Many were the foes that the empire was assailed by. There were the Avars, a fierce Turkish people, from the northern European lands and the more dangerous. One of the tenets of the new Mohammedan faith was the worthiness of war against the unbeliever. The Moslem who died in fighting in the Holy War was guaranteed immediate entrance to a paradise, where he would live a life of luxury. In early days, Islam was not tolerant of other faiths. The unbelievers should be conquered and, once subject, they were allowed to follow any religion they pleased.
For the first time a Christian Emperor ascended to the throne in 324 A.D, the Emperor Constantine. The emperor was a sacred person, appointed by God to rule over man. He was crowned and anointed in solemn ceremonies and everything connected with him was holy. The emperor was to a great extent the ruler of the Church. He controlled the appointment of the Patriarch of Constantinople who was the head of the ecclesiastical organization. He summoned the councils of the Church and issued their decrees. While he might not actually claim the right to determine questions of dogma, by choosing the Patriarch he could direct the course of Orthodoxy. The emperor's power over the Church was not absolute. The people had support of the patriarch. Thus, we find strong emperors submitted to the Patriarch, especially in questions involving the ruler's personal life. During the entire second part of the fifth century, while no one was prepared to deny in principle the established authority of the emperor in religious affairs, in fact all the really convinced minorities of each theological group were eventually ready to challenge imperial will.
Like the State, the Church expanded, and like the state, it found expansion a source of weakness as well as strength. From the mid-fifth century the Church steadily converted the Empire. In this period the emperors from Leo I, to Phocas were devout, often to the point of religious asceticism and always showing deference to the churchmen they considered Orthodox.
The Byzantine Empire was ruled by two dynasties. The first, founded by Leo III, the Isaurian, was in power from 717 to 867. The second, called the Macedonian, ruled from 867 to 1057. Although the Isaurian and Macedonian emperors were obliged to devote most of their attention to their enemies in Eastern Europe and Asia, they could not neglect entirely their relations with Western Europe. Leo the Isaurian thought of himself as a Roman Emperor, and he held Venice, and parts of southern Italy. In the ninth century, the Byzantine Emperor Leo III, the Armenian (813-820), started a persecution against the cult of the orthodox icons. He was under the influence of the Islam religion and the persecution was known as iconoclasm (image breaking). Those that were opposed to this action, that produced great loss to the orthodox iconography, were the monks. Even though the Second Ecumenical Council held in Nicea (A.D. 787), considers the iconoclasm a heresy, the persecution did not cease. But there was commemoration of the first reestablishment of the cult of the icons, by Constantine V Copronymous (741-75). Nevertheless, the persecutions continued and Empress Theodora established on the day of 11 of March 842 the Feast of the Orthodoxy, as the final victory over the iconoclasts. Today this Feast is celebrated on the first day of the Great Lent.
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