Byzantium in the iconoclast era, c. 680–850

Iconoclasm, the debate about the legitimacy of religious art that began in Byzantium around 720 and continued for nearly 120 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.

Leslie Brubaker is Professor of Byzantine Art and Director of the Graduate School (College of Arts and Law) at the University of Birmingham. Her previous publications include Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium: Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus (1999) and, with John Haldon, Byzantium in the Era of Iconoclasm: The Sources (2001). She has edited Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive? (1998) and coedited, with Robert Osterhout, The Sacred Image East and West (1995) and, with Julia M. H. Smith, Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900 (2004).

John Haldon is Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. His previous publications include Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (1990; rev. edn 1997) and Byzantium: A History (2000). He has edited The Social History of Byzantium: Problems and Perspectives (2008) and coedited, with Elizabeth Jeffreys and Robin Cormack, The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (2008).

Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon

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First published 2011

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ISBN 978-0-521-43093-7 Hardback

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Contents

A note on names and placenames

Adopting an appropriate and consistent form for Byzantine Greek names of people and places is always problematic, since several possibilities exist. We have preferred to use standard anglicised forms of personal names, where they exist and are in common English usage – thus George, Constantine, Michael, Theodore etc. – but have otherwise ‘hellenised’ Greek names (e.g. Theodosios, Epiphanios, Germanos, Nikephoros, Niketas, Romanos, Theophilos) rather than use Latinised versions, which were not used by the Byzantines themselves, except on the fringes of the empire, in Italy. By the same token we have left titles and official posts in the Greek form – sygkellos, not syncellus, magistros, not magister, for example. Titles of Greek texts are normally cited either in English (e.g. Book of Ceremonies) or transcribed from the Greek (e.g. Ekloge) except in instances where the Latinised version has become habitual (e.g. Theophanes continuatus). Not everyone will agree with this but, like all such decisions, it reflects our own preferences as much as any scientific rationale, and has at least the virtue of consistency.

We have also continued to use the term ‘iconoclasm’ despite the fact that, as discussed several times in the course of this volume, the Byzantines themselves used the term ‘iconomachy’. We are somewhat hesitant about following this convention, as it perpetuates a misleading assumption about the period, but the word is so firmly entrenched in modern scholarly usage that it seemed precious and pedantic to insist on scrupulous accuracy here.