Nicholas Mystikos

Nicholas I Mystikos served as Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 901 to 907 and again from 912 until his death in 925, and he was one of the most politically consequential churchmen of the middle Byzantine period. He was born in 852. In his youth and early adulthood he belonged to the learned circle around Patriarch Photios I, to whom later tradition also links him by kinship. After Photios was deposed in 886, Nicholas lost imperial favor under Leo VI and withdrew into monastic life. Leo subsequently recalled him to court and appointed him mystikos, a confidential imperial secretary, an office that supplied the epithet Mystikos by which he is known. When Patriarch Antony II Kauleas died in 901, the emperor raised Nicholas to the patriarchal throne.

The crisis that defined his first tenure was the tetragamy, or fourth marriage, of Leo VI. The emperor, whose previous wives had not given him a surviving son, had a child, Constantine, by Zoe Karbonopsina in 905. Nicholas baptized the infant in Hagia Sophia but sought to prevent a fourth marriage, which contemporary canon law regarded as unlawful. Leo nonetheless married Zoe, and Nicholas responded by excluding the emperor from the Great Church. In February 907 Leo deposed Nicholas, confined him to the monastery of Galakrenai that Nicholas had founded, and installed the more accommodating Euthymios I as patriarch. The act split the clergy and laity into Nicholaite and Euthymian parties and opened a schism that outlasted Leo's reign.

Leo died in 912. His brother Alexander, now sole emperor, restored Nicholas and removed Euthymios. Alexander himself died in 913, leaving the young Constantine VII as emperor. Nicholas became the dominant member of the regency council and was forced to deal at once with Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria, who marched on Constantinople. In a famous encounter before the walls, Nicholas negotiated with Simeon and took part in a ceremony that Bulgarian and later accounts treated as a coronation of Simeon as emperor, while Byzantine reports, including Nicholas's own correspondence, present a more limited patriarchal blessing. The regency soon collapsed. In 914 the empress-mother Zoe Karbonopsina seized power and excluded Nicholas from secular government, though he continued as patriarch. After Romanos I Lekapenos took control of the palace in 919-920, Nicholas made his peace with the new regime. A synod in 920 issued the Tomos of Union, which forbade fourth marriages, regulated third marriages, and formally reconciled the Nicholaite and Euthymian factions.

Throughout his second patriarchate Nicholas was an energetic diplomat as well as a hierarch. His surviving letters, more than 150 in number, address Bulgarian rulers, Arab governors, the pope in Rome, and Byzantine officials, and they remain a principal source for the political and ecclesiastical history of the early tenth century. He died on 15 May 925 and was buried at his monastery of Galakrenai near Constantinople. A monk by vocation and a patriarch by office, he is remembered in historical literature as a statesman, canonist, and letter-writer rather than as a saint with a widely observed cult.