The dispute over sacred images (iconoclasm) occupied the Byzantine world for well over half a century in the eighth and ninth centuries, and it was never only a matter for the palace and church circles of Constantinople. Both its partisans and its victims came largely from Anatolia: most of the bishops who spoke at the councils, the commanders who enforced or softened the ban on images, and the clergy sent into exile came from the cities and monasteries of Asia Minor. Within this wider picture the region of Pontus and its metropolitan centre Amaseia (Amasya) appear in two distinct ways. On one side stands a military district, the capital of the Armeniakon theme, drawn into the political turbulence of the age through its commanders, soldiers and revolts. On the other stands a church centre that entered the debate directly through a sermon of its bishop Asterios.
It must be said at the outset that direct evidence for Amaseia itself is limited. The sources examined contain no documented record of icons being removed in this city during the iconoclast period, of a bishop being deposed, or of a monastery being closed. The account below therefore sets out the events surrounding the city and the place of the Armeniakon theme, of Pontus and of the metropolis of Amaseia in them; inferences that do not rest on evidence specific to the city are marked as such.
Amaseia and Pontus on the Eve of the Eighth Century
When iconoclasm began, Amaseia was the capital of the province of Helenopontus and the seat of its metropolitan. It is recorded as a bishopric from the early fourth century, and its metropolitan authority extended over suffragan sees such as Amisos, Andrapa, Euchaita, Ibora, Sinope, Zaliche and Zela. The city was also the capital of the Armeniakon theme, which arose in the mid-seventh century when the Byzantine army withdrew into Anatolia and was settled in military districts called themes. The theme grew out of the old territory of Lesser Armenia and spread over Pontus, Paphlagonia and northern Cappadocia. Its strategos, together with those of the Anatolikon and Thrakesion themes, was one of the three commanders of the highest rank in the empire; in the ninth century he is recorded as governing about nine thousand troops and seventeen fortresses. Its position facing the Muslim frontier made the commander of the region a powerful figure and helped bring the soldiers of the theme into several revolts of the eighth century.
The region lived the Arab pressure that forms the backdrop of iconoclasm at first hand. In 712 the Umayyad commander Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik captured Amaseia along with several other forts and took many prisoners; in 714 he also plundered Galatia. The event is recorded in the chronicle of Theophanes and in a Syriac source. A few years later the siege of Constantinople in 717-718 marked the peak of that pressure. The older view that explained iconoclasm by proximity to the Arab frontier has since been abandoned: recent research shows that the spread of hostility to images had no relation to distance from the border, and that while the Cyclades show iconoclast leanings, the icon tradition continued on Cyprus. That Amaseia was a frontier city is therefore not in itself evidence of an iconoclast stance.
How the Dispute Began
Objections to icons reach back before the eighth century. Even in the first centuries of Christianity there were circles that opposed depicting holy figures, and some respected churchmen openly voiced the view that the reverence shown to icons was excessive. In the seventh century the Monophysite and Monothelete disputes over the nature of Christ, the loss of most of Byzantium's eastern territory to the Arabs, who were bound to Islam, a religion hostile to images, and the volcanic eruption on Thera in 726 brought the question back to the fore. According to the account of Patriarch Nikephoros, Leo III took the eruption as a sign of divine wrath provoked by the veneration of icons; Theophanes instead attributes his stance to Jewish and Islamic influences. Modern scholars tend to treat both accounts as later explanations shaped by iconophile pens, since the victorious iconophiles wrote most of the surviving sources and almost nothing written by the iconoclasts themselves has come down to us.
In the classic account the emperor had the icon of Christ above the Chalke Gate of the Great Palace removed sometime between 726 and 730 and forbade the veneration of icons in 730. Yet the removal of the Chalke icon is not mentioned in every source, and whether it really happened is disputed. The letters of Patriarch Germanos from the 720s and 730s paint a different picture: here the problem comes less from the imperial office than from two churchmen in Anatolia, Constantine, bishop of Nakoleia in Phrygia, and Thomas, metropolitan of Klaudioupolis. Germanos writes that these two subordinates had voiced reservations about icons, that images had been removed from some churches, and that "whole towns and multitudes of people are in considerable agitation over this matter." That the letters speak of Leo as a friend of images supports the view that the emperor's share was enlarged later.
