Pictures of Mary
Jesus and the saints
images from the long lost Empire of Byzantium.
This is a journey of discovery
the search for the origins of western faith
the tale of ancient battles that changed the world forever.
Born of the Bible and the pagan Roman Empire
Byzantium still stands at the heart of the modern
world... its ideas of heroes and of villains and of government
both good and bad and the right of law.
All of the cities of Byzantium
held holy images within them.
Sacred pictures
It was said that came from heaven.
They were carried into battle.
People died to save them from destruction.
This is their story
This is the heart of the ancient
palace of the popes of Rome.
It's centuries older than the Vatican
and filled with holy wonders.
Believers say that Jesus Christ
once walked upon these steps
that they were taken from
Pontius Pilate's palace in Jerusalem.
The steps were brought to
Rome in the first centuries of
Christianity and are reverenced still by millions of
people every year who pass up them on their knees
deep in penitential prayer.
Inside the ancient chapel at their top
Rome's most holy picture an image made
so it was said not by human hands at all.
A portrait so powerful that when deep in the Dark Ages
the barbarians stood at the gates of ancient
Rome the awe inspiring image crippled the
tribes with its paralyzing gaze and sent
them running back to Germany.
The painting's entirely encased in silver.
The nearest you can get to it is that little face
on the top which is actualla painted on linen and
lays right on the ancient panel.
And that type of face a round one with dark hair
is probably the nearest you can get to
an authentic portrait of Jesus.
The original was said
to have been painted on the walls of Pontius
Pilate's palace by the first Christians.
The real painting underneath
has been entirely washed away a thousand years ago.
That doesn't matter really.
This is more than a picture.
It is literally a window into heaven
a link between divinity and the earth.
The Romans called their painting the Achuropeta
an eastern word that means a picture made in heaven.
It was actually made in the seventh
century in the Empire of Byzantium
part of a standard set of pictures of the
people of the Bible.
All those images come from the East.
They're our most basic images of kings and gods
and governments and heroes and mothers and villains.
All those types we take for granted
and their story of how they got from the East
to the modern West is an astonishing tale.
They're come from fire It's a story of blindings
and hatreds and the light of faith.
It's our story
and it's a part of the story of Byzantium too.
The story starts in the year 360 just a few years
after the Roman Empire had accepted Christianity
when a pagan pilgrim came here to the Greek
sanctuary of Delphi to ask the god Apollo if the
ancient pagan images would ever again be honored
and worshipped in the ancient ways.
Deep down under Apollo's vast temple an old lady sat
filled with the fumes from a volcanic crack underneath
and drugged with cyanide.
She babbled a reply
and a priest took down her words in classic verse.
"Tell the world the glorious temple has fallen.
Apollo's springs are dry.
The world no longer has a prophet.
Using the signs and symbols of the ancient gods
Apollo's priest had just announced the ending
of the pagan world.
Of the pagan world
the gods controlled everything the
movements of the stars in the sky to the
fishes in the sea.
And their signs and symbols were everywhere.
They protected crops and trees.
They were in every stone.
When the thunder came down you understood it
because it belonged to a god
and every god had its sign.
It was a complete universe and everybody felt secure in it.
When Christianity took over the Roman Empire
it attacked and swept away all these signs.
Now these signs were as old as man himself
and Christianity was pretty poorly
supplied with alternatives.
After all
it was a language of books and words.
But unless it was to fail it had to develop
and develop quickly a whole new Set of images for the world.
The trick the genius you might say
wasn't just to swap this ancient chaos with ten
thousand pagan signs and symbols for a single set
of Christian images
but to find a quick way of spreading these Christian
images and pictures right through the ancient
Mediterranean.
Books books were the answer.
Books were invented at the same time that
Christianity started.
Before that there were scrolls.
Now there were pages.
This is a copy of one of the oldest books in the world
from the first centuries of Christianity.
Look! If you flip through it you see pictures.
They are illustrating the narrative.
If that would've been a Christian book
it could have gone from one end of the
Mediterranean to the other and
taken a whole set of Christian pictures
the story from the walls of the church.
Well that's just a copy.
These images these ancient images
are so precious that real books of that age
from the fifth century
some of the oldest pictures in the world
that've come from books
are now not in books but trapped in glass.
