Theophilos was the Byzantine Emperor from 829 until his death in 842. He was the second emperor of the Amorian dynasty and the last emperor to support iconoclasm. Theophilos personally led the armies in his long war against the Arabs, beginning in 831.
Theophilus, in the Chronicle of John Skylitzes
Theophilos on a coin of his father, Michael II, founder of the Amorian/Phrygian dynasty
Emperor Theophilos argues with the iconophile monk Lazarus.
Theophilos ordering the urban prefect to execute his father's co-conspirators, who were involved in the murder of Leo V
The Byzantine Iconoclasm were two periods in the history of the Byzantine Empire when the use of religious images or icons was opposed by religious and imperial authorities within the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the temporal imperial hierarchy. The First Iconoclasm, as it is sometimes called, occurred between about 726 and 787, while the Second Iconoclasm occurred between 814 and 842. According to the traditional view, Byzantine Iconoclasm was started by a ban on religious images promulgated by the Byzantine Emperor Leo III the Isaurian, and continued under his successors. It was accompanied by widespread destruction of religious images and persecution of supporters of the veneration of images. The Papacy remained firmly in support of the use of religious images throughout the period, and the whole episode widened the growing divergence between the Byzantine and Carolingian traditions in what was still a unified European Church, as well as facilitating the reduction or removal of Byzantine political control over parts of the Italian Peninsula.
A simple cross: example of iconoclastic art in the Hagia Irene church in Istanbul
Byzantine Iconoclasm, Chludov Psalter, 9th century.
Argument about icons before the emperor, in the Skylitzis Chronicle
Patriarch Germanos I of Constantinople with icons supported by angels