Pope Gregory III
Upon the election of Pope Gregory III as the Bishop of Rome in February 731, he wrote a series of letters to the Iconoclast Byzantine Emperor Leo III, expressing his condemnation of the practice of Iconoclasm and the persecution of the traditional venerators of religious images in the east. Gregory handed the letters to an envoy, a priest named George, with orders to deliver them to the eastern emperor directly. However, upon reaching Constantinople, George was afraid of incurring the emperor’s wrath, and so he returned to Rome without having delivered the letters.