Icons, Missions and the Long Fall

The empire spent much of the eighth and ninth centuries at war with itself over images. Emperors from Leo III moved against the veneration of icons; the Second Council of Nicaea restored it in 787; a second iconoclast period followed from 815 until the restoration of 843, still kept as the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon's reassessment argues that the destruction was far less systematic than the victorious iconophile sources claimed, and that the crisis was as much about imperial authority as about theology. Its settlement gave Orthodoxy a theology of the image that has governed its art ever since.

Outward, the empire's greatest export was its religion. The mission of Cyril and Methodius in the 860s produced a Slavonic alphabet and liturgy, and the conversion of Rus at Kiev around 988 carried Byzantine Christianity into the lands that became Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

The breaks came in turn. The mutual excommunications of 1054 hardened the estrangement from Rome into schism; the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204 and ruled it for fifty seven years, an injury that made reunion politically impossible; and on 29 May 1453 the city fell to Mehmed II, who converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque. What survived was the church: autocephalous Orthodox patriarchates, a liturgy, and in Moscow the claim to be a third Rome.