Nephon I of Constantinople

Nephon I (Greek: Nēphōn) was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 1310 to 1314, in the reign of Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos. Surviving notices of his origin place him in Epirus, in the northwest of the Greek world, a region that in the thirteenth century formed the heart of the Despotate of Epirus and stood only partly under restored Byzantine control. Nothing reliable is known of his birth date, family, or education. He enters the historical record as a monk who had already risen to the metropolitan see of Cyzicus (Kyzikos) on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara, one of the senior bishoprics of the church of Constantinople, before his election to the patriarchate.

He was installed as patriarch in 1310, succeeding Athanasius I, whose second tenure had ended the previous year. The church he inherited remained divided by the Arsenite schism, which had opened in 1265 when Michael VIII Palaiologos deposed Patriarch Arsenios Autoreianos after Arsenios excommunicated the emperor for the blinding of the young John IV Laskaris. For some forty-five years the Arsenites refused to recognize later patriarchs and constituted a lasting ecclesiastical and political opposition within the empire, with support in monasteries and at times at court. Andronikos II, who had already repudiated his father’s union with Rome, sought to close this internal rift.

Nephon’s chief recorded achievement was the reconciliation of the Arsenites, carried through in Constantinople in September 1310. Accounts of the settlement associate it with a public ceremony of reunion around the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on 14 September, in which the schismatics were received back into communion and honors were paid to the memory of Arsenios, whose deposition had become a symbol of resistance to Michael VIII’s usurpation and to the Union of Lyons. The end of the schism removed a long-standing source of faction in the Palaiologan church and in the monastic world, including on Mount Athos, and is the event for which Nephon’s short patriarchate is principally remembered.

His tenure did not last. In 1314 he was deposed. Later Byzantine narrative tradition charges him with simony and with the misuse of church resources, including favor to relatives. Such accusations were common in the politicized Palaiologan patriarchate and cannot be independently weighed, but they were sufficient to force his removal in April of that year. He was succeeded, after a brief interval, by John XIII Glykys. The date, place, and circumstances of Nephon’s death are not securely recorded, nor is his burial place. He was not numbered among the saints of the Orthodox Church (unlike the later patriarch Nephon II). The evidence for his life remains thin and is confined almost entirely to his four years on the throne of Constantinople and to the settlement of the Arsenite controversy that opened his patriarchate.