In Eastern funeral customs, the dead were treated as they had been in life. From high-ranking nobles and imperial mausoleums to ordinary commoners, anyone who could afford a coffin would often have many burial goods.
Even in peaceful times, there were people who robbed graves. The magnificent structures above imperial tombs were meant for the tomb keepers. So long as the dynasty endured and descendants remained, there would generally not be grave robbers like Cao Cao, Wen Tao, and Sun Dianying during chaotic times, using armies and explosives to plunder tombs.
To Easterners, ancestral graves were inviolable, especially when someone dug up another person's ancestral tomb without the consent of the deceased's living relatives. Missionaries in the late Qing period encountered this sort of situation. They had thought those graves could be excavated whenever they wished, like Egypt's Valley of the Kings.
If Easterners obtained emergency funds from the dead, then the Romans obtained emergency funds from the Church. During the French Revolution, neighbors such as Britain, Austria, and Spain invaded France together, intending to turn France into a second Burgundy. The Church in France's property was sold off. Part of the money was used for disaster relief, while another part went toward soldiers' pay, military supplies, and grain requisitions, funding the Great Patriotic War against the invasion.
Leo III of the Byzantine Empire had launched the iconoclastic movement in the eighth century. For ordinary believers with little education, it was difficult to make them understand transubstantiation, while venerating saints' remains was much easier to grasp. For example, Bernadette's body had remained completely uncorrupted for over a hundred years. That was a miracle.
Taking advantage of the destruction of holy images, Leo III suppressed the luxurious Church, seized its lands and property, and forced some monks to return to secular