It is an injustice of historical memory that Emperor Leo III is not celebrated for his defence of Byzantium from the Arab military challenge that threatened to destroy the empire for ever. Instead, he is renowned as the infamous instigator of iconoclasm, the destruction of icons. During the first phase of this battle over icons (iconomachia), which was to last on and off for over a century, Ravenna freed itself from Constantinople and became an integral part of the West in closer association with the bishop of Rome. The issue of iconoclasm shaped developments far from its eastern origins.
Leo came from a family that had lived under Arab rule in northern Syria until they moved to Isauria in central Asia Minor. Then in the 690s they had been transplanted to Mesembria in Thrace, in a typical forced movement of population, when Justinian II needed to build up defences against the Bulgars. Leo had witnessed at first hand the emperor’s transfer of people to protect outlying regions as part of an overall military strategy. Perhaps this meant that he saw military service as the best route for his ambitions. In 705, aged about twenty, Justinian appointed him spatharios (sword bearer, an honorary court title) and sent him to campaign against the Arabs in the eastern provinces, negotiating with their military leaders and rival Armenian, Alan, Abasgian, Apsilion and Laz forces.1 A decade of observing Arab methods of warfare, diplomacy and propaganda allowed him to gain a good measure of Muslim military leaders, the coherence of their beliefs and their ambition to capture Constantinople.
Once established as emperor in March 717 Leo was determined to protect the capital, which he did with great success. Yet even after his brilliant defence, which forced the Arab armies and fleets to retire, rival generals challenged his role, the Sicilians rebelled and the deposed Emperor Anastasios plotted against him. Leo dealt harshly with these revolts. Then, in the summer of 726, a terrifying subaquatic volcanic eruption in the Aegean threw up a new island between Thera and Therasia. From the boiling hot sea a great plume of fire and molten lava, vast clouds of ash, and pumice stones ‘as big as hills’ were projected when the tectonic plates deep below the sea bed collided (as had happened when the volcanic rim of the island of Santorini was created in c. 1400 bc).2 As the monstrous deposits of ash and solid lava were borne to the shores of the Aegean in a tsunami, Leo III sought an explanation of what everyone perceived as a manifestation of divine wrath. Some of his advisers replied that it was due to the excessive veneration of religious images, which led to idolatry – a grave sin prohibited by the Second Commandment issued by God to Moses.
In addition to this cataclysmic event in the Aegean Sea, the Arabs resumed their annual attacks on the heartland of the empire in Asia Minor, terrifying the local population, capturing prisoners and livestock, and destroying communities. In 727, within a year of the tsunami, they began a siege of the major city of Nicaea, 185km from Constantinople, where the first Oecumenical Council had defined the Christian creed in 325. Despite some destruction of its walls the city survived, but when the Arabs withdrew they took with them large numbers of captives from the surrounding area. At about the same time, troops from the region of Hellas in central Greece and the Aegean islands launched a naval attack on Constantinople. It was easily repelled but Leo realized that he needed to reinforce his military strength against external and internal enemies.3
He identified Christian idolatry as the cause of divine anger and exploited the anxieties generated by the Aegean explosion by proposing an effective application of the Old Testament prohibition of graven images: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.’4 In expressing in religious form his determination to stiffen Byzantine morale and military opposition to Islam, he also drew on the nascent iconoclasm practised by three bishops of Asia Minor, Constantine of Nakoleia, John of Synnada and Thomas of Klaudioupolis, who had already removed icons from their churches. In January 730 Leo summoned the patriarch and demanded that he support the policy of taking down icons and whitewashing painted images in order to avoid idolatry. Germanos refused and handed back his pallium of office to the emperor, who bestowed it on a more willing cleric, Anastasios. The emperor then ordered the five senior leaders of the Christian world (the pentarchy of bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem) to adopt this condemnation and get rid of all the icons in their churches.5
