieria 757 | |
| Iconophile Council of Nicaea 787 | |
| Charlemagne 768–814 commissions Libri Carolini 793 summons Council of Frankfurt 794 | |
| Emperor Nicephorus killed by Khan Krum of the Bulgars 811 | |
| Leo IV emperor 813–820 ">“Second Iconoclasm” 815+ | |
| Nicephorus 750–828 patriarch of Constantinople writes Antirrhetikos 818/20 | |
| Theodore of Stoudios 759–826 | |
| “Triumph of Orthodoxy” 843 |
It was this embattled heartland which survived. Between 717 and 843, western Asia Minor, the coastlines of Greece and the Balkans and, at the furthest edge of the Ionian Sea, Sicily and Calabria were firmly incorporated into a new political system. Ruled from Constantinople, southern Italy was as Greek in the early Middle Ages as Magna Graecia had been in ancient times. The modern term “Byzantine” (which we have avoided until now) is apposite for the compact, Greek empire which replaced the old-world grandeur of the “Roman” empire of the East. The emperors continued to call themselves “Roman” and treated the Muslims as no more than temporary occupants of the “Roman” provinces of Egypt and Syria. But they now ruled a more cohesive state, made up of a largely Greek population. Westerners called it, increasingly and with justice, “the empire of the Greeks.”
Though reeling from the attacks of outsiders, the new “Byzantine” emperors were very much lords of their own territories. Few barriers stood between them and direct control of their subjects. The old city councils and the civilian provincial elites associated with the cities were swept aside. Four great Themata – Themes, stationed armies – formed massive regional commands of up to 15,000 troops each. The Themes dominated the countryside of Asia Minor. Their generals came from the highlands of the eastern frontier. Many were Armenians. They were often fluent in Arabic. Altogether, the new elites of the empire were hard men, soldiers and ranchers, who did not pretend to possess urban graces. They were a warrior elite, not unlike their contemporaries in western Europe. But they were pious Christians, loyal servants of Christian emperors in a time of constant emergency. The populations they defended were made up, overwhelmingly, of villagers. The ancient cities and the elites associated with them had all but vanished. No urban oligarchies stood between the villages and the central power, as they had done in previous ages. The inhabitants of such a rural society, if they looked outside their village at all, looked up directly to their emperor. They identified themselves through loyalty to a Christian emperor, who shared the same embattled faith as themselves. Their empire was defined by their religion quite as sharply as was the empire of the Muslims. Theirs was the empire of “the baptized people.”2
At the center of a drastically simplified society, Constantinople stood alone. Other cities had become mere fortresses and market-towns. But even Constantinople was a depleted city. Its population had shrunk to around 60,000. Spacious gardens crept into its center, sheltering monasteries and great pleasure palaces, often built in a new, non-classical Near Eastern style, associated with Persia and with the luxurious life of Arab princes. The inhabitants were largely immigrants from the Balkans. They had lost all sense of the classical past. The ancient public decor of Constantinople spoke to them of a fairytale world, which they understood only dimly. The classical statues which Constantine had lavished on his city now struck them as alien, vaguely threatening presences, out of place in a Christian present.3
Yet, in this greatly reduced city, the Imperial Palace, the gigantic Hippodrome with its imperial box, and the Golden Gate, through which victorious armies still occasionally made their entry, remained in place. So did Justinian’s Hagia Sophia. In the nearby library of the patriarch of Constantinople, it was still possible to find, and even, with some difficulty, to understand the “orthodox” meaning of the writings of the great Greek Fathers of the Church. The Byzantine Church was increasingly cut off from Latin Christianity and from the Christian communities in the Middle East. It became more compact as its horizons narrowed. It had become no more than one “micro-Christendom” among others. But the emperor and clergy of Byzantium were convinced that in the writings of the “Greek Fathers” and in the traditions of their Church lay the essence of a total “orthodox” system of belief.
Texts of the Fathers were excerpted and arranged in encyclopedic anthologies. The organization of the overwhelming richness of the past into trenchant collections of citations and the resolution of theological problems through manuals of Questions and Answers was as necessary a pursuit in Byzantium as it was, at the same time, in the Spain of Isidore of Seville. The Byzantine clergy were as intensely concerned as were the bishops of Spain that “orthodox” belief should be reflected in uniform traditions of worship observed throughout the empire. Given this situation, the religious life of Byzantium was characterized, not by renewed theological controversy, but by heated debates over concrete Christian religious practices. It is not surprising, therefore, that the custom of venerating painted images of Christ, of his Mother, and of the saints became the center of a virulent controversy among the leaders of the Byzantine church.4
This controversy is known to scholars as the “Iconoclast controversy.” To modern persons it has seemed strange that the governing classes of an empire thrown into a period of unparalleled turmoil should have devoted time and energy to deciding how believers should treat religious images. Images that portray religious scenes are now so much part of the imaginative world of western Christians, and “icons” (in the strict sense of individual images of holy persons – Christ, the Virgin, and the saints) are so much part of the religious practice of the Orthodox Church, that it is hard to recapture an age where their presence was hotly contested. But, in around A.D. 730, what was at stake in this issue was by no means trivial. It was about how to find, in a society thrown into a state of perpetual mobilization, fully acceptable symbols around which to rally the religious determination of a much-battered “baptized people.” The beleaguered Christians of the Byzantine empire believed that, if they looked to God for help, then they had to be sure that the manner of their worship was acceptable to him. The survival of the empire was at stake.
Those who revered icons called themselves “Iconophiles” – lovers of images – and even “Iconodules” – worshippers of images. They had come to believe that icons brought Christ, his Mother, and the saints down among the Christian people. These holy figures were now in heaven; but they were made accessible on earth through their portraits. The word “icon” comes from the Greek eikôn, “image.” At the time it meant any representation of a human person. Holy persons could be shown either through their faces alone or in full length. These could be painted on boards (like modern “icons”), but they could also be shown in mosaic or fresco in churches. What mattered is that, since around the middle of the sixth century, these images tended to be set up separately or, if they were part of a larger decor of a church, to receive separate treatment.
