It was the gradual
failure of Constantinople in Catholicism that disclosed the pope to
the Italians as their champion. It was this failure that raised up
even in the imperial citadel, even in Ravenna, men and armies
passionately antagonistic to the emperor, passionately papal too.
During a hundred years this movement grew till, in the eight century,
the _coup de grace_, as we might say, was given to the Justinian plan
by the Iconoclastic heresy.
The Iconoclastic decrees of the emperor Leo are said to have appeared
in Italy in the year 726. Leo was an adventurer from the mountains of
Isauria. He was, so Gibbon tells us, "ignorant of sacred and profane
letters; but his education, his reason, perhaps his intercourse with
the Jews and the Arabs, had inspired the martial peasant with an
hatred of images." It was his design to pronounce the condemnation of
images as an article of faith by the authority of a general council.
This, however, he was not able to do, for he was at once met and his
iconoclasm pronounced heretical by the greatest of all opponents, the
pope--Gregory II.
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