Athanasius II of Constantinople

Athanasius II was, according to later patriarchal catalogues, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in the middle of the fifteenth century, conventionally dated to about 1450–1453. He belongs to the last generation of churchmen associated with the Byzantine capital before its capture by the Ottomans. Almost nothing reliable is known of his origins, education, or early career. No contemporary source that can be securely dated and independently corroborated records his birthplace, family, or the year of his birth, and later notices do not fill those gaps. He should not be confused with the much better documented Athanasius I of Constantinople, the late-thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century patriarch and monastic reformer who is venerated as a saint. Athanasius II left no substantial body of writings that have come down under his name, and he is not the subject of a medieval Life or of a liturgical cult.

His reported elevation took place in a church and empire already fractured by the aftermath of the Council of Florence (1438–1439). That council had proclaimed union between the churches of Rome and Constantinople, a settlement accepted by Emperor John VIII Palaiologos and by a number of Greek prelates for political as well as theological reasons, but widely rejected by monks, much of the parish clergy, and large parts of the Constantinopolitan populace. Gregory III Mammas, a supporter of the union, held the patriarchal throne in the 1440s and became increasingly isolated; he left Constantinople for the West around 1450–1451 and spent his remaining years in Italy. Traditional lists place Athanasius II as Gregory’s successor and as the candidate of the anti-unionist party. Some reconstructions associate his appointment with a synod held in Constantinople in 1450, but the acts of any such synod are not preserved in a form that modern historians regard as beyond dispute, and the exact canonical status of the election remains uncertain. Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, who needed Western military aid against the Ottomans, continued to treat the Florentine union as imperial policy, which further complicated the standing of any anti-unionist patriarch in the capital.

The period of Athanasius II’s supposed tenure coincides with the final Ottoman siege and the fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453. After the conquest, Sultan Mehmed II reorganized the Christian community of the city under Ottoman rule and, in January 1454, installed Gennadius II Scholarius as patriarch. What became of Athanasius II at the moment of the conquest—whether he died, fled, resigned, or had already ceased to function as patriarch—is not established by any surviving eyewitness narrative. Contemporary Latin, Greek, and Ottoman accounts of 1453 that describe the siege, the emperor, and leading churchmen do not give a clear, consistent picture of a sitting patriarch named Athanasius in the last weeks of the empire. Because of that silence, a number of modern historians have treated his patriarchate as poorly attested or even as a later insertion into the official lists, while others continue to accept a short anti-unionist occupancy of the throne between Gregory III’s departure and the Ottoman reorganization of the church.

The documentary poverty surrounding Athanasius II is itself a historical fact. Fifteenth-century Constantinopolitan archives were disrupted by the siege and the change of regime; unionist and anti-unionist factions produced competing claims about who lawfully occupied the see; and later Orthodox chronological tables sometimes regularized a succession that had been, in practice, contested or vacant. No feast day, patronage, or formal canonization is attached to him in the standard Orthodox calendars, and there is no verified burial place. He remains a shadowy figure on the threshold between the Byzantine and Ottoman patriarchates: named in traditional lists as the last Ecumenical Patriarch of the independent Byzantine capital, yet so thinly recorded that even the basic dates of his life, the details of his earlier office if any, and his fate after 1453 cannot be stated with confidence.