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.

Gregory had been elected to the papacy in 715 upon the death of Constantine.  He was a man of great strength of purpose and nobility of character.  Upon the Lombard throne sat Liutprand whose boast it was that “his nation was Catholic and beloved of God,” and who acknowledged the pope as “the head of all the churches and priests of God through the world.”  These three men were the great protagonists who decided the fate of the empire in Italy.

The Lombards though they were thus Catholic had certainly not ceased to make war upon the empire.  In this ceaseless quarrel, for instance, they had, perhaps about 720, possessed themselves of Classis, the seaport of Ravenna, and not long after of the fortress of Narni upon the Flaminian Way, and a little later, about 752, Liutprand himself laid siege to Ravenna, apparently without much result, though Classis seems to have suffered pillage.  But if Ravenna did not then fall it was because the emperor’s Iconoclastic decrees had not then reached Italy.  They appear to have arrived in the following year and immediately the whole peninsula was aflame.  “No image of any saint, martyr, or angel shall be retained in the churches,” said Leo, “for all such things are accursed.”  The pope was told to acquiesce or to prepare to endure degradation and exile.  Then, says Gibbon, surely here an unbiassed authority, “without depending on prayers or miracles, Gregory II. boldly armed against the public enemy and his pastoral letters admonished the Italians of their danger and their duty.  At this signal Ravenna, Venice, and the cities of the Exarchate and Pentapolis adhered to the cause of religion; their military force by sea and land consisted for the most part of the natives; and the spirit of patriotism and zeal was transfused into the mercenary strangers.  The Italians swore to live and die in the defence of the pope and the holy images; the Roman people were devoted to their Father and even the Lombards were ambitious to share the merit and advantage of this holy war.  The most treasonable act, but the most obvious revenge, was the destruction of the statues of Leo himself; the most effectual and most pleasing measure of rebellion was the withholding of the tribute of Italy and depriving him of a power which he had recently abused by the imposition of a new duty.”