This saying is often quoted in characterizing Byzantine Caesar-papism. But the letter does not fit the secular ideology of the iconoclastic emperors. However, in the heat of polemics, people are not always consistent. And in the eyes of the West, it was precisely for such ideas that all the Byzantine basileus were guilty. The accusation is typical.

Pope Gregory II condemns this royal arbitrariness and contradicts Leo, among other things, with the following crude arguments: "If you have not learned from the wise, then learn from the foolish. Go to school, and the children will teach you. If you speak disrespectfully about Christ and the Mother of God, then the children will throw blackboards at you."

The Pope's resistance to the heresy of the Emperor could not but raise all the steam of discontent with the Byzantine regime that had accumulated in Italy. Leo's increased taxes aroused acute discontent. And the Lombards, pressing from the north, took advantage of such moments to seize all of Italy, both Greek Ravenna and papal Rome.

With these data, the madness of the new heresy tore Italy away from Byzantium, both ecclesiastically and politically. The old heresies tore the East apart, and the new heresy helped the West to break away as well. The heresy of the Byzantine emperors was thus pernicious both politically and deeply responsible for the preparation of the division of the churches. The vassalage of the pope from Byzantium turned into vassalage from new patrons. The Lombard kings, who became Christians, soon made the Roman popes secular rulers.

Even before the first order of Leo III in 726 reached Rome, the Lombards had already taken Ravenna and other cities. And the Byzantine governors imposed heavy taxes on Southern Italy, and on the churches in particular. The Pope stood up for the burdened. But the Byzantine officials, considering him a state criminal under the circumstances, allowed a conspiracy to form for the murder of the pope. A new exarch, Paul, arrived from Byzantium to support the conspirators with instructions from the emperor to remove (?) Gregory II and bring in his place another. But the Romans united with the Lombards, surrounded Rome and did not allow the pope to be touched. The Venetian army, the population of Pentapolis, and all the Italians declared that they would withdraw from Byzantium if the exarch encroached on the pope. And Pope Gregory II himself had to calm down the uprising and managed to return to the line of loyalty. But zeal in favor of Constantinople did not cease. The Byzantine governor of Naples wanted to encroach on the life of the pope. The Romans killed him. The papal party also killed the Exarch Paul himself in Ravenna. And on the part of the Byzantines there followed a number of encroachments on the pope. Meanwhile, the Lombards occupied city after city. Again, the Pope urged the Romans not to be carried away by enmity, ne desisterent ab amore vel fide Romani imperii.

From this it can be seen how much the "defeatism" of the Romans, i.e. the union with the barbarian Lombards against Byzantium, contradicted their patriotic Roman feeling, and how much it was caused by the insane heresy of the emperors.

When the epistle of Patriarch Anastasius reached Gregory II, the epistle of Patriarch Anastasius, the pope rejected the epithet "brother and concelebrant" that Anastasius had attached to him, denounced Anastasius as a heresy, and wrote that he would excommunicate him if he did not return to Orthodoxy. Gregory II died in 731, and his successor, Gregory III, took the same firm line. At a council in Rome of 93 bishops, the pope decreed: "From now on, whoever seizes, destroys, or dishonors and desecrates the icons of the Savior, His Most-Pure Mother, the Most Honorable and Immaculate Virgin, or the Holy Apostles and other saints, let him be deprived of the Body and Blood of the Lord and be excommunicated from the church." But all the Pope's messages about this to the Emperor and the Patriarch were arrested on the way and were not allowed to reach the addressees. Similar letters were arrested, sent to various cities in Italy. The emperor decided to put an end to the resistance of Rome. In 732 a fleet was sent to Italy, but it was destroyed by a storm in the Adriatic. The embittered emperor imposed a large indemnity on Sicily and Calabria, including the "legacy of the apostles", i.e. on the possession of the Roman see.

