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Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680–850: A History
Iconoclasm, the debate about the legitimacy of religious art that began in Byzantium around 720 and continued for nearly one hundred and twenty years, has long held a firm grip on the historical imagination. This is the first book in English for over fifty years to survey this most elusive and fascinating period in medieval history. It is also the first book in any language to combine the expertise of two authors who are specialists in the written, archaeological and visual evidence from this period, a combination of particular importance to the iconoclasm debate. The authors have worked together to provide a comprehensive overview of the visual, written and other materials that together help clarify the complex issues of iconoclasm in Byzantium. In doing so they challenge many traditional assumptions about iconoclasm and set the period firmly in its broader political, cultural and social-economic context.
944 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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April 25, 2022
A Difficult But Rewarding Book
This is a tough book to read, but an essential one for anyone interested in Byzantine history. There are 800 pages of text, all of them filled to the brim with facts and in-depth details. I would even say it’s unnecessarily full and inaccessible. But none of that changes the fact that this book is an incredible piece of scholarship that nobody who has any interest in the middle Byzantine period can ignore.
The basic premise of the book is that iconoclasm has been grossly misrepresented, first by the victors and then by modern scholars distorting these accounts further. In the traditional schema the iconoclast movement started when eastern army officers, influenced by Islam’s prohibition of images, came to the throne and immediately attacked traditional icons until mass opposition among monks and laypeople (not to mention changes in dynasty) caused the iconophile cause to surge back. According to Brubaker and Haldon, there are several things wrong with this narrative. First, icon worship wasn’t actually an old tradition and in fact represented the novel development. Second, iconoclasm (or iconophilia) was never a popular movement so much as a set of imperial policies linked to Constantinople and the environs. Third, the whole theological dispute changed dramatically over the centuries. Leo the Isaurian enacted a very limited set of policies which his son Constantine V expanded on, but it was limited to promoting the cross as an imperial symbol and a degree of discomfort with icon worship, although not icons themselves. Policies from the second period of iconoclasm were later predated to fit Leo, who must have been an icon-destroying monster because he started the whole mess. Even the second period doesn’t contain what we think. Support/opposition seems very flexible and there was never a mass smashing of icons. At most some were painted over. The “restoration” of icons that followed mainly consists of entirely new icons being added to places they had never been before. Since everyone knew that icons had been attacked, iconless churches must have been missing icons because they had been destroyed.
I like this argument and think it works for the most part. It can be a bit too reductive at times. There are an awful lot of maybes here. For the most part his arguments are less that we’re interpreting sources wrong and more that we’re missing the data we need to draw any real conclusions. I suspect the fighting was more intense than he suggests simply because later accounts were so furious. Even if the combat was taking place among a select audience. In many of the cases where they speak of a lack of evidence I think that (while technically true) what we do have is certainly suggestive. No smoke without fire and all that. Still, the basic thrust of what they’re saying sounds correct.
The book does not make itself accessible to beginners. The book is 800 pages long and yet there feels both like there’s a lot missing and a lot of fat that could be trimmed. I find it kind of incredible for example that it never manages to really explain what iconoclastic/iconophilic theology was. We get a limited sort of narrative as well. Leo’s death is mentioned pretty casually, with no mention of how. You will want to recap with a brief narrative of the period if you’re not sure you know it already. The basic goal here is to recreate the era, not the theological intricacies or imperial narratives. The way that society worked, the general trends, and specific pieces of data that can be used to draw these conclusions. In that sense it works a lot like a sequel to Haldon’s Byzantium in the Seventh Century. That book is at least shorter.
I suspect I’m not alone in finding this book hard to read. There are a larger number of spelling/grammatical issues than is normal for an OUP book, as if the editors were struggling to work their way through it too! Take this example from page 453: “It is important to stress at the outset of any discussion dealing with this aspect of Byzantine history that these changes were both part of the internal dynamics of Byzantine society or responded to its radically transformed situation at this period, and a reflection of developments outside Byzantine society.” What was that trying to say? It was clearly two different sentences merged together. It’s a good example of this book’s prose in other respects as well: longwinded, dense, turgid even, somewhat confusing… I can’t blame the editors for missing a few of these as it can be tiring getting to the end of a sentence only to have to return to the beginning to remember what it was all about. It may not be a coincidence that the number of mistakes and errors I spotted increased the further I got into the book.
This book is a very useful reference. I wish I could suggest a different one for people just seeking an overview! I understand Brubaker’s Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm is essentially an abbreviation of this one with much of the source criticism removed, but it’s also a much shorter book (134 pages, including bibliography). That’s not really enough space for an issue this complicated, particularly if it’s also an introduction to the period. My advice (unless you are looking for that reference work) is to read this one but be generous with the skimming. The book is quite good at signposting what topic it’s discussing, so you can tell when a subheading is going to be mainly close reading of highly repetitive sources.
