For more than a century, from around 730 until 843 with one partial interruption, the Byzantine Empire officially prohibited the making and veneration of religious images. Monks were beaten and imprisoned. Patriarchs were dismissed. Images of Christ and the saints were stripped from church walls, plastered over, or replaced with crosses and imperial portraits. Two brothers, Theodore and Theophanes, later known as the Graptoi — ‘the Inscribed’ — had mocking verses branded into their foreheads on imperial orders. It was a conflict in which people were mutilated, exiled, and killed for their position on painted wood. The period is known as the Iconoclast Controversy, from the Greek eikon (image) and klastes (breaker), and it was one of the most sustained internal crises in the history of Christianity.
The Byzantine Empire was the eastern continuation of the Roman Empire, centred on Constantinople, the city founded in 330 by the Emperor Constantine I (r. 306–337) on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium at the meeting point of Europe and Asia. The Byzantines called themselves Romans, governed in Greek, and understood their state as simultaneously a political empire and a Christian civilisation in a way that was not merely rhetorical. Christianity was the ideological foundation of imperial authority itself. The emperor was understood as God’s representative on earth, his military victories as signs of divine favour, and his theological errors as potential causes of military catastrophe. Church and state were not separate institutions in any meaningful sense; they were understood as aspects of a single God-ordered reality, and a serious doctrinal dispute was therefore always also a political crisis (Meyendorff, 1975).
The Patriarch of Constantinople, the senior bishop of the Eastern Church, was formally subordinate to the emperor in a way that had no equivalent in the medieval West, where the Pope in Rome maintained an independent claim to spiritual authority. In Byzantium, the emperor could appoint and dismiss patriarchs, convene church councils, and enforce theological settlements by decree. This did not make theology merely instrumental — the arguments were genuine, and people accepted imprisonment rather than abandon them — but it meant that religious controversy and imperial politics were, at every significant point, the same thing.
Icons, painted images of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints, had become central to Byzantine devotional life by the seventh century. They were displayed in churches, carried in procession, and kept in private homes. Particular images were believed to be miraculous, and a small number were held to be acheiropoieta, ‘not made by human hands,’ of divine rather than human origin. Venerating an icon involved kissing it, meditating before it, lighting candles, and burning incense, practices that looked, to a hostile observer, uncomfortably close to the worship of an idol. The question of where veneration ended and worship began was not a technical quibble but a question with serious theological consequences, and it had been unresolved within Christianity since at least the time of the early councils.
The controversy began in the 720s under the Emperor Leo III (r. 717–741), a capable military commander from northern Syria who had successfully defended Constantinople against a prolonged Arab siege in 717–718. The Arab forces were Muslim, and therefore aniconic in their religious practice, and Leo had watched them conquer Byzantine territories across Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa across the preceding decades. Many Byzantines read these defeats theologically: God was punishing the empire for idolatry. Leo appears to have arrived at a similar conclusion. His critics later called him ‘Saracen-minded,’ though modern scholarship has been cautious about reducing his motives to a single external influence, arguing instead that the controversy drew on long-standing internal theological tensions about the nature of sacred images that predated any Islamic pressure (Brubaker, 2012). Around 726, Leo ordered the removal of a prominent image of Christ from the Chalke Gate of the imperial palace. In 730 he issued a formal decree ordering the destruction of sacred images throughout the empire. The Patriarch Germanos I (c. 630–733) of Constantinople refused to endorse it and was dismissed, replaced by a figure more sympathetic to imperial policy. Pope Gregory III (r. 731–741) in Rome condemned the ban and formally excommunicated those responsible, an early marker of the growing distance between eastern and western Christianity that would eventually produce the Great Schism of 1054.
