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