787, the Icons and the Empire in Exile

The seventh ecumenical council met at Nicaea in 787 to end the first period of iconoclasm, and it did so by drawing a distinction that has governed Orthodox practice ever since: veneration may be offered to images, worship belongs to God alone, and the honour paid to an image passes to the one it depicts. The council was convened by the empress Irene and the patriarch Tarasios after a first attempt in Constantinople had been broken up by soldiers, which is why it moved across the water to Nicaea. Its acts were rejected in the Frankish west, where a poor Latin translation made the council appear to authorise the worship of images, and the resulting Libri Carolini set out a position that was neither iconoclast nor Byzantine.

Iconoclasm returned in the ninth century and was ended for good in 843, a date the Orthodox churches still keep as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Nicaea itself had a second political life after 1204, when crusaders took Constantinople and the Byzantine court, the patriarchate and the imperial title relocated to the town, which served as the capital of a government in exile until the city was recovered in 1261. The Ottoman period gave it a third identity, as the centre of the tile industry whose blue and red wares are still called by its modern name.