A significant change had come about in the visual world of Christians all over the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Ever since the fourth century, Christian churches had been filled with images of holy figures: splendid rows of angels and holy persons could be seen on the walls of every church. But now, some of these images, as it were, “broke ranks.” The new images came to be placed, by themselves, in prominent positions: at the doors of shrines, at special places in churches, in public places, outside shops, and in privileged places within Christian homes. Even when they were still part of the overall decor of churches, they were made to look special by being placed in separate panels. This made them “holy” images. They received gestures of veneration: believers bowed deeply before them, kissed them, burnt lights and incense before them, even nailed votive objects to them, as tokens of their power.
Such images made Christ, his Mother, and the distant saints “present” at a precise place, where they could receive the prayers of those who needed them. They met an unchanging need to sense, close to hand, the loving “presence” of invisible protectors. Pagans had made their gods “present” in this way through little pictures and portable statues.5 As we have seen, living holy men had always played a similar important role in eastern Christianity. By their miracles of healing and their preaching, holy persons “made present” the love and power of a distant God. In the course of the sixth century it came to be believed that portraits of such holy persons could also make them present, even at a distance. These portraits were usually made on small portable tablets, following a long tradition of representing protecting gods, and of memorializing heroes, personal benefactors, and beloved parents. In around 550, a woman who had been healed by a holy man set up a portrait of the saint in the inner quarters of her house. “Being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit which also dwelled in the saint,” the image itself began to work miracles. It did so in the privacy of the woman’s quarters, many miles away from the mountain-top where the holy man lived. A woman came to the house to be healed of a 15-year-long illness: “For she had said to herself: ‘If only I see his likeness, I shall be saved.’ ”6
The incident shows the strength of one current in Christian piety at a time when the empire was about to face its most deadly challenges. If we turn to Rome in the seventh century, we can see the manner in which religious images came to be charged with the hopes of those who regarded them as a special means through which to approach invisible protectors. On one icon of Mary, set up in a special place in the ancient Pantheon (which had been converted into a church in 608) the hand of the Mother of Christ was gilded. It was the hand with which Mary would touch her Son, to remind him of his love for those who prayed before her image. Mary’s hand, as it were, was shown in the act of drawing the attention of Christ to the worshipper who stood praying before the image. In Thessalonica, also, Saint Demetrius was shown with a golden right hand raised in prayer to God, while he laid his left hand on the shoulders of those whom he protected. On such images, what you saw was exactly what you hoped to get: the protection of God made “present” by the prayer of the saint before whom you yourself now prayed.
Nor did these images address purely private needs. Ever since the end of the sixth century, at a time when the empire already felt threatened by invasion from Persia and from the Balkans, images of Christ and the Virgin had been carried in processions to invoke their protection. The solemn movement of an image seemed to make it live, as it swayed above the crowd. To the Iconophiles, images of this kind guaranteed the presence, on earth, of the supernatural protectors whom they represented.7
By the year 730, such practices were already well developed. But they were far from being universal. Even after two centuries, many Byzantines regarded the cult of images as a novel and exaggerated form of devotion. Those who were called (by their enemies) the Iconoclasts, the “icon-smashers,” were far from certain that such images were “pleasing to God.” Yet, in peaceful times, conflict over the issue might have been indefinitely postponed. This could not happen after the unparalleled series of crises which fell upon the Byzantine empire in the generations before and after the Muslim invasions. The “worship” of images already had its critics. Now such critics would be heard.
In the first place, the worship of images had always been repugnant to the Jews within the Roman empire. When persecuted by Christians (as had happened during the Persian wars of the emperor Heraclius in the 630s) Jews had responded by bitter criticisms of their images. They pointed out that, in his Ten Commandments, God had expressly forbidden the worship of images made by human hands. Now some Christians were inclined to agree with the Jews. God might, indeed, turn his face away from his people because of their idolatry.8
A little later, the rise of Islam brought the issue of images into even sharper focus. Islam presented itself as a true and incorrupt religion very much through criticizing contemporary Christian practice. Strict Muslim theologians even claimed that no artist had the right to “endow” an image with “life” by representing a living creature. (Painting was seen as a sort of “cloning” through art, by which the artist reproduced “living” creatures, thereby usurping God’s right to infuse them with life.) Muslim art veered away from the representation of the human form. As we saw in the case of the Ummayad Mosque at Damascus and similar monuments, Muslim art and architecture remained magnificent; but it moved rapidly, in the course of the seventh and early eighth centuries, in the direction of abstract, floral imagery, across which moved the steady, Arabic script of citations from the Qur’ân.
Christians under Muslim rule were affected by these developments. In Palestine and Jordan, for instance, Christian churches of this time seem to have acknowledged the validity of Muslim criticisms. The mosaics on the floors of many churches were changed, around 700, so as to replace living creatures with floral designs. It is tantalizing testimony of debates on images which must have taken place all over the Middle East, in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian circles.9
Not all of this debate between Muslims, Jews, and Christians touched Byzantium. Their Iconophile enemies accused the Iconoclasts of having been directly influenced by Muslim views. This accusation can be discounted. The Iconoclast emperors, Leo III (717–741) and Constantine V (741–775) considered themselves to be good Christians. And, as good Christians, they believed that the Christian congregations of their empire should not be encouraged to turn, in their time of need, to unreliable objects of devotion. They should not pin their hopes on “inanimate and speechless images, made of material colors, which bring no benefit.”10
In the opinion of the Iconoclasts, what the Iconophiles presented as “holy” images were no such thing. They were too close for comfort to the little images of the gods which pagans were remembered to have used. The remains of once-vibrant pagan shrines dotted the landscape of Anatolia, over which Byzantine and Islamic armies maneuvered every year. The populations of many areas of Anatolia had only been Christianized for a century or so. The charge that the veneration of “holy” images revived pagan idolatry was easy to believe. It caused particular worry to conscientious bishops placed in the garrison cities of western Anatolia, which lay in the war zone between the Christian empire and its Muslim opponents.
