During the seventh century, an influx of both Byzantine officials and churchmen from elsewhere in the empire made both the local lay aristocracy and Church leadership largely Greek-speaking. However, the strong Byzantine cultural influence did not always lead to political harmony between Rome and Constantinople. In the controversy over Monothelitism, popes found themselves under severe pressure (sometimes amounting to physical force) when they failed to keep in step with Constantinople’s shifting theological positions. In 653, Pope Martin I was deported to Constantinople and, after a show trial, exiled to the Crimea, where he died.
Then, in 663, Rome had its first imperial visit for two centuries, by Constans II - its worst disaster since the Gothic Wars when the emperor proceeded to strip Rome of metal, including from buildings and statues, to provide materials for armaments to use against the Saracens. However, for the next half-century, despite further tensions, Rome and the Papacy continued to prefer continued Byzantine rule – in part because the alternative was Lombard rule, and in part because Rome’s food was largely coming from Papal estates elsewhere in the Empire, particularly Sicily.
However, in 727, Pope Gregory II refused to accept the decrees of Emperor Leo III, establishing iconoclasm. Leo proceeded, unsuccessfully, to impose iconoclasm on Rome by military force and then confiscated the Papal estates in Sicily and transferred areas previously ecclesiastically under the Pope but still under Byzantine control to the Patriarch of Constantinople. In effect, Rome had been expelled from the Byzantine Empire.
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