Look! Here is Jupiter.
This is a pagan book illustrating pagan poetry and
it's a picture of Jupiter the king of the gods
and he's got a halo
just like Christian saints will have in their pictures
And he's holding a globe
just like Christ will in a thousand churches.
And he's sitting under the arc of heaven as Christ does
and he's king of the stars and the moon and the sun.
This is this is a pose which says to you"king".
You can't have Jesus king of the world unless
He looks like a king.
That looks like a king.
That's where they're getting as it were
their iconography from
straight from the pagan faith.
Now look at this.
Here another one of these very precious
ancient illustrations
really the roots of our western art.
Think of that.
When you make gestures today
when you go "Victory!" Or "Communism!"
"Fascism! Bang! Bang!"
You are doing universal gestures.
They get emotions in you immediately.
This said to the early Christians
similar sorts of things.
Look! Here is a Roman general and his mistress
and a friend having dinner.
They're sitting round a table
They're got halos on.
Everybody would know this was an imperial table.
There's a
there's a way of drawing tables
even with a fish on a plate in the middle.
You'll see that in churches.
You'll see that same image except
there it becomes the last supper.
The first imperial images to tell the stories
of the Christian Bible to symbolize its faith
came from this city a thousand miles to the east of Rome
ancient Constantinople
now Istanbul in modern Turkey.
The emperor Constantine the Great
dedicated this column when he founded
Constantinople in the year 330.
From that year on the city stood at the heart of
Constantine's vast empire
the first Christian state
master of the greatest cities the world had ever seen
Alexandria
Antioch
and Rome
and the capitol of the brand new empire of
Byzantium.
From the very beginning
Constantinople really sizzled.
New religion new state new government
everything here was up for grabs.
Amazingly enough
we have a good idea of how it felt to be alive
inside this city and at just this time in history.
This is a fifteen hundred year old press photo
not on film though it's on ivory.
There's the pole for the poor old elephant's tusk.
The Byzantines imported ivory from India
and from Africa.
This probably came from Africa because
it's so enormous.
It would have come
of course
through Egypt up through the empire
to Constantinople.
The Byzantines loved ivory.
They thought it had a texture
like living skin.
This then is the only glimpse we have of life
in Constantinople in about the year 420.
It's a procession.
Two priests are carrying the bones of Saint
Stephen of Jerusalem on a royal
carriage into the imperial palace of Byzantium.
The mighty emperor
Theodosius the Second
is walking with his ministers and soldiers
right through the center of the city.
Theodosius' procession would have passed up
this very street.
This is modern Istanbul.
In those days
in the fifth century
it was called Constantinople.
We're walking between the docks and the ancient
center of this city.
I suspect it was much the same in those days
but there would have been thousands of people
watching their emperor on his way to the palace.
You know these processions
especially at that time were a very tense affair.
These sort of cities these great classical cities
were a thousand years old.
But the Christian bishops that ran them were starting to look
at them with brand new eyes.
The times really were a changing.
They saw the rich on the way to church
to tend to their souls
kicking beggars out of the way by the doors
of the church
children mutilated by their parents
to make them look more pitiful.
And they saw the rich women walking
they said
with a thousand "meals" swinging from their ears
and they didn't like what they saw.
The Christian bishops wanted a moral city
a sexless city a pure city
and a more equitable city too.
So that perhaps
is why the emperor isn't sitting in his carriage
but walking in the street and carrying
a candle with his courtiers.
And the bones of a poor man from
Palestine riding in the royal coach.
The emperor's procession was on its way to
a grand square
half way between the palace and the court church
I think our ivory procession would have
passed through here
right through the heart of the ancient city.
Now you see that Turkish bath over there?
That's in about the same
place as the gate on our ivory.
And see the great high dome on the gate?
And see that figure of Christ
that face of Christ on the gate?
That was such a famous figure!
It was called Christ at the Gateway
the most famous and influential portrait of Christ.
It was copied from the great
shining ivory statue of Zeus of the Seven Wonders.
And that was parked in a palace just over there.
Now think of our procession moving along.
You see they're going past this great portico.
Three high stories are they
people peering out arches looking down
swinging their incense
pleased to see the saint arriving
in the city to make the New Jerusalem joining
heaven to earth.