This is a tough book to read, but an essential one for anyone interested in Byzantine history. There are 800 pages of text, all of them filled to the brim with facts and in-depth details. I would even say it’s unnecessarily full and inaccessible. But none of that changes the fact that this book is an incredible piece of scholarship that nobody who has any interest in the middle Byzantine period can ignore.
The basic premise of the book is that iconoclasm has been grossly misrepresented, first by the victors and then by modern scholars distorting these accounts further. In the traditional schema the iconoclast movement started when eastern army officers, influenced by Islam’s prohibition of images, came to the throne and immediately attacked traditional icons until mass opposition among monks and laypeople (not to mention changes in dynasty) caused the iconophile cause to surge back. According to Brubaker and Haldon, there are several things wrong with this narrative. First, icon worship wasn’t actually an old tradition and in fact represented the novel development. Second, iconoclasm (or iconophilia) was never a popular movement so much as a set of imperial policies linked to Constantinople and the environs. Third, the whole theological dispute changed dramatically over the centuries. Leo the Isaurian enacted a very limited set of policies which his son Constantine V expanded on, but it was limited to promoting the cross as an imperial symbol and a degree of discomfort with icon worship, although not icons themselves. Policies from the second period of iconoclasm were later predated to fit Leo, who must have been an icon-destroying monster because he started the whole mess. Even the second period doesn’t contain what we think. Support/opposition seems very flexible and there was never a mass smashing of icons. At most some were painted over. The “restoration” of icons that followed mainly consists of entirely new icons being added to places they had never been before. Since everyone knew that icons had been attacked, iconless churches must have been missing icons because they had been destroyed.
I like this argument and think it works for the most part. It can be a bit too reductive at times. There are an awful lot of maybes here. For the most part his arguments are less that we’re interpreting sources wrong and more that we’re missing the data we need to draw any real conclusions. I suspect the fighting was more intense than he suggests simply because later accounts were so furious. Even if the combat was taking place among a select audience. In many of the cases where they speak of a lack of evidence I think that (while technically true) what we do have is certainly suggestive. No smoke without fire and all that. Still, the basic thrust of what they’re saying sounds correct.
The book does not make itself accessible to beginners. The book is 800 pages long and yet there feels both like there’s a lot missing and a lot of fat that could be trimmed. I find it kind of incredible for example that it never manages to really explain what iconoclastic/iconophilic theology was. We get a limited sort of narrative as well. Leo’s death is mentioned pretty casually, with no mention of how. You will want to recap with a brief narrative of the period if you’re not sure you know it already. The basic goal here is to recreate the era, not the theological intricacies or imperial narratives. The way that society worked, the general trends, and specific pieces of data that can be used to draw these conclusions. In that sense it works a lot like a sequel to Haldon’s Byzantium in the Seventh Century. That book is at least shorter.
I suspect I’m not alone in finding this book hard to read. There are a larger number of spelling/grammatical issues than is normal for an OUP book, as if the editors were struggling to work their way through it too! Take this example from page 453: “It is important to stress at the outset of any discussion dealing with this aspect of Byzantine history that these changes were both part of the internal dynamics of Byzantine society or responded to its radically transformed situation at this period, and a reflection of developments outside Byzantine society.” What was that trying to say? It was clearly two different sentences merged together. It’s a good example of this book’s prose in other respects as well: longwinded, dense, turgid even, somewhat confusing… I can’t blame the editors for missing a few of these as it can be tiring getting to the end of a sentence only to have to return to the beginning to remember what it was all about. It may not be a coincidence that the number of mistakes and errors I spotted increased the further I got into the book.
This book is a very useful reference. I wish I could suggest a different one for people just seeking an overview! I understand Brubaker’s Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm is essentially an abbreviation of this one with much of the source criticism removed, but it’s also a much shorter book (134 pages, including bibliography). That’s not really enough space for an issue this complicated, particularly if it’s also an introduction to the period. My advice (unless you are looking for that reference work) is to read this one but be generous with the skimming. The book is quite good at signposting what topic it’s discussing, so you can tell when a subheading is going to be mainly close reading of highly repetitive sources.
December 10, 2022
Edit: Thoroughly postmodern isn't really what I had in mind. I think it's noticeably influenced by postmodernism, specifically that politics and power are paramount to all things. Any choice of representation, therefore, is at its root political. The final chapter tries to move away from that in some respects, but I believe the opening chapter and narrative sections highlight that postmodern (for lack of a better word) thinking.
