§ 102. THE RESTORATION OF IMAGE-WORSHIP. 463
Christendom was superseded by the spiritual worship of God alone.
A few months after the Nicenc Council, Irene dissolved the betrothal of her son, the Emperor Constantine, to Rotrude, a daughter of Charlemagne, which she herself had brought about, and forced him to marry an Armenian lady whom he afterward cast off and sent to a convent.1 From this time dates her rup ture with Constantine. In her ambition for despotic power, she rendered him odious by encouraging his bad habits, and at last incapable of the throne by causing his eyes to be plucked out, while he was asleep, with such violence that he died of it (797). It is a humiliating fact that Constantine the Great, the convener of the first Nicene Council, and Irene, the convener of the second and last, are alike stained with the blood of their own offspring, and yet honored as saints in the Eastern church, in whose estimate orthodoxy covers a multitude of sins.2 She enjoyed for five years the fruit of unnatural cruelty to her only child. As she passed through the streets of Constantinople, four patricians marched on foot before her golden chariot, holding the reins of four milk-white steeds. But these patricians con spired against their queen and raised the treasurer Nicephorus to the throne, who was crowned at St. Sophia by the venal patriarch. Irene was sent into exile on the Isle of Lesbos, and had to earn her bread by the labors of her distaff as she had done in the days of her youth as an Athenian virgin. She died of grief in 803. With her perished the Isaurian dynasty. Startling changes of fortune were not uncommon among princes and patriarchs of the Byzantine empire.
1 Charlemagne afterwards offered Irene his hand with a view to unite the Eastern and Western empires, and she accepted the offer; but her prime-min ister, Ae'tius, who wished to raise his own brother, Leo, to the throne, pre vented the marriage.
2 The memory of Irene is celebrated by the Greeks on the loth of Aurrnst. Her patriarch, Tarasius (d. 806), is canonized in the Koman as well as the Greek Church.
464 FOURTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
§ 103. Iconoclastic Reaction, and Final Triumph of Image- Worship, A. D. 842.
WALCH, X. 592-828. HEFELE, IV. 1-6 ; 38-47 ; 104-109.
During the five reigns which succeeded that of Irene, a period of thirty-eight years, the image- war was continued with varying fortunes. The soldiers were largely iconoclastic, the monks and the people in favor of image-worship. Among these Theodore of the Studium was distinguished by his fearless advocacy and cruel sufferings under Leo V., the Armenian (813-820), who was slain at the foot of the altar. Theophilus (829-842) was the last and the most cruel of the iconoclastic emperors. He per secuted the monks by imprisonment, corporal punishment, and mutilation.1
But his widow, Theodora, a second Irene, without her vices,2 in the thirteenth year of her regency during the minority of Michael the Drunkard, achieved by prudent and decisive mea sures the final and permanent victory of image- worship. She secured absolution for her deceased husband by the fiction of a death-bed repentance, although she had promised him to make no change. The iconoclastic patriarch, John the Grammarian, was banished and condemned to two hundred lashes ; the monk Methodius of opposite tendency (honored as a confessor and
1 Hefele, IV. 105, says that under this reign the famous poets, Theophanes and his brother, Theodore of the Stndium, were punished with two hundred lashes and the branding of Greek mock-verses on their forehead, whence they received the name " the Marked " (ypairToi}. But, according to the Bollandists, Theophanes died in 820, and Hefele himself, III. 370, puts his death in 818, although in vol. IV. 108 he reports that Theophanes ypairros was made bishop of Smyrna by Theodora, 842. See on this conflict in chronology above, p. 407.
2 The tongue of slander, however, raised the story of her criminal intimacy with the patriarch Methodius, whom she had appointed. The court instituted an investigation during which the patriarch by indecent exposure furnished the proof of the physical impossibility of sexual sin on his part; whereupon the accuser confessed that she had been bribed by his iconoclastic predecessor. Hefele, IV. 109.