The Armeniakon Soldiers and the Revolt of Artabasdos
The first major intersection of the Amaseia region with iconoclast policy appears in the civil war that broke out after Leo's death. In the summer of 741 the new emperor Constantine V, on his way to campaign on the Arab frontier, was attacked by Artabasdos, count of the Opsikion. Artabasdos was Leo's son-in-law and a former strategos of the Armeniakon, appointed to that post by Anastasios II around 713. While Constantine fell back, Artabasdos entered Constantinople and proclaimed himself emperor. According to Theophanes and Nikephoros he restored the veneration of icons, though some studies note that the support in contemporary sources is weak. He placed his son Niketas at the head of the Armeniakon theme. The Opsikion, Thrace and the Armeniakon stood with him; Constantine was supported by the Anatolikon and Thrakesion themes and by the Kibyrrhaiote fleet.
After two years of fighting Constantine entered Constantinople in November 743, and Artabasdos and his sons were blinded and confined in the Chora Monastery. It is tempting to explain the Armeniakon's choice of side by loyalty to icons, but the assessment in the Encyclopaedia of the Hellenic World does not find this sufficient: Artabasdos was the former strategos of the Armeniakon, while Constantine was the son of the strategos of the Anatolikon and Thrakesion, and the soldiers' choice may have had more to do with such personal ties than with religious inclination. That the Armeniakon soldiers backed Artabasdos therefore does not show that the people of Pontus were iconophile. The episode did, however, harden Constantine V's anti-image policy: an emperor who had nearly lost his throne to a rival who openly declared himself in favour of icons turned to far stricter measures against their veneration.
Pontus as a Refuge
In 754 Constantine V convened a council at the Palace of Hieria near Chalcedon. The sources give the number of bishops present as 338 or 388. The council forbade the veneration of icons and ordered their destruction. It was presided over by Theodosios, metropolitan of Ephesos, and its most active defenders were Sissinios Pastillas, metropolitan of Perge, and Basileios Trikakkabos, metropolitan of Antioch in Pisidia. None of the Christian traditions counts this council as ecumenical, because the patriarchal throne of Constantinople was vacant at the time, Rome sent no representative, and Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem were under Muslim control.
The pressure fell chiefly on monks. According to Constantine's own theology, holiness resided only in the sign of the cross and in the Eucharist; icons tied to local cults and local saints were a form of localism that weakened the central church order. Monks, who carried the cults of the saints and stood on the margins of the church's official structure, thus became the targets. Stephanos, who had founded a monastery on Mount Saint Auxentios in Bithynia, was killed in Constantinople in November 765 and his monastery was destroyed. Stephanos is reported to have advised monks to take refuge in Pontus and Lykia. The sources also note that iconophiles withdrew to distant regions where imperial control was weak, to Cyprus, the southern coast of Anatolia and eastern Pontus. Mountainous Pontus, in which Amaseia lay, was by its geography among the regions named as refuges.
The sources give no detail of any consequence of this advice specific to Amaseia. One may suppose that the steep valleys and secluded corners of the surrounding country suited monastic life, but since no documented record shows iconophile monks settling around Amaseia during the iconoclast period, this remains only a possibility. What is documented is that Pontus was generally regarded as a refuge.
In 766 the exposure of an iconophile plot in the emperor's immediate circle brought the pressure to its harshest point. Constantine appointed new strategoi to some themes, chosen for their loyalty. Foremost among them was Michael Lachanodrakon, strategos of the Thrakesion, who in 771 had the monks and nuns gathered at Ephesos and forced them to marry or lose their sight, and in the following year seized monastic property. These harsh measures took place in the Thrakesion; the situation in the Armeniakon is not separately described in these sources. Modern scholars who share this assessment think that the total effect of iconoclast pressure was less widespread than often supposed and that it fell chiefly on monks.
The Sermon of Asterios and the Debate over Images
The point at which Amaseia entered the debate most directly is its bishop of the late fourth and early fifth century, Asterios. A native of Cappadocia and a former lawyer, Asterios became bishop of Amaseia between 380 and 390, and a considerable part of his sermons, which bear the stamp of his rhetorical training, has survived. Among them the eleventh homily, on the martyr Euphemia, holds a special place. In it Asterios describes a painting of Euphemia's martyrdom and compares it with works of the famous Hellenistic painters Euphranor and Timomachus. The painting is said to have been on canvas and displayed in a church near the martyr's tomb. Because the manner of death differs from other accounts in the tradition, scholars debate how closely the description matches an actual work; the text remains one of the most detailed descriptions of a work of art (ekphrasis) from this period.
