The whole of central Italy burst into rebellion at this demonstration against its civil and religious interests. The exarch was compelled to shut himself up in Ravenna; for the cities of Italy, instead of obeying the imperial officers, elected magistrates of their own, on whom they conferred, in some cases, the title of duke. Assemblies were held, and the project of electing an emperor of the West was adopted; but the unfortunate result of the rebellion of Greece damped the courage of the Italians; and though a rebel, named Tiberius Petasius, really assumed the purple in Tuscany, he was easily defeated and slain by Eutychius, who succeeded Paul as exarch of Ravenna. Liutprand, king of the Lombards, taking advantage of these dissensions, invaded the imperial territory, and gained possession of Ravenna; but Gregory, who saw the necessity of saving the country from the Lombards and from anarchy, wrote to Ursus the duke of Venice, one of his warm partisans, and persuaded him to join Eutychius. The Lombards were defeated by the Byzantine troops, Ravenna was recovered, and Eutychius entered Rome with a victorious army. Gregory died in 731. Though he excited the Italian cities to resist the imperial power, and approved of the measures they adopted for stopping the remittance of their taxes to Constantinople, he does not appear to have adopted any measures for declaring Rome independent.
From 733 A.D., the city of Rome enjoyed political independence under the guidance and protection of the popes; but the officers of the Byzantine emperors were allowed to reside in the city, justice was publicly administered by Byzantine judges, and the supremacy of the Eastern Empire was still recognised. So completely, however, had Gregory III thrown off his allegiance, that he entered into negotiations with Charles Martel, in order to induce that powerful prince to take an active part in the affairs of Italy. The pope was now a much more powerful personage than the exarch of Ravenna, for the cities of central Italy, which had assumed the control of their local government, entrusted the conduct of their external political relations to the care of Gregory, who thus held the balance of power between the Eastern emperor and the Lombard king. In the year 742, while Constantine V, the son of Leo, was engaged with a civil war, the Lombards were on the eve of conquering Ravenna, but Pope Zacharias threw the whole of the Latin influence into the Byzantine scale, and enabled the exarch to maintain his position until the year 751, when Aistulf, king of the Lombards, captured Ravenna. The exarch retired to Naples, and the authority of the Byzantine emperors in central Italy ended.[n]
Leo III died in 741.[48] He was succeeded by his son Constantine V, called Copronymus, whom he had crowned emperor in the year 720, and married to Irene, the daughter of the khan of the Khazars, thirteen years later. Before proceeding with the later reigns, we must pause to consider that great and bloody controversy which brought Christianity into contempt as idolatrous before the Mohammedans, and split the church, or rather split the laity from the church. It was the laity which was non-idolatrous; it was the church that clung to the sanctity and active power of images and even of relics. The subject is considered at more length under the history of the papacy, but cannot be omitted here, since it had its rise in that enlightened and fearless Leo Isauricus, who dared to be consistent even to the point of barbarity.[a]
THE ICONOCLASTS
[717-723 A.D.]
Since the twelfth year of the Hegira (634 A.D.) the hand of Ishmael had lain heavily on the world, nevertheless the rod of the taskmaster had in certain respects been useful to the Byzantine Empire, especially in the interior. Senseless despotism, careless dissimulation, and utter incompetence could not assert themselves for long on the throne. This resulted in a succession of brave soldiers ascending the throne—Byzantine autocrats since the time of Islam had on an average really been stronger than their predecessors—and in the reigning families rapidly detaching themselves. When one or the other dynasty tended to the Merovingian type, it only lasted for a short time. Amongst the families which under Islam wore the crown of Byzantium, the one founded by Leo Isauricus (717-741) occupied a prominent position; after Justinian it was second in the order of Byzantine dynasties.
Leo Isauricus, a man of humble birth, who rose from the rank of a common soldier to that of a general, and his son Constantine V on whom party feeling bestowed the opprobrious nickname of Copronymus, were brave men, but they reduced the church and the people to servitude as their predecessors had done, and perhaps even more ruthlessly, as is proved by their iconoclastic proceedings. Certainly in the beginning of the agitation now in question, they were not wanting in a motive which appeared just, and perhaps was so for a time. In consequence of the terrible oppression exercised by the government authorities, and the spiritual stagnation which generally arises from this source, the Byzantine nation had grown accustomed to superficiality in religion and, as a consequence, to a worship of images which reached a point at which Christianity seemed about to sink back into Hellenism.
On this important matter, which was frequently a source of great danger in the course of the century, Pope Gregory I established an unalterable rule. Bishop Serenus of Massilia (Marseilles), having observed that many of his parishioners worshipped the images which had been brought into the cathedral, cast them out and destroyed them. Gregory I commended the zeal with which Serenus had forbidden divine honours to be paid to the work of human hands, but at the same time censured him for having destroyed the images. He also referred to the reason given by other Fathers before him, and by Paulinus of Nola in particular; he writes, “the churches are decorated with images so that those who do not know the alphabet may see represented on the wall that which they cannot read in the Scriptures.”