What was never at stake, in this controversy, was whether art itself should continue in Byzantium. The Iconoclast emperors built splendid palaces, filled with animal and human figures. But palaces were not churches. Images might be used in profane contexts. The Iconoclast emperors did not follow the trend toward an entirely abstract art which characterized Islam. But they did believe that images were out of place in Christian churches. To make them special and to “worship” them, as many Christians appeared to have been doing, was an impious action, calculated to provoke the anger of God.
This was an age of emergency, the Byzantine equivalent of the Battle of Britain. What contemporaries remembered in the debate for and against the worship of images were not theological arguments. Rather, what counted for them were incidents in which God appeared to show his displeasure at the “idolatrous” worship of images. One example shows this clearly. When the Muslim armies invested the city of Nicaea, having penetrated down from Anatolia to within easy reach of the Sea of Marmara and of Constantinople itself, a Byzantine officer manning the walls spotted an image of the Virgin. The image had probably been brought out by believers to parade along the walls of Nicaea so as to invoke her protection. He took up a stone and hurled it at the image, knocking it off its stand. He then trampled upon it until the wooden panel broke. Sure enough, the Muslim army withdrew. To the Iconoclasts involved in the defence of Nicaea (but by no means to the Iconophiles!) the officer’s gesture had been a pious act. By stopping an “idolatrous” practice, he had pleased God and so caused the withdrawal of the threatening Muslim army.11
From 730 to 787, the initiative lay with the Iconoclasts. Iconoclast emperors and their advisers claimed to offer to their subjects something better than icons. They upheld the image of the Cross. The abstract sign of the Cross was a symbol of unquestioned visual power. The Cross was a symbol which every Byzantine Christian shared, and which every Muslim was known to despise. It had the weight of the past behind it. The Cross had been the “victory-bringing sign” under whose auspices Constantine was believed to have won his battles and to have founded the Christian empire. To force the Cross to the foreground, so that it should replace all other images, was the sign of a Christian empire stripped for battle and reunited to its triumphant past. For the Iconoclast emperors, there was no such thing as an “Iconoclast controversy” for the simple reason that their position seemed, at first sight, to be utterly uncontroversial. As so many Roman emperors had done before them, they would save the present by going back to the past. They would revive the days of Constantine. Under the Cross alone, and without the help of icons, true Christian emperors would relive the victories of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor.12
The emperor who initiated this policy, Leo III (717–741), had the advantage of having begun his reign with a spectacular sign of God’s blessing. In 717, he saved Constantinople from a major Arab invasion. As we saw at the end of chapter 13, Leo used the devastating “Greek fire” (a new invention, brought to Constantinople by refugee Syrians who had gained from the petroleum-rich regions of northern Iraq knowledge of the chemistry of substances that would burn on the surface of water) to destroy the Arab fleet which had gathered beneath the walls of the city. Leo’s decision to act against images coincided with a terrifying volcanic eruption in the Aegean, in 726. As ashes darkened the sky above Constantinople, a new sign of the Cross, its power acclaimed by an inscription, was set up over the entrance to the Palace. Bishops on the frontier received tacit permission to destroy images in the churches much as they would destroy pagan idols. The Byzantines were the “people of God” like the People of Israel. They now thought of themselves as being as beleaguered as the People of Israel had been. Leo feared that his empire might be altogether deserted by God, as the People of Israel had once been deserted by him, because, by worshipping images, they had lapsed into idolatry.13
Thus the first phase of what we call “the Iconoclast controversy” took place in an atmosphere of public emergency. The controversy was not allowed to escalate. Apart from occasional vicious acts of violence by Iconoclast officials (acts which gained in the telling in later, Iconophile histories of the period) a lifeboat mentality prevailed at Constantinople. A small governmental class and an upper clergy, largely recruited from that class, were anxious to maintain what little remained of the Christian empire. They tended to follow a firm, imperial lead.
Leo’s son was appropriately named Constantine V (741–775), after Constantine the Great. He knew what he wanted – that his Christian subjects should pin their hopes on trustworthy objects of devotion. As his armies slowly turned the tide of the Muslim advance, he could count on the loyalty of the populations which he had defended so successfully, and on the active enthusiasm of troops who proved increasingly victorious. The soldiers knew that they had won their battles without the help of icons. There was no need for this new Constantine to hurry. Only in 754 did Constantine V assemble a council of the Church, in his suburban palace at Hiereia, to secure a definitive declaration, on theological grounds, of the illegitimacy of image-worship. Only in 765 did he permit the lynching of a leading Iconophile, Saint Stephen the Younger. Next year (after a failed attempt at a conspiracy against him) he singled out for public humiliation lay persons and monks who did not follow the imperial policy.14
This policy was clear. Constantine would purge the Church of occasions for “idolatry” just as the pious king Hezekiah of Israel had once “purged” the Temple of Jerusalem of the “idol” of a brazen serpent. By so doing, Hezekiah had turned away the danger of invasion and conquest by the Assyrians. Facing imminent conquest by their “Assyrians,” the Muslims, the Byzantine emperors would do the same. They would purge their temples (that is, the churches) of idols (the icons). Sometime in around 750, the large basilica church of Saint Irene was repaired. Saint Irene was a prominent church. It stood between the great church of the Hagia Sophia and the ancient capitol of Byzantium (on the edge of what is now the Top Kapi Palace). Constantine V went out of his way to fill the apse with ethereal green mosaic, in which an entirely abstract sign of the Cross stood out in silver, like a triumphant sign shining from the depths of heaven. Around it, in a stately Greek script, ran an inscription from Psalm 65:
Holy is Thy Temple. Thou art wonderful in righteousness.
Hear us, O God our Savior, the hope of all the ends of the earth.
