Of late--that is to say, during the greater part of the mayoralty of Charles Martel--the antagonism between pope and emperor had been increased by the dispute about the worship of images. In 726 Leo III. the great Isaurian emperor who had successfully repelled the Saracens from the walls of Constantinople, put forth his edicts for the destruction of the sacred images throughout the empire. These decrees, which roused some of the Greeks to actual insurrection, were met by sullen disobedience on the part of the Italians. The authority of the Exarch of Ravenna was set at naught; the local government was vested in dukes chosen by the enraged image-worshippers; it seemed as though the empire would utterly lose even the vestiges of its dominion in Italy. But at this crisis the pope (Gregory II.), though he had been in strong opposition to the emperor, and had sharply denounced his iconoclastic edicts, restrained the Italians from actual revolt and from the election of a counter-emperor, “hoping for the conversion of the sovereign.” It is difficult to say how the matter ended. Apparently the decrees were not enforced in Italy, nor did the movement of insurrection gather head. The exarch still ruled in Ravenna; the pope still considered himself the subject of the eastern emperor; but there was no cordiality between them, and more and more the popes looked across the Alps to the new Austrasian potentate, rather than to the old Augustus by the Bosphorus, for defence, patronage, and endowment. The question of the pope’s position is somewhat complicated by the fact that he was probably the largest landowner in Italy. The “Patrimony of St. Peter,” as it was called, comprised great estates in the Campagna, in Samnium, on the Adriatic coast, besides a considerable portion of Sicily. Any estimate of their extent and value can be only guess-work, but it is conjectured that in the time of Gregory the Great they would, if all massed together, have formed a district as large as Lancashire,[27] and that the yearly revenue derived from them amounted to £420,000. It is to be observed that we are here dealing not with sovereignty but with ownership, and that the wide domains thus actually owned by the Bishop of Rome had probably been increased rather than diminished in the century and a half that had elapsed since the death of Gregory.