When Philip's letters reached Brussels, the iconoclasts or image-breakers were abroad.

Philip was ill at Segovia when he received accounts of the excesses of the image-breakers, and of the convention concluded with the heretics.

"It is to him," say M.M. Ampere and Haureau, "that we must refer the honor of the decision taken in 794 by the Council of Frankfort in the great dispute about images; a temperate decision which is as far removed from the infatuation of the image-worshippers as from the frenzy of the image-breakers."

But it was never known who the image-breakers were.

The controversy between the image-worshippers and the image-breakers, which distracted the East for more than a century (that is, from 726 to 840), did not, however, extend to the west of Europe.