The combination of an abstract Cross, a renewed church as splendid as the “purged” Temple of Jerusalem, and a triumphal citation from the Psalms was very much the message which the Iconoclast emperors had wished to communicate to their subjects.15
Not all of Constantine V’s subjects, however, had agreed with this particular formula for deliverance. The death of Constantine V in 775 and the weakening of his dynasty led to a drastic swing of policy. When it came to an issue as charged as the safety of the empire, it was a matter of either/or. A council was summoned in 787 by the empress-regent Irene (the widowed daughter-in-law of Constantine V) in the name of her son, Constantine VI, to bring an end to Iconoclasm. This event, known as the Second Council of Nicaea, was a clamorous victory for the Iconophiles. Even the site of the council, at Nicaea, was deliberately chosen so as to make the council appear to be a triumphal re-enactment of Constantine’s first “worldwide” council. (The truth was that the bishops did not dare to meet in Constantinople, where opinion was largely in favor of the former Iconoclast emperors.)16
Not surprisingly, the restoration of images did not last. By 815, what is known as “the second Iconoclasm” was back in power. For the best part of a century, strong, successful rule had come to be associated with the absence of images. All that was needed was a renewed public emergency for Icono-clasm to be re-instituted as the policy of the emperors. This happened as a result of a major crisis in the Balkans.
The endless warfare between Byzantium and Islam had overshadowed Balkan affairs. Yet, ever since the Great Plague of the age of Justinian (as we have seen in chapter 7) the hinterland of the Balkans slipped out of the control of the Byzantine emperors. The empire retained its grip on the coastline; but in the mountainous hinterland large swathes of territory became “stateless” zones. Slav settlers moved into them. The Slavs kept a low profile. They tended not to produce aggressive military leaders. Rather they looked for leadership to the nomadic confederacies which had formed to the north of the Danube, in the steppelands of Moldavia and the Ukraine. First the Avars and then the Bulgars acted, as it were, as a “counter-empire” to Byzantium. Their presence effectually neutralized imperial attempts to dominate the Slavs and to regain control of the Balkans.
Hence, only a generation after the apparent victory of the Iconodules at the Council of Nicaea, Constantinople found itself overshadowed, once again, by a semi-nomadic Bulgarian Khanate, which had established itself on both sides of the Danube in the course of the eighth century. The Bulgars called themselves “Children of the Huns.” They were the most recent example of a nomadic style of overlordship. From their base on the Danube, they threatened the rich, disciplined plains of Thrace, on which Constantinople depended for its food supply. Though they came to rule large Christian populations, the Bulgar Khans were deliberately opaque to Christianity. In 811, Khan Krum (802–814) defeated and killed the emperor Nicephorus. Nothing like it had happened since the death of the emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378. Krum turned the emperor’s skull into a drinking-cup with which to share the wine of triumph with his Slav allies.17
Fortunately, Krum died in 814, but not before his armies had reached the walls of Constantinople. Nicephorus’ successor, Leo V, knew what he should do. The message was clear. The revived worship of icons had, once again, angered God:
Why is it that the Christians all experience defeat at the hands of the [pagan] nations? [Leo was said to have asked] I think it is due to the worship of images and nothing else … Only those who have not venerated them have died natural deaths, and have been escorted with honor to the Imperial Tombs …
It is they whom I intend to imitate in rejecting images, so that, having lived a long life, I and my son should keep the empire to the fourth and fifth generations.18
With all eyes upon him, at the Epiphany ceremony at the Hagia Sophia, Leo deliberately passed by a representation of Christ and his Mother in the form of a great roundel woven on the cloth that covered the great altar. He made sure that everyone noticed that he did not bow before it. He made clear, by this gesture, that believing Christians should not show an “idolatrous” degree of respect toward religious images. Under Leo’s successors, Michael II (820–829) and Theophilus (829–842), images remained out of favor. But, this time, they were ignored rather than attacked.
The “Second Iconoclasm” was the product of cultivated men. It was much less raw and more reflective than were the emergency-driven policies of Leo III and Constantine V. It was less a matter of attacking images as “idols,” whose worship angered God, as of questioning the ability of any religious image to capture adequately the unearthly glory of Christ and the saints. As the product of a mere human artist, the icon was doomed to be an unreliable guide to the supernatural realities which it claimed to represent. Consequently, there was no good reason, intellectual or religious, why Christians, who had been provided by God with so many satisfying visible symbols of their religion (the sacraments and the sign of the Cross), should go out of their way to lavish devotion on little painted images.19
Ironically, Iconoclasm was finally undermined by the success of its imperial sponsors. The pressure of Muslim invasions diminished. The beleaguered Byzantine empire of the 730s clambered back painfully, by the year 840 and afterwards, into the position of a world power. After 840, an unprecedented degree of wealth and leisure returned to the elites of Constantinople. With this came a greater degree of cultural self-confidence. After 840, we find that Greek diplomatic missions to Baghdad made capital out of the superiority of Greek culture. As we have seen, in chapter 13, the Califs greatly prized “Greek” wisdom at their court. Byzantine ambassadors now pointed out that their Greek empire was the fountainhead of all this wisdom. Byzantium, and not the upstart Islamic empire, was the crown of civilization.20
Iconophiles of the period after 840 looked back on their own past in a similar mood. After a century of dislocation and hand-to-mouth existence, they had reached a new plateau of culture and sophistication. They dismissed Iconoclasm as a thoroughly un-Byzantine aberration. They claimed that only “half-barbarous” rulers, devoid of Greek culture, could have so mistaken the rich traditions of their Church.
We should not be misled by these assertions. They were made after the event. Throughout the eighth and early ninth centuries, cultivated Greek clergymen had frequently criticized the worship of images. The population, also, had been divided on the issue. In dangerous times, they had no wish to offend God by idolatry. It was a caricature of the past to present it in terms of “barbarous” Iconoclast emperors riding rough shod over the wishes of a naturally Iconophile population. The equation of the worship of icons with the immemorial traditions of the Greek Church was made only after the victory of the supporters of images.
