International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Oscar Prieto Dominguez
University of Salamanca, Departamento de Filología Clásica e Indoeuropeo, 
Salamanca, Spain; 
[e-mail]
Writing during the Iconoclasm: Literature as a Political Weapon
During the iconoclast controversy (730-843), Byzantine literature became scarcer and 
experienced a significant change in its character in such a way that it turned more political and 
developed a clearly combative function. In fact, the literature written in this period is mainly 
composed of texts referring to the crisis of the images and its fight. In the last few decades, research 
into the iconoclast conflict has received an especially productive attention. The major achievements 
in this sense illustrate how, why and in what manner the worship of images was persecuted. However, 
research has advanced very little in the study of its literature, a set of intriguing texts composed 
during that period of instability and controversy, which, owing to political prohibitions, often 
circulated clandestinely, but always with well-defined ideological and propagandistic objectives.
The progressive demographic explosion of Byzantine monasticism since the second half of the 7
th
c. and the increase in the number of noble, wealthy and well-educated individuals ordained as monks 
at the same time as Theodore Stoudite meant that the monastic culture flourished in all its splendour. 
Some intellectuals took advantage of the independence and serenity of monastic retreat to create an 
abundance of new literature, which intended to be a key element in the political evolution of the Empire. 
Their involvement in earthly events became more and more intense, their opposition to imperial power 
grew firmer and firmer, and, thanks to the new texts they were producing, more and more effective.
Beyond its theological and apologetic texts, the writing during the Iconoclasm is above all 
a writing about saints, whose lives were taken as pretexts for narrating history, creating a group 
identity and thus influence society. The attitude of these zealous heroes entailed fleeing, gaol and 
torture, but also solidarity among those persecuted and cohesion among those who found in their 
opposition to the iconoclastic imperial power a form of religious life that can only be compared 
to that of the first Christians. Assimilated in this way to the martyrs executed in the arenas by the 
pagan emperors, the new heroes of Orthodoxy, often simply confessors, were the ideal subject for 
a literature planned to be the perfect tools for bringing a monastic or social group into cohesion, 
creating an identity, and even entering politics.
According to Theodore Stoudite’s Epist. 499, devotion to saints required both texts and images 
to help with the Christian understanding of their virtues. In the promotion of this devotion for 

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those killed in the iconoclast persecution, we find a first ideological and political element that is 
then confirmed by the contents of the narratives created for that promotion. Thus, much of the 
literature of the iconoclast era was addressed to gathering proof that could support the holiness of 
the neo-martyrs in a liturgical context, show their real political agenda and denounce the insults 
made by the heretics. These texts were actually written down to acclaim these heroes, thus preserving 
them for posterity and proposing them as a model of public behaviour. Regardless of the form they 
take, these texts were the ones most loved by the public and also the most abundant, in a certain 
sense, the bestsellers of the Byzantine Empire. What is more, writing them and reading them were 
considered proof of holiness (Vita Georg. Amastr. 13-14), which made them an excellent vehicle 
for the transmission of iconodule ideology and the ideal socio-political weapon for the Resistance.