The Exiles and Floggings

The sufferings of Theodore under Leo V: the exile of 815 to Metopa in Bithynia, the transfer to the remote fortress of Boneta (816), and the move to Smyrna (c. 819); the scourgings, the near-starvation, and the brushes with death that the Studite vitae report; Theodore’s endurance through it all; and his release in 821 after the murder of Leo V — followed by years under Michael II that ended the active persecution without restoring the icons.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

A Note on the Sources

Much of what we know of Theodore’s exiles comes from the Studite vitae — the Lives written by his disciples after his death — and from the synaxaria, sources that are hagiographical in purpose and that present his sufferings as a martyrology of confession. Following this collection’s discipline (METHODOLOGY §3.5), the scourgings, the near-deaths, and the wonders are reported here as what those sources attest, pinned to them and not certified as bare historical fact; the chronology and the places of exile, however, are corroborated by the modern scholarship (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 230–270; Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 152–185). Pope Benedict XVI’s summary catches the shape of it: “Between 815 and 821, Theodore was scourged, imprisoned and exiled to various places in Asia Minor” (Benedict XVI, General Audience, 27 May 2009).

The First Exile: Metopa (815)

Within weeks of the Palm Sunday procession and his defiance of the emperor (see The Renewed Persecution of 815), Theodore was arrested and exiled. He was sent in 815 to Metopa, a fortress on the eastern shore of Lake Apollonia (Lake Apolyont) in Bithynia (Pratsch, pp. 230–245; OCA, Lives of the Saints, 11 November). [Corrected: some popular accounts place this first exile in “Illyria”; the scholarship locates Metopa in Bithynia, in Asia Minor, not the Balkans.] From Metopa, and from each later place of confinement, Theodore did not fall silent: he kept up a stream of letters to the scattered iconodules, sustaining the resistance from captivity (see The Letters from Exile).

Boneta (816) and the Scourgings

Because the exile did not silence him, the regime moved Theodore in 816 to a harsher and more remote place — the fortress of Boneta (Bonita) in the Anatolic theme of Asia Minor (Pratsch, pp. 245–260). Here, by the vitae, the persecution turned bodily. When Theodore continued to write and to encourage resistance, orders came for him to be flogged; an initial order was refused by his guards, who could not bring themselves to beat the old monk, but after he had written to Pope Paschal I (c. 817; see Rome and the Pentarchy) a later order was carried out, leaving him gravely ill (Pratsch, pp. 245–265; OCA, 11 November). The Lives describe him at Boneta as brought near to death — “deprived almost of food and drink, covered over with sores and barely alive” — and his disciple and fellow-prisoner Nicholas tending and sharing his sufferings (the vitae; reported as the tradition attests). [Disputed: the synaxaria’s specific figure of “a hundred lashes” is a hagiographic detail not found in the scholarly accounts, which speak of severe flogging without a fixed number.] Through it all Theodore endured, and — the tradition is insistent on this — did not waver in the confession nor cease to direct the resistance by letter.

Smyrna (c. 819)

About 819 Theodore was moved again, to Smyrna, on the Aegean coast, into the custody of an iconoclast bishop, where the hard usage continued (Pratsch, pp. 260–270; OCA, 11 November; some accounts give only “after 817” for the move). By now he had spent some four years in exile across three places, beaten, starved, and repeatedly near death, and he was an old man — past sixty when the second iconoclasm began. The endurance the sources celebrate is not a literary flourish but the plain fact of a frail, aging monk who would not yield through years of deliberate cruelty, and who turned each prison into a command post for the iconodule cause.

Release and the Reign of Michael II (821–826)

Theodore’s release came not from a change of imperial heart but from a change of emperor. Leo V was assassinated on 25 December 820, struck down in the palace chapel during the Christmas service, and his successor Michael II (the Amorian) — to consolidate his throne — freed the imprisoned and exiled confessors early in 821 (Pratsch, pp. 270–285; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Michael II”). But the relief was partial. Michael II ended the active persecution of the iconodules; he did not restore the veneration of the icons, holding instead to a policy of enforced silence on the question, forbidding both the destruction and the public veneration of images and favoring the iconoclast party in practice (Pratsch, pp. 270–290). Theodore was therefore freed but not vindicated: he could leave his prison, but he was not permitted to resume his abbacy at the Stoudios, and the icons remained officially in eclipse.

Theodore did not, in the event, return permanently to the Stoudios. He came back to the region of Constantinople but settled with his monks across the water — by the OCA’s account on the promontory of Akritas, near the church of the Martyr Tryphon, in Bithynia — continuing the resistance and the correspondence, and pressing Michael II to a restoration that would not come in his lifetime (Pratsch, pp. 285–310; OCA, 11 November). He would die there in 826, seventeen years before the cause he had suffered for finally triumphed (see Repose and the Triumph of Orthodoxy). The exiles and floggings are the reason the Church numbers Theodore among the Confessors — those who suffered for the faith short of death — and the reason his name carries that title to this day.