And over there
look! That's about the spot where the church
the brand new church
of Saint Stephen is being built.
It's ready to receive the relics
but they haven't finished the roof
and the tilers are still working away out there.
But the empress is proudly waiting by the door
holding a cross.
And that is quite extraordinary.
For the first time in the ancient world
the center of attention is not the emperor
but an empress.
She carries the cross of victory
she receives the holy relics into her church.
It's probably the virgin empress Pulcharia.
In that most ancient language signs and symbols
the little ivory is telling
us about an ancient revolution
and one that still affects the world today.
In the first years
many of Christianity's most famous pictures
were made here in the grounds of the great
monastery of Saint John Studious of Constantinople.
These monasteries were Pulcharia's holy battle
grounds the places where she conjured up
the sacred images and metaphors with which
she waged her earthly arguments.
At the center of this ancient image factory
one of Constantinople's oldest churches
where the sacred signs and
stories were put to powerful use.
Imagine that it is Easter
April the 15th, 428
and that this nice new church is filled
with all the nobles of Constantinople
men downstairs women upstairs in the galleries.
Suddenly there was a great hush.
The imperial guard the emperor and all his family
had walked into the church.
Now in the middle of these churches
there's a stone pulpit.
For more than a century now
preachers have been giving fire and
brimstone from these pulpits
using all the language
all the signs and symbols of the Christian
faith and the ethics of the Bible.
They laid out the whole structure of
this brand new Christian empire.
And the emperor and his family listened in humility.
Right on this line here there was an altar rail.
It separated the main body
of the church from the high altar.
Only the emperor and his priests were allowed in here
close to the divine mystery of communion.
In 428
though things were rather different.
Theodosius the emperor was usually accompanied
to the altar by his sister Pulcharia.
They're ruled together since they'd been children
two frightened toddlers in a palace filled with intrigues
and plots for the succession.
When she was fourteen
Pulcharia had hit upon the answer.
She dedicated an altar to her own virginity
and to the rule of the emperor.
From that moment on they ruled as a strange sacred couple
like Joseph and Mary
and there were no plots for the succession.
It'd also given Pulcharia the unique role
within the church.
On that particular Easter day
though things turned out rather differently.
Pulcharia's way to the altar was barred by the
new patriarch of Constantinople
one Nestorius.
He said that only men could enter the sanctuary.
Pulcharia was aghast Her new role as a virgin
had projected women in a different way.
She was as pure as gold
she said. She had kept herself as soft
as fleece to receive the holy spirit.
"Have I not given birth to God!" she cried.
Nestorius
though was a man of the old school.
He preferred to see women as the daughters of Eve
that unfortunate
lady who dabbled in snakes and sex and sin.
"You," he said to Pulcharia,
"Have given birth to Satan!"
And there you have it really.
The three roles of women laid out in the early
Christian church... sinners virgins and mothers.
By opening the debate Pulcharia had not only
advanced the role of the Virgin Mary
and women in Byzantium but
defined the role of women in Christendom forever.
Encouraged by Pulcharia the next full council
of the church declared Mary the mother of Jesus
to be Mary the mother of God.
It was a defining moment.
Nestorius' challenge to the empress Pulcharia
was now seen as an insult to the Virgin Mary.
He was declared a heretic and exiled.
Thanks to Pulcharia the family of the emperor of Byzantium
had become a mirror image of the holy family
in the court of heaven.
That is why these medieval emperors offer
their city and an image of this church
Saint Sofia
Byzantium's cathedral
for the protection of the Virgin Mary.
Christ's mother is their mother too.
After Pulcharia the emperors of Byzantium
ruled by divine right and by right of birth
and all later Western kings's imitated them.
Pulcharia had cast that spell of power and sanctity
that still surrounds the offices of government today.
She'd also changed the way that men saw women
and women saw themselves.
Once more ancient images tell the story.
Pagan Greeks and Romans loved public displays
of sexuality inside the city.
They seemed to hold the force of life within them.
They gave assurances of immortality.
The Christians though that gazed upon eternity
just as they destroyed the pagan temples
so they attacked the pagan body image.
Byzantine preachers said that the sight of barren
nakedness threatened anarchy within the
family and the state.
And it was covered up.