This homily was quoted twice at the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787 and served the party defending the veneration of icons as patristic proof that the practice was ancient. It is also reported that at the council Asterios was called a bright star illuminating the minds of all, in a play on the meaning of his name. Amaseia's most concrete contribution to the iconoclast debate was thus an authority raised there four centuries earlier, to whom the iconophiles appealed. The relation of this legacy to the survival of an icon tradition in the city cannot be established, since the sources say nothing of it.
The Council of Nicaea and the Armeniakon
After Constantine V's death his son Leo IV eased the pressure. When Leo died in 780, Eirene, who took the regency on behalf of her son Constantine VI, appointed an iconophile patriarch and several new metropolitans. The council she tried to hold in Constantinople in 786 broke up under the reaction of the tagmata soldiers loyal to the memory of Constantine V. The following spring Eirene sent the troops to Malagina in Bithynia on the pretext of an Arab campaign and secured the capital with units brought from the eastern themes. The episode also shows that identifying iconoclasm with Anatolia as a whole is mistaken: most of the tagmata had been recruited in Anatolia, yet Eirene too based her position in the capital on soldiers from the Anatolian themes.
The council met at Nicaea in the autumn of 787. The leading iconophiles were Patriarch Tarasios and Euthymios, metropolitan of Sardis, who came from Lycaonia. On the iconoclast side were Gregory, metropolitan of Neokaisareia, Theodosios of Amorion, Basil of Ankyra, Theodore, metropolitan of Myra, and Hypatios, metropolitan of Nicaea; they were eventually persuaded by their opponents to change their view. Neokaisareia is another metropolitan city of Pontus, but the sources available to us say nothing of the stance of the metropolitan of Amaseia at the same council. On 13 October 787 the council decreed that icons might be kept in churches and venerated, while worship was due to God alone.
That almost no reaction to the Nicaean decisions came from Asia Minor is taken as a sign that iconoclasm had not taken deep root among the population. In 790 the Armeniakon soldiers rose against Eirene and secured her removal and Constantine VI's sole rule, and in 792 they rebelled in turn against the emperor; in neither case did the question of images come up. The same holds for the revolt of Bardanes Tourkos against Nikephoros I in 803. This is read as showing that Anatolian soldiers mostly sought internal peace and stability. In the same region, at Amnia in Paphlagonia, which then lay within the bounds of the Armeniakon, lived a wealthy and charitable landowner known as Saint Philaretos. His granddaughter Maria was chosen in 788 as the bride of Constantine VI; his hagiography describes the event as a bride show. Philaretos is held to have died in 792.
The Second Period
Between 802 and 813 Byzantium suffered heavy defeats at the hands of the Bulgars. In 813 Leo the Armenian, strategos of the Anatolikon, took the throne as Leo V. The council that met in Hagia Sophia in 815 reintroduced the ban on icons, and Theodotos Melissenos replaced Patriarch Nikephoros. Iconophile resistance in this period formed around Theodore, abbot of the Stoudios Monastery, who in 815-819 was exiled to places in the Opsikion, Anatolikon and Thrakesion themes. In the sources examined Pontus is not named among these places of exile. The iconoclast side had supporters from the powerful families of Anatolia, among them the Melissenos line.
At Christmas 820 Leo V was murdered by Michael Traulos of Amorion, his former comrade in arms. Shortly after taking the throne Michael faced the revolt of Thomas the Slav in 821-823. According to most modern scholars Thomas was born near Gaziura in Pontus (modern Turhal); the chronicles give his birthplace and ancestry differently, and whether he was of Slavic or Armenian origin is disputed. Like Artabasdos, Thomas presented himself as the opponent of iconoclasm in order to win popular support, and he gained more than two thirds of the military strength of Asia Minor. The two themes that did not join him were the Opsikion and the Armeniakon. Olbianos, the strategos of the Armeniakon, stayed on Michael's side; in the first engagement the Armeniakon army was defeated and Thomas passed through the eastern parts of the Armeniakon and occupied the frontier region of Chaldia. When the Abbasids took advantage of the turmoil to raid southern Asia Minor he had to turn back without conquering the Armeniakon completely. Later, when he sent his adopted son Constantius against the Armeniakon, Constantius was killed in an ambush laid by Olbianos and his severed head was sent to Michael and from there to Thomas. Olbianos afterwards stood at Michael's side in Thomas's final defeat as well.