In fact, a firm Iconophile position emerged for the first time only at the very end of the controversy, in the period between the Iconophile Council of Nicaea in 787 and the official “Triumph of Orthodoxy” in 843. It is important to realize this. The victory of icons did not represent, at the time, the “natural” victory of the immemorial religious ideals of the majority of Greek Christians. Rather, the period of the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” and the measures taken to consolidate the Iconophile position were marked by creative new solutions, which had little to do with the past. What emerged at that time was new and destined to last.
In the eighth century, the Byzantine empire had almost collapsed, only to remake itself into a new state in such a way that it would endure for centuries as a major power in eastern Europe and the Middle East. Without the Iconoclast emperors and their willingness to jettison much of the cumbersome legacy of the later Roman empire, Constantinople would almost certainly have fallen to the Muslims long before 1453. In much the same way, the Iconophiles jettisoned much of the East Roman Christian past. They gained control of the elites of the empire in the course of the ninth century. Having done so, they used their victory to incorporate the worship of images into what was, in effect, a novel religious system. They showed that they were as much “reformers,” in their own way, as the Iconoclasts had been. While they claimed to have revived the immemorial traditions of the Church, they were prepared to take control of popular religious practice in a new way and to make it serve their own, new needs. It is their measured synthesis (and not the more dramatic but piecemeal forms of the worship of images associated with previous centuries) which has endured for over a thousand years in all regions of the Orthodox world. Let us look, briefly, at some of the intellectual underpinnings and the consequences of this silent revolution in religious practice.
The consolidation of the Iconophile position was due to three great protagonists. Two were active in Constantinople immediately after the Second Council of Nicaea of 787. The great abbot Theodore of Studios (759–826) showed a hatred of compromise and a fighting spirit on behalf of the worship of icons which fired the lay and religious elites of Constantinople. The theological ideas of the Iconoclast emperor Constantine V were carefully refuted by the patriarch of Constantinople, Nicephorus (750–828), in his Antirrhetikos (written in 818–20). Together, Theodore and Nicephorus regained the intellectual high ground for the Iconodules. They promoted the worship of icons from being an intense but largely unreflective practice of many Christians into being a touchstone of orthodoxy. They argued with remarkable intellectual bravura that not only was it permissible to represent central doctrines of the faith (such as the full humanity of Christ) through images, but that, in fact, such doctrines could not be properly expressed without images. Icons were not merely useful “illustrations” of the faith. They were a sine qua non for its correct expression.21
In the long run, however, the most authoritative voice came from a century earlier, and from a long way from Constantinople. The views of a distant and hitherto little-known Syrian, John of Damascus (ca.665–ca.749), only came to be adopted in the generations after the Council of Nicaea. From then on, in Orthodox Christian circles, John Damascene (as he is usually called), was acclaimed as the last great Father of the Church, and his defense of holy images has been held to be the classic statement of the Orthodox position. Yet, although John, like all other Iconophiles, claimed to defend the perennial wisdom of the Church since its earliest days, his writings reveal a comprehensive and thought-through attitude to Christian art that was entirely new. His defense of images was as much a novel departure, in comparison with all that had gone before, as was the radicalism of the Iconoclasts. Let us linger a little, therefore, on the thought of this remarkable man.
John was not in any way a “Byzantine” as this had come to be defined at Constantinople in the war-torn years of the eighth century. He belonged to an older and more open age. As we saw in chapter 13, John was a Christian Arab. He was a pious member of a powerful administrative family of Christian Arabs long settled at Damascus. In the manner of generations of cultivated and pious public servants, John left his father’s profession to adopt a life of ascetic retirement, much as Gregory I had done when he retired from the prefecture of Rome to his family monastery. John is said to have become a monk in the great monastery of Saint Sabas, in the Wadi Saba near Jerusalem.
Political frontiers meant little to John. He thought of himself, first and foremost, as an “Orthodox” Christian, a supporter of the Chalcedonian faith with which (as we have seen) the “Byzantine” emperors were still identified. Though probably an Arabic-speaker from his boyhood, as a theologian John wrote and thought in Greek. This was the learned language of his fellow-Orthodox wherever they might be. When he sat down to write his Defense of Holy Images and other treatises in defence of orthodoxy, between 726 and 733, both Muslim and early Iconoclast arguments were already known to him. It was typical of the embattled and authoritarian mood of the Byzantine empire, that only a Christian living under Muslim rule was free to write in defense of images, and that (due to careful Muslim protection of the Christian communities within their domains) he enjoyed complete leisure to do so and had access to unparalleled library resources still maintained in the monasteries of the Judaean Desert. It was also characteristic of the regionalism which had fallen across the entire Christian world, that John’s writings only came to be well known in Byzantium after 800. Only then did they come to play an essential role in the formation of a Byzantine theology of images. But it was John’s theology of the image which helped to prepare for the definitive victory of Iconophile ideas associated with the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” of 843.22
John’s most decisive intellectual maneuver was to claim for images the same unambiguous ability to represent the unseen that earlier authors had claimed only for the liturgy and for the sacraments of the Church.
Images [he wrote] are a source of profit, help and salvation for us since they make hidden things clearly manifest to us, enabling us to perceive realities otherwise hidden to human eyes.23
He did this largely under the influence of two remarkable works, the Celestial and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchies of Dionysius the Areopagite. This crucial author was a Christian Platonist of the sixth century. But John and his contemporaries believed that he was none other than an Athenian philosopher who had become the disciple of Saint Paul. His thought was held to reflect the opinions of the very earliest Christians.