From Palestine, where he lived under Arab rule and therefore beyond the reach of Byzantine enforcement, the theologian John of Damascus (c. 655–750) composed three treatises defending the veneration of images on explicitly Christological grounds. His argument was this: because God had taken on human flesh in the Incarnation, matter itself had been sanctified, and images of Christ were not idols but affirmations of the reality of that Incarnation. To refuse the icon was to imply, however indirectly, that Christ had not truly become human, and that implicit denial was a far older and more dangerous heresy than anything at stake in the question of painted wood (Pelikan, 1990). The iconoclast position, meanwhile, was formally codified at the Council of Hieria in 754, which declared image veneration to be blasphemy and styled itself the seventh ecumenical council of the church. It was attended by 338 bishops. Neither Rome nor any of the eastern patriarchates outside Constantinople sent representatives, a fact the iconophiles pressed hard in subsequent arguments about its legitimacy.
The ban continued with considerably greater ferocity under Leo’s son Constantine V (r. 741–775), who brought more theological rigour and more systematic violence to the iconoclast position than his father had. Monasteries, which produced the icons and whose monks were the most consistent defenders of their veneration, were closed, their inhabitants forced to marry or conscripted, their buildings converted to barracks. The violence was real, sustained, and deliberate.
The first reversal came not through theological persuasion but through a change of imperial personnel, as such reversals so often do. Constantine V died in 775, his son Leo IV (r. 775–780) maintained iconoclasm with less energy and died young, and his widow, the Empress Irene of Athens (c. 752–803), ruled as regent for their son Constantine VI while harbouring iconophile sympathies she had presumably kept concealed throughout her marriage. In 787, working with the Patriarch Tarasios (c. 730–806), she convened a new council at Nicaea, the Second Council of Nicaea, which reversed the Council of Hieria, restored the veneration of icons to the churches, and confirmed the distinction between veneration and worship that John of Damascus had made the cornerstone of the iconophile case. It is recognised by the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches as the seventh and last of the great ecumenical councils (Barber, 2002). It did not settle the matter.
A second wave of iconoclasm began in 814 under the Emperor Leo V (r. 813–820), again at least partly motivated by military setbacks interpreted as divine punishment, and continued under Michael II (r. 820–829) and Theophilos (r. 829–842). Methodios of Syracuse (c. 788/800–847), the man who would eventually preside over the final restoration, had by this point travelled from Sicily to Constantinople, entered a monastery in Bithynia, been sent to Rome on ecclesiastical business, returned, been arrested by Michael II, and spent years imprisoned. He was eventually released and, in one of the stranger turns of the period, found himself living at the court of Theophilos, the most passionately iconoclast of all the emperors, who in 832 issued a new edict formally forbidding icon veneration. The same emperor, it is worth noting, had the Graptoi brought before him and ordered those verses inscribed into the brothers’ faces, apparently in person. This is the world the panel was eventually produced to commemorate.
Theophilos died in January 842, probably not yet thirty years old. He left behind a two-year-old son, Michael III (840–867), and his wife, Theodora (c. 815–867), of Armenian aristocratic descent and described by contemporaries as politically capable well beyond what her position might have suggested, who had spent her entire marriage secretly venerating the icons her husband persecuted. Theodora became regent and moved, within a year, to reverse the entire religious settlement. On the advice of the minister Theoktistos, she convened a local synod, deposed the iconoclast Patriarch John VII, and secured the appointment of Methodios in his place. The one condition extracted by her advisers, for the sake of the family’s honour and political stability, was that Theophilos would not be formally condemned. Political calculation shaped the theological settlement of 843 at least as much as theology did; it is worth being clear-eyed about that (Kotoula, 2006). On 11 March 843, Methodios led a triumphal procession from the church of Blachernae to Hagia Sophia. The icons were returned to the walls, and the church established an annual feast to commemorate the moment, observed on the first Sunday of Lent, still kept today.
This small panel, acquired by the British Museum in 1988 and painted approximately five centuries after the events it depicts, is the earliest surviving representation of that occasion.The icon is an act of memory, a retrospective insistence that the church’s identity had been defined, tested, and vindicated, made at a moment when the Byzantine Empire was under pressure from the Ottoman Turks and that vindication may have felt less secure than the image suggests.