The Armeniakon's stance in this war cannot be tied to being for or against icons either; as scholars stress, other factors, above all the commander's loyalty and his tie to the centre, were decisive. Amaseia was at this time the capital of the Armeniakon, but the sources examined contain no direct record of the city's role in this war.
The Final Phase and 843
Under Michael II iconophile monastic communities flourished on Mount Olympos in Bithynia and no systematic persecution is reported. Theophilos, who took the throne in 829, remained moderate in his first years; his wife Theodora came from a prominent iconophile family of Paphlagonia. The exposure of an iconophile plot in December 831 hardened his attitude. Theophilos reinstated the decisions of the council of 815 in 833, and in 838 the council convened by the new patriarch John Grammatikos anathematised the iconophiles and decreed the destruction of all icons. A year after Theophilos's death, in March 843, Empress Theodora convened a council and restored the veneration of icons, meeting almost no reaction. The event is celebrated in the Orthodox world on the first Sunday of Great Lent as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.
The consequences across Anatolia were heavy: monasticism suffered a serious blow, many monasteries were closed or destroyed, and some monks fled to Greece and Italy. In the Church of the Koimesis at Nicaea the mosaic of the Virgin in the apse was replaced with a cross in the mid-eighth century and restored to a depiction of the Virgin after 843; the plain cross decoration of many provincial churches is also regarded as a legacy of this period. The sources examined contain no comparable example from Amaseia. The Byzantines themselves used the word iconomachy (image struggle) rather than iconoclasm, and there are signs that actual destruction was less than often supposed; a letter written in 824 by Michael II and Theophilos to the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious admits that images placed higher up were left in place.
In the ninth century the large frontier region of the Armeniakon theme was broken up. Smaller frontier districts such as Charsianon and Cappadocia were detached; around 819 the coastal Paphlagonia and Chaldia and then the area of Koloneia became separate commands, leaving only western Pontus in the Armeniakon. A hagiography of the eighth or ninth century concerning the relics of Saint Theodore at Euchaita states that the relics were then still at Amaseia and that the Christians of Euchaita were pressing insistently for their transfer to their own city. This shows that Amaseia remained a centre of a saint's cult; the sources say nothing about any relation of that cult to iconoclasm.
Chronology
712: Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik captures Amaseia and takes many prisoners.
726-730: The period in which Leo III is held to have declared his stance against icons and, in 730, forbidden their veneration.
741-743: Revolt of Artabasdos, former strategos of the Armeniakon; the Armeniakon soldiers side with him.
754: The Council of Hieria decides to prohibit icons.
765: Stephanos the Younger is killed in Constantinople; monks are advised to take refuge in Pontus and Lykia.
787: The Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea restores the veneration of icons; Asterios's homily on Euphemia is quoted twice.
790 and 792: Revolts of the Armeniakon soldiers; the question of icons does not arise.
815: The council convened in Hagia Sophia under Leo V reinstates the ban on icons.
821-823: Revolt of Thomas; Olbianos, strategos of the Armeniakon, stays with Michael II.
833-838: Theophilos's edict and the council of John Grammatikos.
843: Theodora definitively restores the veneration of icons.
Bibliography
Other sources
- Makrypoulias, Christos. "Iconoclasm in Asia Minor." Encyclopaedia of the Hellenic World, Constantinople (constantinople.ehw.gr, lemma 7880).
- "Byzantine Iconoclasm." Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
- "Armeniac Theme." Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
- "Artabasdos." Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
- "Thomas the Slav." Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
- "Maslama 1." Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire I (pbe.kcl.ac.uk).
- "Asterius of Amasea." Wikipedia.
- "Maria of Amnia" and "Philaretos the Merciful." Wikipedia.
- "Iconoclasm." Orthodox Church in America (oca.org).
Online sources