In his treatises, Pseudo-Dionysius endowed the entire material world with a sense of the holy. God lay behind it. He had created the visible universe to act as his own, immense icon. A vast “code” of visible symbols, deliberately placed by God in the world, linked humanity to an invisible God. The physical, visual aspects of Christian worship were part of that great code. God was far above human imagination. But God drew the human race toward him through a proliferation of visible symbols. This was the cornerstone of Pseudo-Dionysius’ argument: “we are led to the perception of God by … visible images.”24
Religious images, therefore, were not a mere product of human choice and of human invention. They were essential to God’s revelation of himself. They formed a bridge, wished by God himself, with which to cross the vertiginous chasm between the seen and the unseen. The figures which believers saw on icons or on the walls of churches were what God wished them to see. They were clearly recognizable tokens which led the mind to the invisible persons that they represented.
By such arguments John of Damascus answered the acute anxiety which had driven Iconoclast criticism of the worship of images. The Iconoclasts had not trusted the unguided visual imagination. For them, as for many Christians in former centuries, there was no reason why a saint, the Virgin, or Christ as imagined by an artist should be related in any way to the “real” person that it claimed to represent. The contorted, haunting forms of classical statues showed only too plainly how pagans of the distant past had been led by demons to dream up images of their gods. Were Christian “holy” images, painted by mere artists, to be treated as any more reliable? John’s symbolic system of the universe, based on Pseudo-Dionysius, answered this criticism with great force. What Christians represented on their “holy” images was, basically, what God, the saints, and the angels wished them to represent, as a merciful concession to the weakness of the human mind.
But there was a price to be paid for absence of anxiety about images. This was the acceptance of guidance from the Church alone. John of Damascus and his successors insisted not only that images had always been venerated, in some form or other. They also asserted that every image that was venerated in their own days had been venerated, in exactly the same form, since the days of Christ and the Apostles. The Gospel written by Saint Luke was said to have included illustrations. These illustrations were the prototype of all future Christian representations of the life of Christ. All images, therefore, reached back ultimately to the days of Christ and the Apostles. It was a breathtaking claim, which made time stand still. But it was made for a good reason – to ensure that not a shadow of doubt could fall between the form taken by images, as they had evolved in ninth-century Byzantium, and the beloved persons whom they were said to represent.25
John’s assertion that icons had always been part of Christian worship was further validated, in the ninth century, by appeals to visions. For visions added up-to-date confirmation of the Iconophile belief that the Church had always possessed a complete and totally reliable set of “identikit” representations of every holy figure. The Christian imagination did not need to fear that it had wasted itself in vain on arbitrary creations.
We can appreciate what this meant to Byzantines through one well-known example. In 867, a mosaic of the Virgin with Christ on her lap was set up for the first time in the apse of the Hagia Sophia. The mosaic used all the devices of a self-consciously revived classical style in a deliberate, even fussy manner, to emphasize the three-dimensional and hence the “real” quality of Christ and his Mother. Hyper-real by Byzantine standards, the new mosaic was an awkward presence in that vast and ancient church. Even today it stands out in marked contrast to the faceless glory of the golden mosaic dome and the shimmering, multicolored marbles set up, three centuries previously, by the emperor Justinian. For Justinian was very much a Christian of the early sixth century. He had made little use of images. Rather, he and his architects had believed that the sheer blaze of sunlight trapped in the dome and the haunting shimmer of multicolored marbles had done nothing less than bring heaven down to earth in his great new church.
But, in 867, cultivated Byzantines no longer thought as late Roman persons such as Justinian had done. For them, to look up at the newly installed mosaic was to look past it. It was to see the apse open on to a scene which was believed to have always been available to believers, and which had always been exactly as they now saw it. It was to see the Virgin and her child as they really were, and as they had appeared to believers in all ages. This was no “imagined” image, the product of the random fantasy of an artist. It was a real vision, frozen in mosaic.
Before our eyes stands motionless the Virgin carrying the Creator in her arms as an infant, depicted in painting as she is in writings and as she has appeared in visions.26
After 843, the churches of the Orthodox Byzantine world came to be filled with such visions, frozen in mosaic and fresco. What Orthodox believers now saw, on entering a Byzantine church from the ninth century onwards, was no longer a space throbbing with faceless, shimmering glory, as Justinian’s Hagia Sophia had been. But neither would their eye be drawn to a single, heavily charged image, which stood out from all the rest, as an object of special devotion, as was the case in many seventh-century churches. What they now saw were rows upon rows of human faces, arranged on the walls as if they were all staring down upon the worshipper from the great court of heaven. The saints were brought into the present in orderly ranks. The faces and figures of saints and Apostles, of the Virgin, and of Christ himself rose up the walls, from ground level, each one occupying its accustomed, carefully allotted space. Every church endowed in this way with images, John of Damascus had said, acted as a “spiritual hospital.”27 Sick souls could enter any church in the Byzantine world and find in it the same comforting vision of a heaven whose saintly inhabitants pressed in around them on the walls with quiet, clearly recognizable faces.
We must remember that this was not how Christian churches had looked in previous centuries. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the founders and donors of new churches, lay persons and clergymen alike, had filled the basilicas of the eastern empire with every form of visual magnificence. They had striven to bring Paradise down to earth; and it was still a very ancient Paradise. On the mosaic floors of churches all over the eastern Mediterranean, Paradise lay all around the believer in exuberant floral decorations, in frank hunting scenes, and in classical personifications of the virtues and of the elements. Majestic figures of saints, of the Prophets, of Christ, and of the Virgin were also present on the walls. But they were swamped by a greater, less focused sense of majesty. In Justinian’s church of San Vitale, in Ravenna – to take only one well-known example of a late antique church – many holy figures were represented. But all around them, from the top of the vault to the floors, they were flanked by a bright green jungle of fern-like ornament. The eye of the believer was encouraged to lose itself in this jungle. For it spoke, in a language taken directly from the ancient Near East, of a Garden of Paradise, a place of faceless, vegetable abundance, where the righteous would find their rest. In such a church, the liturgy also made full use of incense, of chanting, and of shimmering lights. It engulfed the senses. In church, worshippers were surrounded with the sights, the smells, and the sounds of Paradise.28
After the ninth century, it is as if the heavy atmosphere of Paradise had cleared a little. The liturgy remained as splendid as ever. But what drew the visual imagination of Byzantines was no longer, to such an extent, the idea of Paradise as a place of supra-human joy and abundance, which lay tantalizingly close to the material world. As we saw in chapter 6, in the West, Gregory of Tours had looked for such a Paradise. In the East, also, early Muslims sought a similar Paradise in the garden-like mosaics of the Great Mosque of Damascus. By contrast, what was expressed most forcibly in icons was something different. It was the desire to see clearly recognizable human faces of the saints and, through these faces, to enter into a direct relationship with invisible protectors – with Christ, with the Virgin, and with the saints.29
The need to establish a relationship with invisible human protectors had driven the early cult of images. Images had made the saints “present” to their worshippers. The need of Byzantine believers to feel that Christ and the saints were close to hand in all their daily emergencies – in sickness, in the swearing of oaths, at the baptism of their children, in childbirth and infertility, at moments of success and of danger – had given to the Iconophiles a “low-profile” tenacity in their defense of images which, ultimately, wore down the high-minded reform of public worship introduced by the Iconoclasts.
