Historians call the struggle over the images of Jesus, Mary, and other holy figures in the Byzantine Empire the Byzantine Iconoclasm or Iconoclast Controversy (in Greek Eiconomachia, war on icons). This was a period of conflict during the 8th and 9th century within the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church in the Byzantine Empire between the iconodules, those who veneer religious images of Jesus, Mary, and saints, and iconoclasts, those who oppose the veneration of images in religion because they claim it tends to idolatry. Iconoclast comes from the Greek, which means image-breaker, because during this conflict many iconoclasts destroyed religious images such as paintings and sculptures that represented Jesus, Mary, and saints.
