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Biography

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Saint Nicephorus (Nikephoros) I was Patriarch of Constantinople in the early ninth century and one of the principal ecclesiastical opponents of the second wave of Byzantine iconoclasm. He was born in Constantinople in the mid-eighth century, conventionally dated around 758, into a family of court officials. His father, Theodore, served as a notary in the imperial chancery and was punished under the iconoclast emperor Constantine V for refusing to abandon the veneration of images; Theodore was flogged, deprived of office, and died in exile. His mother was named Eudokia. Raised in the capital amid the religious conflict over icons, Nicephorus received a strong education in both secular letters and theology and entered imperial service as an asekretis, or secretarial official, following his father’s profession.

He took part in the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which restored the veneration of icons, appearing in connection with the imperial administration rather than as a bishop. After the council, and during the unsettled years of Irene and Constantine VI, he withdrew from court. He founded a monastery on the eastern, Asiatic shore of the Bosporus and lived there in ascetic retirement and study, though he remained unordained. In 806 Emperor Nikephoros I named him Patriarch of Constantinople in succession to Tarasios. Because he was still a layman, he was advanced through the degrees of ordination in a matter of days. That irregularity, together with his willingness to apply ecclesiastical economy to the so-called Moechian controversy (the irregular second marriage of Constantine VI), provoked lasting opposition from the monks of the Stoudios monastery under Theodore the Studite.

His patriarchate coincided with the last years of the restored iconodule settlement. When Leo V the Armenian revived imperial iconoclasm in 814–815, Nicephorus refused to give synodal or patriarchal sanction to the new policy. He was deposed in 815, replaced by the iconoclast patriarch Theodotos I, and sent into confinement and exile, spending his remaining years chiefly at the monastery he had founded, often identified as the monastery of Saint Theodore on the Bosporus. From exile he continued to argue for icons on christological and traditional grounds. His chief theological writings include the Apologeticus maior and the three Antirrhetici against iconoclasm. He was also a historian: his Historia syntomos (Breviarium) narrates events from the death of Emperor Maurice in 602 into the eighth century, and he compiled a Chronographikon syntomon. These works remain important sources for seventh- and eighth-century Byzantine history.

Nicephorus died in exile in 828. After the Triumph of Orthodoxy and the final restoration of icons, Patriarch Methodius I had his relics translated in 847 to the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, an act that publicly established his cult as a confessor. The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him on 13 March, the day of the translation of his relics, and on 2 June, associated with his repose. He is remembered as a patriarch, monastic founder, polemicist, and chronicler rather than as the patron of a particular place, trade, or illness. Surviving evidence does not record a wife or children; his public life after his withdrawal from the chancery was that of an ascetic and, after 806, of a bishop bound to celibacy.

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