This book sets out to resolve a problem related to the church council held at the palace of Hiereia just outside Constantinople in 754, which established iconoclasm as official policy within the Byzantine Empire. Its acts were condemned and destroyed twenty-four years later. Only its definition of iconoclast faith, Horos, survived when it was denounced as heresy, so there is no record of its deliberations or the 338 bishops who are reported to have participated. Now Ivan Basić has investigated a reference in the twelfth-century Chronicle of Michael the Syrian, who relied on much earlier eighth-century writers, which records the participation of bishops from Dalmatia and other peripheral regions of the empire in the council of 754. For a long time this had been noted but never fully explained. Basić has tested the reliability of the Chronicle by reconstructing what is known about the bishops based on the Adriatic coastlands in the mid- to late eighth century. In this way he has made an extremely valuable contribution to the history of early Christendom.

In eight short chapters he discusses the text of Michael the Syrian; what is known about the council of 754; Notitia 3 as a historical source; Dalmatia's position in it; the Ionian islands and ecclesiastical continuity; and whether there are one or more Dalmatias. A bibliography with many little-known studies in Croatian and an index complete the work. Within the broader framework of iconoclast studies, his detailed examination of a series of documents, not normally considered together, in particular the so-called iconoclast Notitia 3, elucidates the ecclesiastical and administrative structures of that period. Notitiae episcopatuum, lists of bishoprics based on civilian notitiae dignitatum, were headed by the pentarchy of five major sees – Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem – followed by autocephalous archbishops, such as Cyprus, and then metropolitan sees, each with their own suffragan bishops. The metropolitans were always listed according to their rank in the hierarchy. Thus, the see of Caesarea in Cappadocia occupied the most honoured, first position and its bishop received a higher salary than the rest, followed by Ephesos, Ankyra, Thessalonike, Sardis and so on down to the most recently created, which usually commanded a much lower salary. This structure also governed the order in which ecclesiastical representatives signed the acts of the universal councils, which are usually dated to the very day.

Although the Notitiae episcopatuum constitute a critical record of the expansion of the eastern Church, they are not dated. And Notitia 3 remains very perplexing, as it records a larger number of cities with bishops and mixes up the suffragans of several major sees. For this reason it has also been identified as a civilian list of cities ranked according to imperial provinces, familiar from late Roman records (descriptio orbis terrarum), rather than an ecclesiastical one. Basić investigates the character and dating of this list and concludes that it reflects the situation of sees subject to Constantinople in the late eighth century, at the time of Patriarch Tarasios, with additional material which is not very well integrated. Notitia 3 can therefore be used to elucidate Michael the Syrian's reference to bishops from Dalmatia, Hellas, Cilicia and Sicily who attended the iconoclast council of 754.

In a very careful piece of detective work, Basić has re-examined this Notitia, with all its confusions, in the light of geographical, historical, literary and provincial administrative records pertaining to Dalmatia and other peripheral areas of the empire. He notes the existence of several well-established metropolitan sees along the eastern Adriatic coast (Palaia Epeiros/Nikopolis, Epeiros I/Dyrrachion, Peloponnesos/Corinth) and those of Sikelia/Syracuse, Kalabria/Rhegion, Hellas/Athens, whose bishops could well have participated in the council. He also shows how the suffragan bishops of Corinth have been transferred to an entirely fictitious see of Kephalia-Delmatia, probably connected with a duplicate entry for Epeiros I, which lists Kephalenia as its metropolitan see. The absence of Cilicia, which had always belonged to the patriarchate of Antioch, stems from the lack of imperial control over the area, which had been conquered by the Arabs.

Although Rome claimed authority over ecclesiastical sees in the Adriatic regions, there is no mention of the council of 754 in the Roman Book of the pontiffs until 769, when it was condemned. But Rome continued to exercise some control over those bishoprics that survived Slavic invasions in the seventh centuries, while Constantinople tried to sustain their political loyalty. This mixed legacy can be traced in the late sixth-century correspondence of Pope Gregory i, references in other Greek and Latin sources and the elevation of Kephalenia to be the capital of a new imperial administrative region (thema), followed later by Dyrrachion. Both cities played a critical role in sustaining Constantinople's influence in western Greece and the Adriatic during the eighth century and their bishops were later elevated to metropolitan status. From additional sources such as the seals of imperial officials, the author concludes that the concept of Dalmatia appears to have corresponded to today's Albania and north-west Greece in an uninterrupted though contaminated geographical tradition that survived into the early Middle Ages. He emphasises that this type of inherited knowledge is often a ‘symbolic geography’ rather than a reality based on actual medieval political or administrative structures.

Ivan Basić's study adds very important evidence to the history of iconoclasm, to the development of the new provincial government (the system of themata instituted in the late eighth and early ninth centuries), to the geography of early medieval Dalmatia, the Adriatic coastlands and Ionian islands, systems of communication (routes used by armies, diplomats, traders and pilgrims) and the connections between the imperial centre, Constantinople, and its provinces. In an extremely well-focused analysis of a specific area, he illuminates and enhances our knowledge of many more general issues occluded in the destruction of iconoclast material by the victorious icon venerators after 787.