But in addition to this internecine war with the Roman West, both state and material, the iconoclastic madness laid a solid foundation for centuries for the war of the Church, for the discord, struggle and disintegration of the Churches, Roman and Greek. Subconsciously, the dividing role of the national principle in the church was also manifested here. Until now, the ancient "Magna Graecia", i.e. the south of Italy (Puglia, Calabria, Sicily), where the Greeks lived and spoke their own Greek language at that time, as well as almost the entire Balkan Peninsula (Achaia, Epirus, Thessaly, Illyria, Macedonia, Dacia, Maesia, Dardania), according to the old imperial division, were considered provinces of the Western Roman Empire and therefore ecclesiastically belonged to the Roman Patriarchate. In them, however, church life according to the liturgical language, rites and customs flowed not along the Latin, but along the Greek channel. The Latin canon and the Latin rite were only just beginning to absorb the Greek rite in the far west, in the south of Italy. The farther to the East (in Achaia, Macedonia), the more insignificant was the influence of the Roman rite. But with the Greek language and the Greek liturgical rite, the Greeks of these regions considered themselves ecclesiastically loyal children of the Roman patriarch, the pope. Now this is supposed to end. Emperor Leo, in anger at the popes without a council, by his own authority redistributes the boundaries of the Patriarchates of Rome and Constantinople. He took by force the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the popes over this vast territory with hundreds of dioceses and bishops and subordinated it to the ecclesiastical, patriarchal authority of the Archbishop of Constantinople. The Patriarchs of Constantinople and all the Byzantines could not help but be carried away by the benefits of this national "victory" of theirs. And the Roman Church (the Pope) could not but treat this as uncanonical violence, the robbery of the "heritage – patrimony" of the Apostle Peter. It was this discord over power under Patriarch Photius (ninth century) that led to the sad division of the churches.

And the Roman popes, by this act of the Emperor Leo, as it were, threw themselves out of the boundaries of the finally renounced empire, broke away from its spirit and interests, and were pushed into the arms of the new Western "barbarians." The iconoclastic frenzy deepened the division between East and West.

Emperor Leo died on June 18, 741, after a glorious reign from a secular point of view and the strengthening of the power of his empire. And the church on the Sunday of Orthodoxy anathematized Leo in the following way: "To the first most evil iconoclast, and even more so to the Christ-fighter, to the evil beast, deceived by the two dogs of the Jews, to the demonic servant, to the God-hating warrior of the Church, to the torturer, and not to the king, to Leo the Isaurian and his false patriarch Anastasius, the persecutor of Christ's flock, and not to the shepherd, and to their mysteries — anathema!"

Constantine V (741-775)

The successor of all the policy of Leo was his son Constantine, who brought iconoclasm to the horrors of cruel persecution. A personality that is equally opposingly evaluated by secular Byzantines and ecclesiastical ones. Church historians attached to Constantine the nickname Copronymus (Κοπρωνυμος, Γnoetezny, i.e. in Church Slavonic namesake for pus, dung, feces), the chronicler Theophanes reports that he was so named because he was soiled in the very font of baptism. But it is more correct that the Orthodox called it so on other grounds. He was a maniacal lover of horses, tinkered with them, smeared himself with manure and assured his relatives and relatives that it was both pleasant and healthy. It was usually called Καβαλλινος - "Λoshadiny" - "Konstantin the Horseman", the church people only strengthened this nickname - "Dung".

Some historians praise Constantine to the skies for his victories and the rise in the economic well-being of the empire. But no one can deny his barbaric cruelty and sadism in religious persecution and his personal depravity. He was a homosexual, who ended his days in the worst putrid disease. Constantine's were attended (for the sake of the element of blasphemy) by his drinking companion from among the monks who had thrown themselves off, someone with the nickname της χαρας παπας — "the ancient father." Constantine's religious cynicism reached the point that it seemed that he was an enemy not of Orthodoxy, but of any religion. The chronicler relates: "The tsar reached such madness and maniacism that he ordered not to publicly call any of the saints of God a saint; spit on the relics they find, do not demand their intercession, for they can do nothing. In addition to this, the all-filthy impious man commanded: let no one call upon the intercession of Mary, for she can do nothing, and forbade her to be called the Mother of God. Holding a purse full of gold in his hand, and showing it to everyone, the king asked: What is the purse worth? They answered: it is expensive. Shaking out the gold, he asked again: what is it worth now? They answered: nothing. So Mary, said the emperor, not vouchsafed, the accursed one, even the name of the Mother of God, as long as she had Christ in her, was worthy of honor. And as soon as she gave birth to Christ, she is no different from other women. Have mercy on us from such blasphemy, O Lord!"