Theophanes the Confessor

Theophanes the Confessor was a Byzantine monk, hegumen, and historian of the eighth and early ninth centuries, later venerated as a saint by Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians. He was born in Constantinople into a family of senatorial standing. His father, Isaac, served in a high military or administrative capacity; his mother was Theodote. Isaac died while Theophanes was still a small child, and the boy was brought up under the eye of the imperial court during the reign of Constantine V, an emperor committed to iconoclasm. In adolescence Theophanes received the court dignity of spatharios. The emperor arranged his marriage to Megalo, a woman of comparable rank. Husband and wife agreed to remain continent. After Theodote’s death they divided their property, freed their slaves, and withdrew from the world, Megalo to a convent and Theophanes to the monastic life in Bithynia.

Settling in the coastal highlands of Mount Sigriane on the southern shore of the Propontis, Theophanes passed some time at existing houses, including a monastery called Polychronius, and used his remaining fortune to found a community on the nearby island of Kalonymos. He subsequently established the monastery of Megas Agros, the Great Field, at Sigriane, and governed it as hegumen. His reputation was that of a strict ascetic. In 787 he attended the Second Council of Nicaea, which reversed imperial iconoclasm and defined the veneration of icons as consistent with Christian tradition; Theophanes stood with the iconophile majority.

The accession of Leo V the Armenian brought a second official iconoclast campaign beginning in 815. Theophanes, by then aged and chronically ill, would not sign the iconoclast decrees or enter communion with the new patriarch Theodotus I Kassiteras. He was brought to Constantinople, imprisoned, and after a period of confinement banished to the island of Samothrace in the northern Aegean. He died there in exile, according to the hagiographical tradition on 12 March, in 817 or 818. Because he suffered for the iconophile faith without being put to death, he received the title Confessor. His body was later taken back to Megas Agros for burial. He is commemorated on 12 March. He should not be confused with his slightly later namesake Theophanes the Branded (Graptos), another iconophile confessor.

Theophanes’s enduring importance for historians rests on the Chronographia, which he composed as a continuation of the chronicle of George Syncellus, a learned monk and former synkellos of Patriarch Tarasios and a close associate of Theophanes. Syncellus had carried his own compilation from Creation to the reign of Diocletian and, dying around the end of the first decade of the ninth century, asked Theophanes to take the narrative forward. The Chronographia runs from 284 to 813, arranged in annalistic entries that combine Byzantine imperial history with notices on the Arab caliphate, the papacy, and neighboring peoples. It is often the principal, and sometimes the only, connected Greek narrative for the seventh and eighth centuries, decades poorly served by other Byzantine historians. The work is not impartial: it reflects iconophile theology and hostility to the Isaurian iconoclast emperors, and it depends on earlier sources that Theophanes adapted rather than on extensive original research for the more remote periods. Even so, it remains indispensable. In the later ninth century Anastasius Bibliothecarius produced a Latin version, the Chronographia Tripertita, which made much of this material available in the West. Through both the Greek text and that translation, Theophanes shaped medieval and modern understanding of the Byzantine “Dark Centuries” and of the first great struggle over images.