Germanus, the long-serving patriarch, protested against the edict and appealed to the patriarch of Rome. But the emperor deposed Germanus as a traitor (730) and had Anastasius (730-54), formerly syncellus of the
patriarchal Court, and a willing instrument of the Government, appointed in his place.
Opposition to Islam: As will be seen, the new patriarch was well informed about the other more distant enemy: “With respect to the Saracens [he wrote], since they also seem to be among those who urge these charges against us, it will be quite enough for their shame and confusion to allege against them their invocation which even to this day they make in the
wilderness to a lifeless stone, namely that which is called Chobar [the Ka'bah stone at Mecca], and the rest of their vain conversation received by tradition from their fathers as, for instance, the ludicrous mysteries of their solemn festivals” (Germanus, Patr. Gr. 98).
2. Prince Constantine, aged 12, was betrothed by his father to the daughter of the (pagan) khagan of the Khazars. See below: c.730 – Judaism.
730: fl. Boniface, the English-born Benedictine monk, later known as the "Apostle of Germany". He was archbishop of Mainz from 746.
Paganism in Germany is superseded by Christianity: See 739.730: The Khazars achieve a major victory over the Muslims on the plains of Azerbaijan.
The Arabs were also defeated in the battle of Tours in what is now France (732). The Pyrenees and the Caucasus remained henceforth the extreme limits of Islam and Christendom.
c. 730:
1. Persecution: George Limnaiotes, an iconodule martyr, is known only from short synaxarion notices (a synaxarion is a liturgical book). In his youth he became a monk on Mt Olympos in NW Asia Minor; under emperor Leo III, ca.
730, he was tortured to death for his iconodule beliefs, having his nose slit and his head burned (perhaps with burning coals, as in the case of Anthousa
of Mantineon). He supposedly died at age 95, and therefore may have been born ca. 635. – Hagiography database by Kazdhan et al., at
www.doaks.org/hagiointro.2. Transcaucasia: The pagan Khazar king converts to Judaism. See 737.
c.731: Northumbria: Bede completes his Historia Ecclesia, a history of the church in England.
There were three kingdoms in Anglo-Saxon England: Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.
730-31:
Italy: In 730, emperor Leo III issued a second Iconoclast edict which fared no better than the first. The pope or patriarch of Rome Gregory III denounced it immediately upon his accession to the papacy in March 731. Gregory also summoned, in November, a synod in Italy which pronounced (12 April 732) Iconoclasm heresy and affected to excommunicate the emperor (Ekonomou 2007: 246).The Exarch Eutychius was not even able to prevent the
Archbishop of Ravenna from attending the synod.
Infuriated, Leo III sent (see 732) a fleet to Ravenna but this show of force failed when the fleet was shipwrecked in a storm.
731-41:
Rome slips from the empire: The “Greek” pope Gregory III, a Benedictine of Greco-Syrian origin, was the last to obtain the Imperial mandate before his consecration as Pope. Cf 752.
As Gregory was not consecrated for more than a month after his election, it is presumed that he waited for the confirmation of his election by the exarch at Ravenna.
A great missionary pope, he organized the religious structure of Germany under St. Boniface as Metropolitan. In 732, he condemned the Iconoclastic heresy and proclaimed his veneration for the holy images and relics by building an oratory, dedicated to all the saints, at Rome. It was he who obtained the political sovereignty of Rome (with himself as temporal ruler) from Pepin the Short. —Cath. Encyc. under Gregory III. See below: 732-33.
731:
Papal resistance to Constantinople: A synod of Italian bishops in Rome denounces iconoclasm and authorises letters of protest to the emperor. Cf 732/33, 737.
Elected by popular acclamation, Gregory was - as we have said - the last pope to seek the Byzantine exarch's mandate. He immediately appealed to Emperor Leo III to moderate his position on the iconoclastic controversy.
When this elicited no response, Gregory called a synod in November 731, denouncing iconoclasm and excommunicating destroyers of icons.