Women like Pulcharia who once had flaunted wealth and
beauty at the public baths now lived a regretful
celibate, in hermit's house
inside their marble palaces.
No longer was each man an Alexander
and every woman a Venus.
Right through the empire
the cities of Byzantium were filling up
with Christian piety.
Yet it was still a magic superstitious world.
A world too
where those who knew the will of God held
quite enormous power.
Hermits like Saint Simon of the Pillar
who preached in Syria
and did not hesitate to question the behavior
of the emperor himself.
Since you have become arrogant Emperor
and since your heart has forgotten
the Lord your God who gave you the imperial crown
and the imperial throne
and since you have become a friend of the feckless
faithless Jew then know this.
Soon you will face divine judgment
and then you will raise your hands to heaven and moan!
Impiety, then, brought down the wrath of God.
Piety on the other hand brought prosperity
good government and victory too.
The preachers kept their eyes on the great
cities and on the countryside as well.
For the people who fed and fueled Byzantium were
also at the mercy of the Lord.
Deep in Turkish Anatolia
this little village was once the city of
Saint Michael of Ten Thousand Angels
famed for its fine churches.
In Byzantium's countryside life was on a knife
edge between prosperity and starvation
between flesh and the Devil.
Magic stones still eased the pain of
reaping and of childbirth.
Magic images half cockerel half snake all dressed in armor
still kept the Evil Eye at bay.
Byzantium was built on the
memories of this pagan past
sometimes even from the same old stones.
Ancient demons haunted the countryside
stopped up wells curdled milk
and threatened plague and madness.
Many saints were really doctors ministering
to a madness born of holy terror.
Their prayers drove out the ancient devils
safeguarded animals and crops.
For archaeologists
of course
such goings on are very hard to excavate. Yet
sometimes there are clues to them
still lying on the swelling earth.
Have you ever wondered what attracts archaeologists
to one place rather than another?
This hill is a wonderful example.
Just look at its shape.
It's a bit strange in the landscape.
Look at all these white stones.
This is building stone.
That's interesting you might think.
But then I found this.
See! It's a very rare piece of marble
just like the Byzantines used to use to clad the
walls of buildings.
So this is quite a rich building.
Here's a bit of the roof.
So we've got the walls and the ceiling
everything you could need.
What the devil is it?
Well look a bit closer and here you can find
something absolutely unique.
This field is studded with tiny
little bits of glass.
These bits of glass are very special.
These are mosaics and they were made from the fifth
to the seventh or eighth centuries.
That makes this field unique.
Look around and you'll soon discover
why such a sophisticated city church was built
here deep in the countryside.
Long before the Christians took over its magic
this area had been a pagan sanctuary
a place of sacred springs and running waters
a little paradise.
Well
this is the place that's given this region its name...
old Turkish "Yurmai",
Greek "Germia",
Roman "Thermai".
That's a hot spring over there.
Once it was a great pagan shrine.
That Christian church then that Christian church
on the hill with those mosaics
perhaps that is its exact descendant.
It's a magic place.
Once there were many places like this in Anatolia.
Once upon a time in the early years of Christianity
a pagan washer woman called Hypatia said
that she would become a Christian only
if she could see the face of Jesus for herself.
And straight away the story goes
she found a portrait of the Lord floating
in the waters of the village spring.
And she was very frightened
and clutched the picture to her breast.
And then Hypatia found she had two pictures
the original panel and another imprinted on her dress.
It was a miracle.
Such powerful images
fallen straight from heaven and mysteriously duplicating
are called achuropeta.
Tradition has it that several of them still survive.
The achuropeta in the ancient palace
of the popes of Rome the great shroud of Turin.
In the sixth century
Hypatia's panel painting became
Byzantium's battle icon
the picture to paralyze the enemy with a terrifying gaze.
With such miraculous signs and symbols how could
the Byzantines ever lose?
Yet lose they did.
And with that loss
Byzantium and all its signs
and symbols were forever changed.
These are the ruins of a Byzantine
border fortress set right upon
the edge of the Syrian desert.
In the seventh century the East exploded.
The Byzantines moved on Persia
and the Persian armies moved towards Byzantium.
Vast battles rolled back and forth across
these plains for a quarter of a century and more.