Ever since early Christian times, images large and small of Christ, the ever-Virgin Mother of God, Theotokos (as Mary was entitled in Greek), saints, martyrs, bishops and holy men and women had become an essential part of ecclesiastical life in the East Mediterranean. Christians honoured them with profound veneration: they kissed the icons, lit candles in front of them, bowed before them and directed their prayers to them. Numerous stories of requests being answered by the figure represented on an icon generated an expectation of an improvement in health or wealth, the birth of children, or simply relief from sickness, sin and guilt.6 Icons were carried in liturgical processions and displayed for particular attention on feast days, such as the Nativity. Although relics of the saints were also extremely important objects of veneration, icons were ubiquitous and memorable. Small, often primitive icons in metal, ceramic and paint also decorated homes and this domestic use probably preceded their appearance in churches, while giving icons a greater prominence in the lives of Christians, especially women and children.7
The veneration of icons was justified by a theological argument that the respect and honour paid to the image was transmitted through it to the figure represented, a belief that went back to the fourth century when St Basil of Cappadocia noted that the honour paid the emperor’s image passed on to the ruler himself. Such a demonstration of respect had been demanded of Christians during the great persecutions launched by Diocletian in the late third and early fourth centuries, and their refusal to acknowledge imperial images often resulted in death, making them martyrs. Portraits of the saints inspired Christians to lead a holy way of life; similarly, pictures of the great councils of the church reminded them of the correct belief decreed at such meetings.8
The practice of icon veneration reproduced an ancient appreciation of statues and images of pagan gods and goddesses that were washed, dressed, decorated with flower garlands and honoured with lights and other signs of respect and affection. In addition to large-scale statuary, such as the massive representations of Athena set up in the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, smaller terracotta statues of household gods (lares) were displayed in kitchens. Imperial portraits painted on wooden panels were sent around the empire to announce the inauguration of a new ruler.9 The first Christian icons adopted the same format of small wood panels, similar to the portraits of ancient gods that have survived in the dry conditions of Egypt and which would have been in use all over the Roman world. Such painted panels were sometimes laid over the faces of deceased Christians in a comparable fashion to funerary portraits painted to cover Egyptian mummies.10 The gestures associated with the veneration of images of Christian holy figures were taken over from the ancient world: bowing and putting lights before the icon, kissing and addressing prayers to it. Icons were considered doorways to the spiritual world in which the holy figures had unimaginable power.
Such veneration had always been distinguished from idolatry, as defined by the Second Commandment that forbade the worship and making of images. The invisible God could never be represented and was always to be worshipped spiritually.11 So Christian leaders stressed that icons were merely a visual reminder, never objects of adoration. Occasional outbursts of iconoclasm occurred, when holy images were removed as dangerous, or even attacked and rendered impotent by gouging out the eyes, for example. In the late sixth century when Bishop Serenus of Marseilles decided to take down the icons in his church, Pope Gregory the Great protested, formulating the classic defence of the role of images in Christianity: ‘Pictures are the Bibles of the illiterate. What they cannot read they understand through images.’12 There was another brief attempt to purge religious images in Armenia during the seventh century. But Christian icons were deeply ingrained in religious practice in a way that was far more than just instrumental, even if pictures designed to instruct the laity dominated the decoration of churches – for example the images of Christ’s miracles and the narrative of his death and resurrection in Theoderic’s palace church in Ravenna. Icons, in the sense of painted wooden panels, were more widespread in the East than the West, but symbolic as well as figural images of the holy were employed throughout the Christian world.