In 731 Gregory III held a synod of 93 bishops at St. Peter's in which all who
‘broke, defiled, or took’ images of Christ, of His Mother, the Apostles or other saints were declared excommunicate. Another legate, Constantine, was sent with a copy of the decree and of its application to the emperor, but was again arrested and imprisoned in Sicily (Cath. Encyc. under ‘Iconoclasm’).
The demonstrated inability of the Exarch in Ravenna to prevent or interrupt the Roman Synod of AD 731, at which iconoclasm and the emperor were formally condemned, and the failure of Constantine V to either prevent or disrupt the Franco-papal alliance of AD 754, effectively signified the permanisation of the papal ‘secession’ from the empire. Theophanes writes of “the defection of Italy” (TCOT: 101).
+ 100th ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF MUHAMMAD. Cf 739.
Italy in 732
After The Times Atlas 1994: 59.
The Lombards controlled nearly the entire peninsula. All the north including Tuscany was Lombard; but Venice still belonged to the empire. Byzantium controlled a long narrow corridor, running north-south from present-day Venice to Ravenna and thence via Perusia [near mod. Perugia] along the ancient Via Amerina to Rome (cf 733 below.)
The Naples area and Amalfi were also under imperial rule, along with just the bare heel and toe of Italy. Otherwise Lombard (Beneventan) control
extended south as far as the Gulf of Taranto [mod. Basilicata] and N Calabria.
The heel-tip (Otranto), S Calabria, Sardinia and Sicily continued under imperial rule.
Corsica was in Lombard hands (conquered c.725 or earlier), but the
Balearics and, as noted, Sardinia still formally acknowledged Constantinople, or perhaps better: had not repudiated the emperor.
732:
1. W Mediterranean: raids by the Muslims of Ifriqiya. ‘Abd al-Malik b. Qatan raids Byzantine Sicily to seize booty and prisoners; and ‘Abd-Allah b. Ziyad makes an incursion into Sardinia (Ahmad p.3). See 733.
2. Aegean-Anatolian coast: First mention of the re-badged maritime theme of the Cibyrrhaeots, Greek: Kibyrrhaiotai, named for Cibyra, the port east of Attalia (opposite the western tip of Cyrprus). It was the renamed old Carabisian. See 770.
Leo sends a large fleet under Manes, general of the Cibyrrhaeots, to Italy to re-assert control over Rome and the papacy, but his ships are shipwrecked in the Adriatic. This was the last attempt to assert effective imperial control over N Italy (Collins 1991: 216, citing Theophanes a.m. 6224: TCOT p.101).
But where he could do so, Leo punished the pope. He confiscated [729-32]
all of the papal ‘patrimonies’* in southern Italy and Sicily, the main source of the Pope's income and the only areas where imperial authority still remained strong. Cf 737. As we noted earlier, he was able to confiscate the papal estates of Sicily and Calabria but not those of Sardinia and Corsica, a signal that the latter two islands had effectively been lost to the empire.
(*) A patrimony, governed by a rector, was a collection of estates leased by the church to tenants who paid rent and farmed the land.
The estates also supplied grain, horses and timber.
The Papal patrimonies in the Naples region (Campania), Apulia and Calabria and elsewhere are first attested under pope Pelagius I [acc. 556], but probably they date from much earlier. There were altogether 11
patrimonies in the mid 500s, but by 729 many had been lost to or curtailed by the Lombard invasions (Richards p.312).3. Khazar alliance: The emperor's son, the future Basileus Constantine, marries the daughter of the (Jewish) Khazar khagan. Cf 737.
Prince Constantine, aged 14, was betrothed to the Khazar Chagan's daughter, still a child, who became a Christian and was renamed Irene [Gk Eirene, ‘peace’]. In 750, having grown into a woman, she will provide Constantine with his son and heir Leo IV, who was thus half-Khazar.
The Byzantine emperor Leo III married his son Constantine (later
Constantine V Kopronymos) to the Khazar princess Tzitzak, daughter of the Khagan Bihar, as part of the alliance between the two powers. Tzitzak, who was baptized as Irene, became famous for her wedding gown, which started a fashion craze in Constantinople for a type of robe or mantle (for men) called tzitzakion (Constant. Porph. De Cerimoniis, Book 2, cc.1-2 ). Their son Leo (Leo IV) would be better known as "Leo the Khazar".