The Conditions of Byzantine Monastic Exile

To grasp what Theodore endured it helps to understand the institution that held him. Byzantine penal exile for an offending churchman was not a single sentence but a sliding scale of severity, and the regime moved Theodore up that scale as he refused to be silenced. Its instruments were the fortress-prisons of Asia Minor — strongholds like Metopa on its lake-shore and Boneta in the Anatolic theme — chosen for their remoteness, where a prisoner could be held under the eye of a local commander far from the capital, his contacts harder to maintain and his sufferings less visible (Pratsch, Theodoros Studites, 1998, pp. 230–270; Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, 2007, pp. 350–400). Conditions depended heavily on the guards and on the local authority into whose custody the prisoner was given: a sympathetic warden might soften the regime, a hostile one tighten it. The vitae preserve a telling instance — that at Boneta the guards detailed to flog the old monk at first refused the order, unable to bring themselves to it, so that the beating was carried out only on a later and sterner command (the Studite vitae; Pratsch, pp. 245–265). The detail, reported as the tradition attests it, captures the human texture of Byzantine imprisonment: the prisoner’s fate ran through the consciences of his keepers as much as through the will of the distant emperor.

Theodore did not bear this alone. His disciple Nicholas of Stoudios shared his captivity, by the vitae tending him through the floggings and the near-starvation at Boneta and serving as his hands when his own were failing — copying letters, carrying messages, nursing his wounds (the vitae, reported as the tradition attests; Pratsch, pp. 245–265). The presence of a fellow-prisoner-disciple was itself part of how the exile worked: the regime could isolate the abbot geographically, but it could not wholly cut him off from the obedience he had formed, and the bond between Theodore and Nicholas — confessor and confessor — turned the prison cell into a fragment of the monastery it could not extinguish. Nicholas is honored by the Church as a confessor in his own right for this fidelity.

Theodore Among the Confessors

The Church titles Theodore the Confessor, and the title is precise. In the patristic vocabulary a confessor (homologetes) is one who suffers for the faith — imprisonment, torture, exile, the loss of office and health — but does not die under it, as distinct from the martyr (martys) who seals the confession with his blood (Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 1991, s.vv. “Confessor,” “Martyr”). The category is ancient: it honored those who endured the persecutions and lived, and it carried its own dignity, second only to martyrdom and sometimes, in the early Church, conferring a recognized authority. Theodore belongs to it exactly. He was scourged near to death but not killed; he lost his abbacy, his freedom, and his health, and died in his bed seventeen years before the cause triumphed — the very pattern the title names.

He stands, moreover, in a specific company: the iconodule confessors of the two iconoclasms, the line of those who suffered for the images short of death. His own brother Joseph of Thessalonica, the deposed Patriarch Nikephoros, his disciple Nicholas, and the scattered Studite monks belong to it with him (see The Resistance). Behind them stands the greater Confessor whose pattern Theodore consciously echoed — St. Maximus the Confessor, exiled and maimed for resisting an emperor over dogma a century and a half before (see St. Maximus the Confessor). To name Theodore a Confessor is therefore not a vague honorific but a placement: it sets him in the apostolic succession of suffering witness that the Orthodox tradition holds up beside the martyrs, and it marks the exiles and floggings as the substance of his sanctity rather than its background.

The Pressure That Failed: The Years Under Michael II

Freedom in 821 did not bring vindication, and the years that followed were a second, quieter struggle — to convert Michael II’s neutrality into a restoration. Michael had ended the active persecution to consolidate his throne, but he held the icons in a deliberate official silence, forbidding both their destruction and their public veneration and leaving the iconoclast party entrenched in the hierarchy (Pratsch, pp. 270–290; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 1991, s.v. “Michael II”). Theodore, settled with his monks across the water at Cape Akritas near the church of the Martyr Tryphon (OCA, Lives of the Saints, 11 November), turned his correspondence to pressing the new emperor toward a council and a full restoration. He wrote to Michael, and continued to write outward — to Rome and to fellow confessors — keeping the question open and refusing to accept enforced silence as a settlement (Pratsch, pp. 285–310; see The Letters from Exile). The pressure failed in his lifetime: Michael would not reopen the question, and the icons remained officially in eclipse when Theodore died in 826. The restoration came only in 843, under the Empress Theodora and the Patriarch Methodios — the Triumph of Orthodoxy — vindicating posthumously the confession Theodore had sustained through exile and refused to abandon under Michael’s blandishments (see Repose and the Triumph of Orthodoxy).

References

Pratsch, Thomas. Theodoros Studites (759–826) — zwischen Dogma und Pragma. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998. (The chronology of the exiles: Metopa 815, Boneta 816, Smyrna c. 819, release 821, the years under Michael II.)
Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (On the exile years and the confession.)
Benedict XVI. General Audience, 27 May 2009 (on St. Theodore the Studite) — for the summary of the scourging, imprisonment, and exile 815–821.
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.vv. “Leo V,” “Michael II,” “Theodore of Stoudios.”)
Venerable Theodore the Confessor and Abbot of the Studion. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, 11 November and 26 January. (The places of exile, the floggings, the role of Nicholas of Stoudios, and the settlement at Akritas, as the tradition attests them.)
Hatlie, Peter. The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca. 350–850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. (On the institutions of monastic exile and the fortress-prisons of Asia Minor.)