These majesterial armies with their gold
and silver and their standards and their
generals all the panoply of ancient war
and at the end of it all of Persia
was destroyed and all of Byzantium had been sacked
except one city that of Constantinople.
And at the same time
that this tremendous battle was going on
small tribes were
infiltrating up through the empire.
One of them brought bubonic plague.
It was so bad in Constantinople that
ten thousand people a day died from it.
The bodies were piled in a fortress and the
terrible smell of death hung over the city.
One of these tribes from a Byzantine trading
city in Arabia found a great prophet in their midst Muhammad.
Muhammad had the ability to turn a personal
religious revelation into an immediate political reality.
Fired by his genius
the armies of Islam swept through the devastated
landscapes of the East.
In 636
in a gigantic battle on the Golan Heights in Syria
the Byzantines were crushed.
Not long after
the best part of the Byzantine Empire
that vast empire that once had run from Spain to Syria
was ruled by Arab Kurds.
At the same time
the nation of the Slavs had broken
through the northern Byzantine defenses
on the Danube and were raiding south down into Greece and
even threatening Constantinople.
Old Byzantium was completely broken.
An ancient way of life was coming to an end.
The story of the Syrian city of Apamea could serve
for a hundred others.
Apamea had been a huge rich city for a thousand years.
In pagan times it had a sprinkling
of philosophers and fine temples.
Antony and Cleopatra came here on their honeymoon.
Byzantine Apamea too
had its share of elegance
of churches relics and fire eating bishops.
There'd been hundreds of cities like Apamea
throughout the Empire of Byzantium.
But now after the great wars they all collapsed.
It's very difficult to see a disaster in archaeology.
Things stop.
All you get is ash.
In the Byzantine Empire coinage practically stopped being issued.
This meant that nobody could collect taxes
nobody could mend anything anymore
there were no inscriptions.
History practically stopped.
After the seventh century
the survivors came back into the ruins and
started to build little houses and
small fortresses amongst the great spines
of the broken cities.
At that point in the world Constantinople
was the only imperial city left unconquered.
You could say that Byzantium had changed from
an empire of cities to an empire of fortresses.
Much of seventh century Constantinople
must have looked like this.
Old Monunvassier in southern Greece.
The city's walls
protected refugees from the lost empire soldiers craftsmen
landowners.
Its churches were filled with images from
ten thousand distant shrines.
Its open squares and public
highways were choking up
with curving lanes and little alleyways.
The scale of life had changed completely.
People now stayed by the family fireside
read books in silence by themselves
cultivated their songs
engaged in clandestine love affairs.
Even patterns of eating and drinking changed.
Take bread for example.
Corn in Constantinople largely came from Egypt.
After the Arab invasions there was no corn from Egypt
no free bread handouts
first time in hundreds of years.
Worse than that the wheat that came from
the north actually tasted different.
But it rose.
It rose like modern bread and
that's really where the modern loaf starts in.
But it wasn't just the food you eat.
It was actually the way you ate it.
Ancient people had sat on couches
and been served by slaves.
They didn't really have knives and forks.
There was nowhere to put them.
Now with chairs and tables
people were sitting down so that the
great classical spoons were filed down to make
a little fork with which you could prod the food.
Pretty soon people would be cutting their own food up with knives.
Other changes too with the loss of Syria to the Arabs practically
all the olive oil trade dried up.
So you had to light your house with candles.
They were quite expensive.
Not so many fry ups either.
There were more boiled foods now from the north.
Northern foods called more for beef than pork.
The Northerners too brought different clothes with them.
Byzantium was cold.
People took up wearing trousers for the first time.
And those tough guys from the North
with their long hair began to be
copied by the Byzantines.
If you want to look cool and groovy and wild
you look like a Northerner.
The old classical world was disappearing.
Behind the high stone walls
there was uncertainty and stress and fear.
And in the age old way
Byzantium expressed this change
of mood with the signs and symbols of its faith.
This is a very good example of what I mean.
In its day this coin was absolutely unique.
Instead of having a picture of the emperor
on the front it had a picture
of the Christ that was over the palace gate.
It's extraordinary.
Nobody knows why it was done.
One sure thing it did.
It cut the Arabs off from using it because
they didn't agree with religious portraits.
