Suggest an Edit — Nicholas II of Constantinople

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Biography

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Nicholas II Chrysoberges was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in the late tenth century, holding office during the reign of the Macedonian emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII. Surviving sources do not record his year or place of birth, nor do they preserve a detailed account of his family, education, or career before his elevation. He is known chiefly from patriarchal lists and later liturgical commemoration. Most modern reconstructions, following the conventional chronology of the see of Constantinople, date his patriarchate from December 984 until his death on 16 December 991. The epithet Chrysoberges is attached to him in the tradition of the patriarchal catalogues; its exact origin, whether a family name or a descriptive byname, is not explained in contemporary narrative histories.

His appointment came after a troubled interval in the government of the church of Constantinople. Patriarch Antony III Studites had left office around 979, and several years elapsed before Nicholas II was installed. The 980s were also a period of political strain in the empire: Basil II faced serious aristocratic revolts, notably that of Bardas Phokas, while the imperial government sought to reassert control over both the army and the great landholding families. As patriarch, Nicholas II stood at the head of the Byzantine Church during these years, but few of his synodal acts or letters survive, so his personal role in court politics and in the day-to-day administration of the patriarchate cannot be reconstructed in detail.

The event of widest historical consequence associated with his tenure is the conversion of Kievan Rus' to Christianity. In 988 Prince Vladimir I of Kiev accepted baptism, an act traditionally located at Chersonesus in the Crimea, and thereafter promoted the baptism of his people. Later East Slavic tradition holds that a metropolitan for Kiev, often named Michael, was sent from Constantinople in connection with this mission, and some accounts attribute the dispatch of that hierarch to Patriarch Nicholas II. Historians continue to debate the identity of the first metropolitan of Kiev and the precise year of the see's foundation, yet it is not in dispute that the canonical dependence of the new Rus' church on Constantinople began in this generation, during or immediately around Nicholas II's patriarchate. That development proved one of the most durable results of tenth-century Byzantine ecclesiastical diplomacy.

Nicholas II is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, which commemorates him on 16 December, the date given for his death. Like other occupants of the throne of Constantinople in this period, he belonged to the unmarried, customarily monastic clergy; no spouse or children are recorded. He died on 16 December 991 and was succeeded, after an interval, by Sisinnius II. Beyond the outline of his dates, the association with the baptism of Rus', and his later place in the Orthodox calendar, the documentary record is sparse. No substantial corpus of his writings has been preserved, and secular historians of the age mention him only briefly. He remains, therefore, a figure whose importance is chronological and institutional rather than biographical: a patriarch of Constantinople at the moment when Byzantine Christianity was planted among the East Slavs, remembered by the Church on the day of his death, but otherwise poorly documented in the surviving sources.

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