The composition is arranged in two horizontal registers. At the centre of the upper tier, flanked by red curtains and guarded by two winged figures in red hats, stands the Hodegetria icon displayed on a stand, the Virgin as Hodegetria [She Who Shows the Way] pointing to the Christ child she holds. To the left stand Theodora and Michael III in imperial regalia; to the right, Methodios holding a Gospel book and a cross, accompanied by three monastic supporters of the iconophile cause. In the lower register, eleven historical figures associated with the defence of icons across the full span of the controversy are ranged in a row, among them Saints Theodosia of Constantinople, Theodore the Studite (759–826), Theophanes the Confessor (c. 758–817), and the Graptoi themselves (Cormack, 2007). The brothers with their branded foreheads are not placed here for compositional balance. They are evidence, a compressed martyrology confirming that the Triumph was purchased at a specific human cost.
The Hodegetria at the compositional and theological apex carries the full weight of the iconophile argument. Iconophiles believed it had been painted by the Evangelist Luke during the Virgin’s own lifetime, and this supposed apostolic origin was the strongest available argument for the legitimacy of sacred images as a class (British Museum, n.d.). Whether Luke held a brush is historically beside the point. The attribution was doing doctrinal work: if this image went back to the lifetime of Christ, then the icon was not a human innovation subject to imperial prohibition but a divine commission older than any emperor’s decree. The panel is, accordingly, an icon of an icon, a painted representation of the very class of object whose legitimacy was at issue, placed at the centre of the composition where it cannot be avoided or explained away.
The Iconoclast Controversy is sometimes treated as a finished chapter in Byzantine ecclesiastical history. It is better understood as an early, unusually well-documented instance of a pressure that has operated within Christianity across virtually every century: the recurring question of whether the church’s current practice has drifted from its foundational sources, and who holds the authority to make that determination. The first four ecumenical councils, Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451), each redrew the boundaries of orthodox belief, each produced schisms that did not fully heal, and each was followed within decades by renewed controversy. The Great Schism of 1054 divided Eastern and Western Christianity along lines of authority and doctrine that remain in place. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, which produced its own iconoclasm when Calvinist congregations destroyed images in churches across the Netherlands in 1566, was framed by its protagonists as a recovery of apostolic Christianity against accumulated corruption, a claim structurally indistinguishable from what the iconophiles had said seven centuries earlier. The argument is almost never about whether tradition should carry authority; it is about who defines the tradition, and what happens to those on the losing side while the question is being settled (Brubaker, 2012).
Beneath the formal theological positions, there is also the more durable question of human nature, which doctrinal history tends to underweight. People have always found it easier to approach the divine through particular, visible, tangible things than through abstract doctrine. The icon is a more direct technology of piety than the sermon, which is partly why its prohibition generated such sustained resistance across so many decades. John of Damascus had grasped this, which is why his defence of images turned not on legal argument alone but on the theology of matter: because God had entered the physical world in Christ, physical things could carry the sacred without being mistaken for it. The iconoclasts were identifying a real risk, the confusion of veneration with worship, the image with what it represents. The iconophiles were identifying an equally real and equally persistent human need. Neither the risk nor the need has disappeared, which may explain why the feast commemorating this particular resolution is still observed every year, nearly twelve centuries after that procession through the streets of Constantinople.
References
Barber, C. (2002) Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm. Princeton: Princeton University Press
British Museum (n.d.) Icon with the Triumph of Orthodoxy, c. 1400. Acquisition no. 1988-0411-1. London: British Museum. Available at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1988-0411-1 (Accessed: 8 January 2024).
Brubaker, L. (2012) Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm. London: Bristol Classical Press
Brubaker, L. and Haldon, J. (2011) Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era c. 680–850: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Cormack, R. (2007) Icons. London: British Museum Press
Humphreys, M. (ed.) (2021) A Companion to Byzantine Iconoclasm. Leiden: Brill
Kotoula, D. (2006) ‘The British Museum Triumph of Orthodoxy icon’, in Louth, A. and Cassidy, A. (eds) Byzantine Orthodoxies. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 121–128.
Meyendorff, J. (1975) Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press
Pelikan, J. (1990) Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons. The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1987. Bollingen Series XXXV.36. Princeton: Princeton University Press
Pentcheva, B. (2006) Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press