From the ninth century onward, however, it was the Church which claimed to control this fierce need for the “presence” of the saints. Rather than attempt to abolish such practices, by effectively excluding them from the regular worship of the Church, as the Iconoclasts had done, the Iconophile clergy, from the ninth century onward, stepped in to take charge of lay devotion. An already existing devotion to icons was “clericalized.” It was pulled into the gravitational field of the Church. The clergy now insisted that icons should be concentrated, in an orderly fashion, within the walls of the churches and that their worship should be intimately connected with the regular celebration of the liturgy.
This meant, in fact, a considerable “flattening” of the holiness ascribed to individual icons. In the sixth and seventh centuries, it had been quite normal for a heavy charge of worship to be directed to one particular holy picture in a church, in a city, or in a private setting. That particular painting and that one only seemed to bear the “presence” of an invisible person. It was an “effective,” a “miraculous” image, and all others were not. Now all icons claimed equal respect because all of them had been declared equally holy. They were holy because of the holiness of the persons whom they represented and because of their placing in a church where the liturgy was celebrated. Individual icons no longer “broke ranks” as they had done in an earlier time.30
Slowly but surely, the visual world of Byzantium had come to be different from its late antique past. Religious images now clustered in churches and (later) in the special “icon corner” of private houses. But they had vanished from places where they had once been scattered with reckless abundance in early centuries. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries there had been no lack of Christian religious images. They were all over the place. Christians had worn images of holy persons embroidered on their robes. Figures of saints and martyrs were stamped on cutlery and on tableware. In Syria, even the doorposts of stables carried images of Symeon the Stylite, so as to protect the livestock within. But these representations were not seen as icons. They were talismans. The holy “presences” portrayed on them acted on their own accord to ward off the demons. They were not meant to engage the eyes of human worshippers. Rather, they were there to beat back the “evil eye” of nonhuman, malevolent powers.
After the ninth century, this function of the religious image was silently abandoned. What came to count, in the view of the clergy at least, was the creation of precise “habits of the heart,” through the conscious worship of the tranquil, carefully characterized faces seen on icons. It was on the walls of the churches and in the “icon corner” of the home – and nowhere else – that the saints were “present.” It was conscious human prayer addressed to loved and powerful human beings, as believers stood before their icons – and not the mute power of talismans – which saved the faithful from harm in a dangerous world. Those who sought personal protection of a more intimate kind now resorted not to amulets, but to enkolpia – to exquisite portable icons, worn around the neck, each of which showed a clearly designated protector-saint.31
Altogether, the claim of the Iconodules to have done no more than bring back the ancient traditions of the Church has obscured the extent of their achievement. Never before in the history of Christianity had a determined and highly cultivated elite taken in hand, with such firmness and with such theoretical certainty, the schooling of the visual imagination of an entire “baptized people.”
Not surprisingly, of course, icons continued to “break ranks.” They still spoke to the heart, and so to fiercely private needs. Meanings clustered around religious images which the theorists of icons could do little to control. Icons did not always function in the manner that their clerical defenders claimed that they should. Miraculous icons, for instance, remained a constant feature of the Orthodox world. They spoke, they wept, they moved. Some even showed the “spirit” which resided in them by spinning around, when carried in processions in Constantinople and elsewhere, as if their bearers were possessed.32
Nor did the sharp sense of privacy which grew from standing alone in the silent “presence” of an icon vanish. One could say things to icons which one could never say to one’s priest. Up to this day, a part of the marble paving of the narthex of the Hagia Sophia is visibly lower than the rest. A pilgrim to Constantinople in the fourteenth century was told why this was so. It had been worn down by the feet of innumerable believers who came to kiss the icon of the “Confessor Savior,” which hung to the left of the doors of the main church: it was the image “before which people confess their sins when they cannot confess them before a father confessor because of the shame.”33
This late medieval pilgrim, we should note, came from Novgorod, a Russian trading city near the Baltic. By the year 1400, the Orthodox Christianity of Byzantium – and not the Christianity of the Latin West – had become the religion of the Balkans and of much of eastern Europe. Soon Russian Orthodoxy would spread as far as the Arctic Circle and, within a few centuries, eastward as far as the Pacific. The greatest and most lasting triumph of post-Iconoclast Byzantium lay in the diplomatic offensive of the late ninth and tenth centuries which led to the conversion of the Slavs of the Balkans (in around 860), of the kingdom of Kiev in the Ukraine (in 987), and eventually, through Kiev, of the northern Slav lands that came to be associated with Russia.34
It is not the concern of this book to recount what was, in itself, a remarkable venture in Christianization. That story belongs to the history of another Christendom, not that of the West. But it is worthwhile remembering, in this chapter, that what the Byzantine state, as a political empire, had lost forever, in surrendering the Middle East to Islam, it more than regained in the form of a spiritual empire which embraced the huge territories of eastern Europe and Russia in Asia in a single Orthodox faith.