"The deed and the guilt of Constantine Copronymus [“name of dung”]
were acknowledged. The Isaurian heretic, who [allegedly] sullied [shat in] the baptismal font, and declared war against the holy images, had indeed
embraced a Barbarian wife. By this impious alliance he accomplished the measure of his crimes, and was devoted to the just censure of the church and of posterity" (- so declaims Gibbon, ch 53).
732: The Franks and Burgundians under Charles, called Martel: "the Hammer”, defeat an Arab incursion north of the Pyrenees near Poitiers in what is now west-central France. As well as Arabs, there were Berbers and subject Visigoths in the Muslim-led army.
Watson notes that the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 describes the battle in greater detail than any other Latin or Arabic source: the
Franks drew themselves into a large infantry square, so that they were
"like an immovable wall" and a "glacier". The Muslims, who included mailed cavalry, threw themselves at the Frankish square in fruitless attempts to break the formation. Many Muslims were cut down by Frankish swordsmen. The Arab cavalry several times broke into the interior of the Frankish square, but it held. The Muslim assault, however, ceased when night fell. The discipline and resolve of the Franks was apparently too much for the Muslims, as Frankish scouts discovered on the following morning that the Muslim camp had been abandoned in haste during the night, with a great deal of plunder having been left behind in the tents. - William E. Watson, in
Providence: Studies in Western Civilization v.2 n.1 (1993).
Much has been made in the West of how this battle saved
Christendom. But it is noteworthy that Tabari (d. 923), the greatest Arab historian, and Ibn al-Qutiyya (d. 977), the first historian of Muslim Spain, make no mention at all of the Battle of Tours/Poitiers (Lewis 1982: 19).
733:
1. Italy: The troops of the Byzantine garrison of Venice marched to Ravenna to recover the capital from the Lombards (Brown 1984: 91). Or later: see 737-38. Treadgold 1997: 355 dates the loss and recapture of Ravenna to the one same year, 738.
2. Off Sicily: A Byzantine flotilla using Greek Fire (“naptha”) destroys several ships of a corsair expedition led by Abu-Bakr b. Suwad. The battle took place off Trapani on the western side (Blankinship p.193; Ahmad p.3; Kennedy 2008: 334). See 734.
734: Visigoths, Arabs and Franks in Occitania: The Muslim governor of Narbonne, Yusuf ibn 'Abd al-Rahman al-Fihri, concluded agreements with several Visigoth-ruled towns on common defence arrangements against the encroachments of the Franks under Charles Martel, who had systematically and brutally brought the south to heel as he extended his domains. Charles failed in his attempt to take Narbonne in 737, when the city was jointly defended by its Muslim Arab and Christian Visigoth citizens.
Francia: After 732, according to some writers, Charles Martel began the integration of Arab-style heavy cavalry, using the stirrup and mailed armour, into his army, and trained his infantry to fight in
conjunction with cavalry, a tactic which stood him in good stead during his campaigns of 736-7, especially at the Battle of Narbonne. Others have noted that there is no mention of stirrups in inventories, literary sources or military manuals even as late as Charlemagne's reign (fl.
791). Stirrups first appear in Frankish graves in the 800s. – Butt 2002.
734:
Sicily: Unsuccessful attack by Muslims from Africa; Byzantine ships intercept the Muslim fleet and take many prisoners. The expedition to Sicily in 116/734 under 'Uthman b. Abi 'Ubayda al-Fihri was apparently a considerable disaster, as the Byzantine fleet again intercepted the Muslims at sea on their return, capturing 'Uthman's two sons (Blankinship 1994:194; Ahmad p.3; Kennedy 2008: 334).
See next and 740.
735:
1. Iberia [present-day Georgia]: It was not until 735 that the Arabs succeeded in establishing their firm control over a large portion of the country. In that year, Marwan, governor of Armenia, took hold of Tbilisi and much of the neighbouring lands and installed there an Arab emir, who was to be
confirmed by the Caliph of Baghdad or, occasionally, by the Wali of Armenia.