acknowledged, however, even by Leo’s enemies, that he treated the bulk of the prisoners and the rebel theme with great mildness. Indeed, he seldom punished disobedience to his edict with death: stripes and imprisonment were the more frequent rewards of those whom the Iconodules styled heroes and confessors of the true faith. Leo was determined that his edict should be carried out, but he was not by nature a persecutor: it was as rioters or rebels, not as image-worshippers, that his enemies were punished, just as in the reign of Elizabeth of England the Jesuit suffered, not as a Papist, but as a traitor. Leo deposed the aged patriarch Germanus for refusing to work with him, but did him no further harm.[46] In general it was by promoting Iconoclasts, not by maltreating Iconodules, that he worked. Footnote 46: The stories of the sufferings of Germanus are late inventions of Iconodule writers. The last thirteen years of Leo’s reign (727-40) were on the whole a time of success for the emperor. He succeeded in getting his edict enforced over the greater part of the empire, in spite of some open and more secret resistance; only Italy defied him. From the reconquest of Rome he was kept back by the necessity of providing for the defence of the East, for in 726 the caliph Hisham—hearing no doubt of Leo’s domestic troubles—commenced once more to invade the Asiatic themes. [Sidenote: Wars with the Saracen.] In 727 a Saracen host pushed forward as far as Nicaea, where it was repelled and forced to retire. There were less formidable invasions in 730, 732, and 737-8, but none led to any serious loss, and the imperial boundary stood firmly fixed in the passes of the Taurus. The Saracen war practically ended with a great victory won by Leo in person at Acroinon, in the Anatolic theme, where an army of 20,000 Arab raiders was cut to pieces with the loss of all its chiefs. The house of the Ommeyad Caliphs was already verging towards its decline: it never again prepared any expedition approaching the strength of the great armament of Moslemah, which Leo had so effectually turned back in 718, and its later sovereigns were not of the type of those fanatical conquerors who had cut the boundaries of the empire short in the preceding century. Leo had effectually staved off any imminent danger to eastern Christendom from Moslem conquest for three full centuries. Leo was succeeded by his son Constantine, fifth of that name according to the usual reckoning, sixth if the grandson of Heraclius be given his true name, and not the erroneous title of Constans II. The second of the Isaurian emperors, however, is less known by the numeral affixed to his name than by the insulting epithet of Copronymus, which his Iconodulic enemies bestowed on him—showing thereby their own bad taste rather than any unworthiness on the part of their sovereign.