This was a massive tome (800 pages of text and another 150+ of sources/ bibliographical material) that was at times a slog to get through. Not to say that the writing was poor or anything but in a book this size, there will be long stretches where the content drags. My problems with this text are less in the conclusions but more in the methodology. The authors concluded their text by hoping they have laid down to rest the traditional understanding of the Iconoclast Era. I don't want to say they entered their work with that already decided but that their harsh textual criticism of the written sources tended towards the argument being in their favor from the get-go. They relied heavily on the work of Paul Speck, so I can't comment on the source criticism in particular, but I think it's a worrying trend in modern academics that we can't know anything about the past because everything is about power and relation to power. They give a brief concession that one shouldn't discount religious/ theological motive but are always quick to suggest a political/ economic motive (despite the absence of anything in the sources that would suggest that beyond conjecture.)
It's a thoroughly postmodern, to use an over-used term, look at the past. But the authors clung to an outdated materialism at the same time, that the only things we can "know" about anything is physical. This is represented in their choice of topics in the second half of their work. There the focus was on seals, coins, and archeological remains and other physical markers.
There were many good things about this work, and anyone interested in the period does need to consume the narrative portion at least. In particular, their contention that Leo III was not as committed an iconoclast as later sources make him out to be interesting and fairly well backed. Also, the repeated emphasis that Iconoclasm did not cause widespread support or revolt for the majority of the population. Genuine support and genuine resistance could be found in Constantinople but the majority of people kind of went with the flow. The second half of the work focused on different aspects of the Byzantine state at the time and while I couldn't tell you anything about the economics chapter, their analysis of the development of the themeta was excellent.
For anyone wanting to hear from the authors mouth, Leslie Brubaker recently went on "Byzantium and Friends" to talk about first Iconoclasm. She comes off rather smug but covers a lot of the narrative portion of this work without some of the in-depth source criticism. In the final analysis, "Byzantium In the Iconclast Era" is the definitive work on the subject but has serious methodological/ historiographical flaws that while neo-liberal academia might not see, the text operates philosophically in a weird area where they accept some of the claims of modern theorists about the past while refusing to acknowledge the conclusions from those claims. Its an incredibly weel researched text and one that has given me a lot of thought. It was not an "enjoyable" read in the classical sense but an incredibly valuable one.
This was a massive tome (800 pages of text and another 150+ of sources/ bibliographical material) that was at times a slog to get through. Not to say that the writing was poor or anything but in a book this size, there will be long stretches where the content drags. My problems with this text are less in the conclusions but more in the methodology. The authors concluded their text by hoping they have laid down to rest the traditional understanding of the Iconoclast Era. I don't want to say they entered their work with that already decided but that their harsh textual criticism of the written sources tended towards the argument being in their favor from the get-go. They relied heavily on the work of Paul Speck, so I can't comment on the source criticism in particular, but I think it's a worrying trend in modern academics that we can't know anything about the past because everything is about power and relation to power. They give a brief concession that one shouldn't discount religious/ theological motive but are always quick to suggest a political/ economic motive (despite the absence of anything in the sources that would suggest that beyond conjecture.)
It's a thoroughly postmodern, to use an over-used term, look at the past. But the authors clung to an outdated materialism at the same time, that the only things we can "know" about anything is physical. This is represented in their choice of topics in the second half of their work. There the focus was on seals, coins, and archeological remains and other physical markers.
There were many good things about this work, and anyone interested in the period does need to consume the narrative portion at least. In particular, their contention that Leo III was not as committed an iconoclast as later sources make him out to be interesting and fairly well backed. Also, the repeated emphasis that Iconoclasm did not cause widespread support or revolt for the majority of the population. Genuine support and genuine resistance could be found in Constantinople but the majority of people kind of went with the flow. The second half of the work focused on different aspects of the Byzantine state at the time and while I couldn't tell you anything about the economics chapter, their analysis of the development of the themeta was excellent.
For anyone wanting to hear from the authors mouth, Leslie Brubaker recently went on "Byzantium and Friends" to talk about first Iconoclasm. She comes off rather smug but covers a lot of the narrative portion of this work without some of the in-depth source criticism. In the final analysis, "Byzantium In the Iconclast Era" is the definitive work on the subject but has serious methodological/ historiographical flaws that while neo-liberal academia might not see, the text operates philosophically in a weird area where they accept some of the claims of modern theorists about the past while refusing to acknowledge the conclusions from those claims. Its an incredibly weel researched text and one that has given me a lot of thought. It was not an "enjoyable" read in the classical sense but an incredibly valuable one.
September 28, 2025
Dense, exhaustive, and well-researched though not all sections are equal in quality. To be fair, neither is the corpus of Byzantine sources.
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March 4, 2016byzantium, byz-la-ema-owned
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews