Original subtitles

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