Today we tend to look at icons as ‘works of art’ that demand an aesthetic response. But in early Christendom they were endowed with power and integrated into Christian lives, familiar as a way of communicating with the past and the uncertain future, bound up with Christian authority. The lines between devout Christian veneration and an improper paganstyle of worship were inevitably blurred and a constant danger lurked even in the production of icons. Craftsmen were commissioned by covert traditional pagans to paint an icon of Christ that resembled Zeus, and painters who did so were miraculously punished by losing the use of their painting hand.13 Another danger arose when Christian icons were worshipped as if they were themselves holy objects. This was the issue that bishops Constantine of Nakoleia and John of Synnada had brought to Patriarch Germanos’ attention in the early eighth century. In some parts of their dioceses, they reported, Christians were devoting all their love and veneration on icons as if they were holy.14 This type of total veneration (latreia) had to be reserved to the invisible God. The icons were merely a medium through which relative veneration (proskynesis) could pass to the holy figure depicted. They must never be allowed to usurp the place of the Almighty who had created Heaven and Earth. Patriarch Germanos had explained this to Bishop Constantine, who visited Constantinople between 720 and 730, and had communicated the correct theology by letter to Constantine’s superior, John of Synnada. But the bishop had returned to his province and removed the icons from his churches, so that no one would be tempted to commit idolatry. Given their faith, it wasn’t irrational for the bishops to fear this plausibility. Yet Germanos protested that the proper veneration of icons was an ancient tradition of the church; it was helpful to ordinary people who relied on their local saints and benefitted from their cults.15
In Rome the events of January 730 are reported by the Book of the Pontiffs as Leo’s decree ‘that no image of any saint, martyr or angel should be kept, as he declared them all accursed’.16 The emperor was determined, it maintained,
to force his way on everyone living in Constantinople by both compulsion and persuasion to take down the images, wherever they were, of the Saviour, his holy mother and all the saints, and, what is painful to mention, to burn them in the middle of the city.17
Painted churches were to be whitewashed and the people who opposed such activity were beheaded or mutilated. What Leo actually stated is not known, as later iconophiles destroyed the records, but there is no trace of the alleged burning of icons. On every occasion Pope Gregory II refused to comply with the imperial order and sent the emperor firm denunciations of his iconoclast policy.18
The pope encouraged a more general opposition to Constantinople, writing to Christians everywhere to warn them ‘against the impiety that had arisen’, and associating Leo’s extra taxation with the prohibition of icons. Initially, the inhabitants of the Pentapolis and the armies of the Venetiae defended the pope while resisting tax demands, with no reference to holy images. They elected their own dukes to take over from those loyal to the exarch, and then planned (with ‘the whole of Italy’) to choose a new emperor whom they would take to Constantinople to replace Leo III. The pope restrained the leaders of this revolt, hoping that the emperor would change his mind.19 But Leo, long familiar with the effectiveness of Muslim iconoclasm and seeking to legitimate his own distinct rule, insisted on visual purification.
Although the account in the Roman Book of the Pontiffs is doubtless exaggerated, and there is no other evidence for the wholesale burning of icons in Constantinople, it is an undeniably contemporary witness to the imperial order of 730 as it was experienced in Rome. It doesn’t mention the participation of Ravenna, where no attempt to destroy its icons or glorious mosaics, filled with human representation, is recorded. Unlike some churches in the East, Ravenna’s were never whitewashed or plastered over. But Exarch Eutychios was unable to stop neighbouring regions from joining in the general opposition and Archbishop John V did nothing to implement the imperial order. There is no record of any desecration of the many images that adorned the walls and ceilings of its buildings. Ravenna resisted iconoclasm: its icons and representations of holy people went untouched.20 In this way, the city adopted an independent attitude, defining its own character as part of Latin Christendom. Loosening its ties with the empire involved opposition to the exarch and to any hostile force from Constantinople, as in the naval victory later commemorated every year. The process also implied greater co-operation with the other major authority in the West, the bishop of Rome, who was taking the lead in the defence of images and making a claim to the overall direction of the entire world of western Christianity.
The destruction of Carthage in 698 facilitated the expansion of Islam across western North Africa and into Spain, creating more Christian refugees and depriving Constantinople of tax revenue, which had to be made up by higher taxes on the remaining areas of the West. As imperial demands for taxation increased, Ravenna’s political loyalty declined in conjunction with a cultural and ecclesiastical break. Papal opposition to the proposed destruction of icons became a rallying call the Ravennati could follow.
