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Biography

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Theophanes the Confessor was a Byzantine aristocrat, abbot, and chronicler of the eighth and early ninth centuries, commemorated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. He was born in Constantinople to a senatorial family; his father Isaac held high office and died while Theophanes was still a child, and his mother was named Theodote. The orphaned heir was raised in proximity to the imperial court of Constantine V. In keeping with his rank he was married young to Megalo, daughter of a patrician. Near-contemporary accounts, including the tradition of his Life, state that the couple lived in continence by mutual consent and later separated to enter the monastic state. An exact year of birth is not securely attested; sources only allow an approximate placement in the mid-eighth century.

After Megalo became a nun, Theophanes used his inherited property to found religious houses. He first established a monastery on the island of Kalonymos in the Propontis (Sea of Marmara) and afterward founded and governed the monastery of Megas Agros (the Great Field) on Mount Sigriane in the hinterland of Cyzicus in northwestern Asia Minor. As abbot he was remembered for ascetic discipline, hospitality, and the copying of books. He was a friend of the chronicler George Syncellus, who before his death asked Theophanes to continue an unfinished universal chronicle.

When Emperor Leo V the Armenian revived official iconoclasm in the second decade of the ninth century, Theophanes was summoned to Constantinople and pressed to reject the veneration of icons and to communicate with the iconoclast hierarchy. He refused. He was imprisoned and then banished to the island of Samothrace, where he died in exile; the date traditionally assigned is 12 March 818, though some older reference works give 817. Because he suffered for the iconophile cause without being put to death, the Church honors him as a confessor rather than a martyr. His remains were later translated from Samothrace to Megas Agros.

Theophanes is of lasting importance as the author of the Chronographia, which continues Syncellus and covers the years from the accession of Diocletian (284) to 813. Written from a firmly iconophile standpoint, it is nonetheless a principal narrative source for seventh- and eighth-century Byzantine, Near Eastern, and Balkan history, preserving sequences of events otherwise lost. A ninth-century Latin translation by Anastasius Bibliothecarius carried much of this material into the medieval West.

His cult is ancient in the Byzantine rite; the principal feast is 12 March. He was not the object of a later papal canonization process of the modern type. He is not widely invoked as patron of particular places, professions, or illnesses in the manner of more popular saints, but he remains a standard figure in Orthodox synaxaria and in the historical literature on iconoclasm and Byzantine historiography.

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