No history written afterwards at a distance of time could set forth these things with so great a force as the words of a Pope issued to the chief actor in a desperate struggle at the very beginning of the conflict. The immediate result is to be noted. In the year 730 the emperor, finding that he could not make Germanus, the nonagenarian patriarch of Constantinople, further his design in stripping the churches of their ornament, deposed him and put a compliant instrument in his stead, Anastasius, a priest and officer of the great Church, who held the see three and twenty years to the time of Leo’s son Kopronymus, with what effect and what ending will be afterwards seen. St. Gregory II. died in 731. In the four years which elapsed from the first letter to his death he was rewarded for it by the emperor Leo in five attempts to have him murdered. All these attempts were frustrated by the fidelity of those about the Pope, and by the awakened solicitude of the Italian people, who saw in Leo the most cruel and remorseless of tyrants, in Gregory not only the champion of their faith, but the defender of their temporal well-being, of every moral as well as religious liberty.(171) The Greek chronographer, Theophanes, the main part of whose life belongs to this same eighth century, calls Pope Gregory II. “the most holy apostolic man, the assessor(172) of Supreme Peter in his chair, conspicuous in word and deed”. His resistance to the rude soldier on the eastern throne won him great praise from the subjects of that throne. The rude soldier met him only with scorn and violence, as he met the murmuring of his people. Greece itself had taken arms in defence of its violated churches. Leo, by means of the Greek fire, destroyed the fleet of the insurgent Cyclades, and punished with the utmost severity his opponents in the capital. He carried on with greater violence the attack on the images. In many cases it passed on to the relics. The patriarch Germanus made one more attempt to persuade the emperor. He reminded the emperor of the oath taken at his coronation to maintain the faith of the Fathers. This brought matters to an open breach. St. John of Damascus attests that “the blessed Germanus, distinguished in his life and his words, was scourged and banished”. Another Greek historian, Cedrenus, adds that the emperor called him an idolater and struck with his own hands the patriarch of ninety years, who laid upon the altar of the great church the omophorion, the symbol of his rank, and departed into exile, with the words, “If I am Jonas, cast me into the sea, but I cannot touch the faith without a General Council be held”. Germanus had sat for fifteen years; St. John Chrysostom and he the noblest who ever sat on that perilous throne. He retired to his paternal house, and did not cease his courageous struggle against the Iconoclast. He died in most extreme old age, it is supposed in 740.