These indirect consequences of the Arab conquest of North Africa were matched by more direct influences: Caliph Umar II (717–20) initiated the forced conversion of Christians and wrote to Leo III, urging him to abandon his Christian beliefs and recognize the final divine revelation made to the Prophet Muhammad. His successor, Caliph Yazid II, attempted to correct the iconophile practice of his own Christian subjects through an edict in 723 that commanded them to get rid of all representations of persons from their churches and homes.21 Leo III’s response was to emphasize the cross, the supreme symbol of Christian faith, which was made a dominant feature of church decoration to replace images of holy people. One of the first of these substitutions is found in the apse mosaic of the church of Hagia Eirene, Holy Peace, in the capital, which was rebuilt after an earthquake in 740 and survives. Later, images of the Mother of God in the apse of churches at Nicaea and Thessalonike were replaced by similar monumental crosses.
The inhabitants of Synnada, Nakoleia and Klaudioupolis, cities that lay directly on the routes of Arab armies invading Asia Minor, reacted in similar fashion to Islamic military victories. In the 730s, when Bishop Thomas of Klaudioupolis removed icons from his churches, whole regions threatened by the Arabs followed his example. His decision to destroy the miracleworking icon of the Mother of God at Sozopolis because it no longer manifested its healing power prompted Patriarch Germanos to insist on avoiding any suggestion that the icon had failed. Germanos warned Thomas not to allow the ‘enemies of the cross’ to draw any comforting conclusions from the break in miraculous cures. Elsewhere he stressed the danger of giving unbelievers, that is Jews and Muslims, any grounds for claiming that Christianity was in error, and insisted that traditional icon veneration should be maintained.22 Here we can see how the argument over the best way to mobilize against the Arabs was articulated in religious terms.
Islamic visual culture, so clearly expressed in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the mosques built in Damascus and Kairouan (in Tunisia), also spread awareness of Islam’s strict avoidance of idols, which threatened the Christian use of icons in a more focused way than before.23 In obeying the Second Commandment and promoting the Christian cult of the Cross, Emperor Leo gave visual force to his reaction to the Islamic prohibition of idolatry.24 He thus found a way to purify Christian worship and strengthen imperial opposition to further Arab military victories. And, indeed, iconoclasm fortified the armies in their constant operations against the Caliphate and built up a great store of loyalty to the emperor and his son, Constantine V. This does not mean that the idea of iconoclasm was an invention of Leo III alone, since bishops in Asia Minor had already embraced iconoclast practice. But it does suggest that when the empire was under the greatest threat of extinction, one specific aspect of Christian belief – worship in spirit and in truth – was used most effectively to secure its survival by an iconoclast emperor.
By the early eighth century the combination of Islamic expansion and Byzantine resistance divided the Mediterranean world, while Christendom fragmented, leaving Italy and the transalpine regions to set out on their own course. Over the next hundred years this western sphere would take on its European character under the leadership of Frankish kings allied with bishops of Rome. Although this new form of ‘the West’ had a much less elaborate tradition of iconic art than the East, it adopted the defence of images as part of its internal development, in opposition to eastern influence and the political dominance of Constantinople that had been exercised through Ravenna and Sicily.
The mosaic, fresco and sculpted decoration of churches throughout Italy thus remained intact, while comparable images and figural sculptures in Byzantine churches were whitewashed, replaced or destroyed. Iconoclasm would eventually generate a completely novel formulation of symbolic decoration achieved by Charlemagne’s advisers, Theodulf of Orleans and Alcuin. In a curious twist, this Frankish position was never accepted in Rome, whose bishops emphasized their dedication to iconic art and commissioned their own portraits, which were frequently incorporated into figural church decoration. The rejection of eastern iconoclasm was therefore by no means uniform. But by raising questions about the legitimacy of figural representation and the potential of idolatry and future punishment, iconoclasm hastened the division of the ancient Mediterranean world, setting Muslim areas in visual rivalry with both Byzantine and western regions, and preserving the rich narrative and figurative mosaics in Ravenna as nowhere else.