So the Byzantine exchequer was sort of
shut off from them from this moment
because the coins had a picture of Christ on them.
There's another side to this too.
There were lots of Byzantines at the same time
who didn't like pictures of Christ.
There was a debate broke out
inside Byzantium whether it was a good idea
or not a good idea to have images.
It was a debate that went on with blindings
burnings maimings
and ferocity for over a hundred years
and it changed Byzantium forever.
By the eighth century after the invasion of Byzantium
Constantinople the ancient capitol
stood at the center of a gathering storm.
The storm called iconoclasm
which means quite literally
the destruction of the images.
In the year 730
there was a whole lot of agitated people milling
around in this square.
They'd come here because they heard
that the emperor wanted to take down the great picture
of Christ that hung above the palace gateway.
They loved the picture.
They didn't want it taken down.
It healed the sick.
Now this painting stood under the great high
arches of the palace gates somewhere over there.
And a soldier put up a ladder to go and
get the painting and somebody rushed out
of the crowd and pushed the ladder down
and killed the soldier.
But the other soldiers took the painting down
and arrested the person who had killed their friend
and they had her executed.
And Saint Theodosia the virgin martyr
became the first victim of iconoclasm.
Iconoclasm
the cataclysm of the paintings.
This movement that started in the palace of
Byzantium to destroy all holy images.
Thirty years after they took
the picture down from the palace
the iconoclasts
that is the people who were destroying the images
went through the great church itself.
The patriarch was murdered.
All the images were taken down.
And though the angels came down from heaven
so it was said and beat the impious emperors
the iconoclasm continued.
Glass mosaics were pounded into dust.
Books were ripped apart
wooden panel paintings chopped into pieces
and the blood of the holy images so it was said
soaked the clothing of the iconoclasts.
It wasn't only little things either.
The monuments of this city were
actually covered in images
This for example
was part of a great milestone that stood
at the center of the city.
The emperor decreed that the sacred image
of the Virgin that it contained
should be scraped away
and a picture of his favorite charioteer
put up in its place.
What on earth was going on?
Once more signs and symbols tell the story.
About the year 750
that same emperor who so hated holy images
restored this fine old church
Saint Irene's in Constantinople.
The plain cross was the measure of the man.
The pious emperor Constantine the Fifth
a single minded soldier.
Like other emperors and generals at the time
Constantine the Fifth believed that sacred
pictures were evil in the sight of God.
The church contains no other images.
We move in a dangerous and mysterious age.
Part of the dark mystery of iconoclasm was
actually solved a few years ago in the Vatican
library by the study of this old book.
Now this book
well it was clearly more than a thousand years old.
But the text in it was twice as old as that and more
This is called Ptolemy's Handy Tables
and it was written in ancient Alexandrian Egypt.
And it describes all the passages of the stars
and the sun and the moon through the sky.
What was so remarkable about this copy of
it was not simply its beauty
but also the fact that it
had been written at the height
of iconoclasm right at that burning beginning
when every image in the churches
were being destroyed.
Now the key of this book and the central
image of it is this beautiful plate in the front
And it shows you... it's a sort of a diagram
from the most ancient world of astrology.
There's the zodiac signs around the edge.
All those wonderful old signs all added
together to make a sort of cosmos.
And in the middle this iconoclast artist
has actually painted Apollo the sun god.
This is the ancient Greek world.
It revolves around the sun.
And there's Apollo in his chariot sailing
through the sky.
Isn't that extraordinary?
These pious emperors who think so deeply and so
hard about Christianity put Apollo in his
chariot at the center of the universe.
Why do you think they've done that?
The truth is of course
this man is interested in these old pagan values.
He's thinking of luck.
Charioteers
his favorite charioteers ran races and won
them in the center of Constantinople.
The charioteers brought
luck and victory to his city
And that's what these iconoclasts wanted.
They wanted a pure Christianity.
But they wanted that most ancient virtue luck.
In the great spasm of iconoclasm that passed
through Byzantium in the seven hundreds
the monasteries and nunneries along this lonely
coastline to the south of Constantinople sheltered
both artists and the holy images.
The battle for the icons
ebbed and flowed throughout
Byzantium like a summer storm.
But you know
those pictures never really left the people.
