Jeremias I of Constantinople

Jeremias I served as Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 1522 until his death in 1546, with a brief interruption in 1524–1525. He was born in the village of Zitsa in Epirus, then under Ottoman rule. The precise year of his birth is not recorded in the surviving sources, nor are the names of his parents. He entered the monastic life, as was required of men raised to the episcopate in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and later became Metropolitan of Sofia. In 1522 the synod in Constantinople elected him to the ecumenical throne in succession to Patriarch Theoleptos I. The patriarchate at that date was both the senior see of Eastern Orthodoxy and the head of the Orthodox Christian community (the Rum millet) within the Ottoman Empire, so its occupant had to balance canonical duty with negotiation at the Porte.

In 1524, while Jeremias was absent from the capital on a long pastoral journey that took him to Cyprus, Egypt, and the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai, a faction in Constantinople raised Joannicius of Sozopolis to the patriarchate. The installation was irregular. Jeremias went to Jerusalem, where a synod held with other Eastern patriarchs condemned the intrusion, excommunicated Joannicius, and recognized Jeremias as the legitimate patriarch. He was restored to Constantinople in 1525 and thereafter retained the office until the end of his life. The episode shows both how vulnerable the sixteenth-century patriarchate was to internal rivalry and how the other ancient patriarchates could still be invoked to judge a disputed succession.

In the years after his restoration Jeremias I gave particular attention to Mount Athos and to the legal position of the Church under the sultans. In the 1530s he backed the restoration of the Monastery of Stavronikita, which had fallen into ruin; with patriarchal support it was re-established and came to be counted among the twenty ruling monasteries of the Athonite hierarchy. He also travelled extensively through the Balkan and other dioceses of the patriarchate in order to supervise bishops, collect alms, and keep scattered Orthodox communities in communion. Much of his reign was spent on such journeys rather than in continuous residence at Constantinople.

Jeremias I died on 13 January 1546 at Vratsa, in the Bulgarian lands of the Ottoman Empire, while travelling among the European eparchies. He is not to be confused with the later Patriarch Jeremias II Tranos, who occupied the same throne in the last decades of the sixteenth century and is far more fully documented in diplomatic and theological sources. Evidence for Jeremias I himself is relatively thin outside lists of patriarchal succession, Athonite records connected with Stavronikita, and accounts of the 1524–1525 deposition. Within those limits he is remembered as a monk-patriarch who survived an illegal usurpation, helped restore an Athonite house, and spent a large part of his long tenure on the road among the churches of the Ottoman Orthodox world.