For the Orthodox Slavs, Constantinople, and not Rome, was the center of the world and the fountainhead of all culture. In the year 1415, a Russian monk, Epifanij the Wise, wrote to the famous Byzantine icon painter, Feofan (Theophanes) the Greek, who was then working in Russia:
I ask your Wisdom to paint for me in colors a representation of that great church of Hagia Sophia at Constantinople erected by Justinian … Some say that in quality and size it is like the Moscow Kremlin, so large it is to walk around … Please represent this … so that I can put it at the beginning of a book and imagine myself in Constantinople.35
But Byzantium was close not only to the learned. Up to the present, in a vast sweep, from the Balkans to Alaska, it is still possible to step into an Orthodox church and to be confronted with the same vision of a heavenly court, each member of which is clearly defined by a facial expression and by a style of dress that is a recognizable echo of the revived classical art of post-Iconoclast Byzantium. When John of Damascus, a Christian Arab living under Muslim rule, wrote his treatises, in around the year 730, he could not have known that the cult of icons would be the most direct legacy of all of Byzantium to regions and to ages of which he and his contemporaries could not have dreamed.
But this is to anticipate by several centuries. If we return to where we left off, in the West around the year 730, we find a world to which the Byzantine empire had become increasingly distant. The Iconoclast controversy took place in an empire forced to turn in upon itself. Throughout the eighth century, the imperial armies had been pinned down by a seemingly endless defensive war on the eastern frontier. For most Byzantines, the West dropped out of sight. Byzantine control continued in southern Italy. But in order to retain Sicily as the westernmost bulwark of a naval empire based on the Aegean, all Italy to the north of Calabria was neglected. In 751, Ravenna fell to the Lombards. King Aistulf held court in the former palace of the Exarch, and doubtless offered his gifts, as a good western Catholic, on the altar of San Vitale, under the silent gaze of Justinian and Theodora. Rome was next. If the popes in Rome were to maintain their autonomy, they had to look for new protectors.
The popes soon found such protectors. After 751, the northern Franks, and not the emperors of Constantinople, came to be recognized as the arbiters of Italian politics and as the privileged protectors of the popes in Rome. At the Council of Nicaea, in 787, pope Hadrian’s envoys from Rome spoke with enthusiasm of the pope’s model “spiritual son,” Charles, king of the Franks. We know this “Charles,” of course, as Charlemagne. Charles had already taken over northern Italy. According to the glowing account of the pope’s envoys, he had “conquered all the West” and had even “subjected barbarous tribes to the Christian faith.” To the Byzantines at Nicaea, it was unwelcome news. A mere “barbarian” king should not be praised for doing what only “Roman” emperors should do. That part of the pope’s letter was not translated into Greek.36
When the Acta of the Council of Nicaea were sent to Rome and forwarded to the Frankish court in a Latin translation, the clerics around Charles, for their part, were pleasantly disappointed. It struck them as a slipshod and theologically incorrect document. It showed that the Church “of the Greeks” no longer held a reliable form of Christianity. The Latin Church had done better. Latins, they claimed, had realized that images were essentially neutral. Images were not to be “adored,” as the Council of Nicaea seemed to suggest that they should be; but neither were they so important that they had to be smashed. In the opinion of the clergy gathered to advise Charles, the Greeks had wasted their energies on a trivial matter. A memorandum on the worship of images was prepared by an expert, Theodulph (the future bishop of Orléans).37
The memorandum was read out to Charles and carefully explained to the Frankish monarch. Notes in the margin of the surviving manuscript record Charles’ reactions. They provide a precious insight into the outlook of the new master of Europe. Theodulph wrote that the Greek Church should not have acted on its own: “[it] should have sent to the churches of all the regions around it to enquire of them whether images should or should not be adored.” Probe: “That’s it!” was Charles’ comment. Theodulph observed that it was the duty of bishops to teach the “people beloved of Christ.” Recte, “of course!” was what Charles replied.38
And when Charles said “of course!” he meant it. When, in 794, he summoned a council of all the bishops of his extensive kingdom to meet in his palace at Frankfurt, he had no doubt as to his role. Like the Byzantine emperors, he also saw it as his duty to reform the Latin Church as a whole. And this Church was exactly like its Byzantine peer, in that it believed that it possessed the fullness of Christian truth. The council declared that the decrees of the “Greek” Council of Nicaea in favor of the worship of images were to be “completely rejected and scorned.”39 Nor were the Byzantines the only victims of this mood of high confidence in the theologians gathered around Charles. Representatives of the great Visigothic Church, now broken by Muslim conquest, were also condemned for heresy. The proud “micro-Christendom” of Spain had derived its theology from long reflection on the works of Augustine and had expressed this theology in a carefully composed, local liturgy. Now this local theology was found wanting. The condemnation of Elipandus, the archbishop of Toledo, for having advocated incorrect views on the human nature of Christ, derived from the local traditions of his Church, was a characteristically high-handed gesture. It was due to the emergence of a new, more academic, standard of orthodoxy, based upon what a group of scholars patronized by Charles considered to be the correct reading of “Roman” texts.40
Times had changed. While the eastern empire had been engaged in fighting its way back from the brink of annihilation, a new political order had emerged in the West. It was connected with a new dynasty, with the “Carolingian” descendants of Charles Martel. Both its rulers and its clerical elite were confident that they knew how to absorb and to educate whole new Christian peoples. They made clear, in a decisive half-century, that they would do so in a manner very different from that of the Greeks. By the end of the eighth century, as the Council of Frankfurt of 794 made plain, they were confident that they lived in a uniquely privileged Christendom, and that they were even entitled to an “empire” which could be treated as the equal of the “empire of the Greeks.” To find out how this situation came about, we must go back to around the year 700, so as to trace the build-up of Frankish power and the extension of a distinctive form of Frankish Christianity in northern Europe.