They were too much beloved
The monks really fought for them.
The monks of the great imperial
monasteries of Constantinople
the monks that lived here in this idyllic
land along the coast of Marmara
they died for those pictures.
There were icons too even in the royal palace.
The ordinary people liked them.
The people in the royal family liked them.
Constantine the Fifth's own son was married
to a girl from Athens
who's Irene
who kept icons in the palace.
Now Irene was an interesting lady.
She wanted the icons back.
And when her son finally became
emperor in his own right
she took him back to the room where he's been born
a room with shining porphyry
and had him blinded
and restored the pictures.
That terrible story of Irene
wasn't the end of the iconoclasm.
Fifty years later
they were still torturing people who liked pictures
A painter called Lazarus had his hands
forced down on sheets of red hot iron
to stop him painting.
And still
he got a paint brush in his crippled hand
and painted a new image of the Helke Christ
on the gate of the imperial palace.
And that as the people of the city knew
was the restoration of the pictures.
In the year 867
on the twenty-ninth of March
the patriarch of Constantinople
one Foteus dedicated the first pictorial
mosaic in the church of Saint Sofia
Beside it
in mosaic was a single sentence.
"These images that the heretics cast down
are being set up again by pious emperors
The iconoclasts had lost the century old debate.
Even in her image
Foteus tells us the Virgin graces and delights
she strengthens and she comforts us
Once again the holy pictures filled Byzantium
with their unearthly presence.
In Saint Sofia
images of Christ were placed up in the dome
and here above the church's central door
where only the emperor could enter.
Not the favorite Western image
the mortal Christ impaled in time upon a cross
but the old familiar figure
from the palace gate
Christ of all time and of all places
Christ lord of the cosmos.
Before this ancient image penitent emperors now
prostrate themselves in awe.
Not long ago
there was a better ending to this story.
Here in ancient walled city of Nicaea
close to Constantinople.
In the first years of Byzantium
Christian creed had been written in this pretty
little city and approved here too
by the first council of the church.
Over the following centuries
Nicaea had filled with little churches.
One of them a miniature Saint Sofia
decorated with mosaics that celebrated
the return of icons after the iconoclasm.
Now though
you can only see the glittering scenes in
old photographs... the triumphant angels
the exquisite Madonna drawn over
the shadow of the iconoclasts' plain cross.
All of this was blown away in the Greek
and Turkish wars of 1922.
And each side still blames the other.
How is it that people can show such tremendous
ferocity to such quiet beauty
to such passive images?
Well I think it depends upon the way
you look at pictures.
You see that Virgin who stood
here in the nave of this church
like the one in Saint Sofia
wasn't like a Western picture.
It wasn't just a picture of a woman
in a blue dress sitting on the chair
with a sacred baby.
It wasn't like a record of an event.
These pictures were actually intended to
actually take part of the identity of the Virgin
part of the eternal cosmic identity of the Virgin
something was there at the beginning of
time and there at the end of time.
And you had it in your church.
As every little icon every little picture
throughout the empire refracted these bits of
holiness throughout the empire.
The emperors didn't want that.
They wanted to gather all that dispersed holiness
around their own person in the city
along with the sacred relics inside their palace.
Just as they collected the taxes
so they wanted that power to themselves.
The Byzantines came from one of the most
ancient cultures of the Middle East.
The people wanted their images.
So the triumph of the pictures
you might say is really a compromise.
The emperor gets his sacredness
his divine power and his taxes in Byzantium.
And the people get their pictures.
The compromise is the most indelible aspect
of the Byzantine identity.
This is a picture of a procession carrying
an icon and it was made six centuries ago
in the last years of Byzantium.
It gives a precious glimpse of Constantinople's
most famous image of the Virgin Mary painted
it was believed from the life by Saint Luke himself
Underneath the sum of those who centuries before had fought
iconoclasm and found their way to paradise.
Saint Theodosia the virgin martyr
the abbots of the monasteries the artists...
they hold the pictures that they died for.
Pictures painted with such passion and precision
such blazing color such quiet power.
They say that on the last night of Byzantium
on the evening of Monday the
twenty-eighth of May in 1453
just hours before Constantinople fell to
armies of the Turks that the Virgin
came down into her city for the last time and took
her picture back to heaven