Michael of Synnada

Origins and the monastery on the Black Sea

Michael was a Phrygian, from Synnada (the modern Şuhut) in the interior of Asia Minor, born in the middle decades of the eighth century — that is, into the first iconoclast persecution, under Constantine V, and into a province where the imperial policy had teeth. The tradition says that he wished for the monastic life from boyhood and that it was Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople from 784 to 806, who directed him: he was sent to a monastery on the coast of the Black Sea, where his companion in the ascetic struggle was Theophylact, afterwards bishop of Nicomedia and himself a confessor for the icons. The two are remembered together, and their careers run in parallel from the cell to the episcopate to exile.

Of their years in the monastery the synaxarion preserves one miracle, and it is a modest and characteristic one. In a drought, at harvest, when the labourers of the district were fainting for water, the prayers of the two monks filled an empty metal vessel — the sources call it a brazen jar — and the water did not fail. It is worth noting the shape of the story: not a marvel of judgement but a small provision for farm workers in a dry Phrygian summer. Michael's later cult kept that character, and in some places he is invoked for the protection of crops.

Bishop of Synnada; the Seventh Council

Tarasius, who had summoned the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787 and restored the veneration of the icons, drew both his disciples out of the monastery and made them bishops: Theophylact to Nicomedia and Michael to the metropolitan see of his own native Synnada. Michael's subscription is found among the fathers of the Council of 787, so that he belonged, personally and not merely by inheritance, to the assembly that defined the doctrine for which he would afterwards suffer. This is the single most important fact about him: the man Leo V exiled in 815 was a surviving father of the council Leo was overturning.

As bishop he was, by every account, effective — and the emperors noticed. He stood in high favour with Nikephoros I (802–811) and with Michael I Rangabe (811–813), and both used him as an ambassador. The sequence of his embassies, as the Byzantine prosopographical record reconstructs it, is remarkable:

• to Charlemagne, about 802–803, in the negotiations that were to ratify peace between the two empires in the delicate aftermath of the Frankish coronation of 800;
• to the caliph Harun al-Rashid, in 806, in the year of the great Abbasid invasion of Asia Minor — an embassy sent to buy peace, or time, from a position of weakness;
• to Charlemagne again, in 811–812, to renew the treaty and, the sources say, to treat of a marriage between the two ruling houses.

A bishop entrusted three times in a decade with the empire's two most dangerous frontiers was not a provincial figure. It also explains the tone of what followed: Leo V was dealing with a man who had negotiated with Charlemagne and with Harun al-Rashid, and who was not easily frightened by a tribunal in Constantinople.

Confessor under Leo the Armenian

Leo V the Armenian (813–820) revived iconoclasm in 815, deposing the patriarch Nicephorus and holding a council in Hagia Sophia that annulled the decrees of Nicaea. The method was, at first, pressure rather than blood: bishops were summoned, invited to subscribe, and offered the retention of their sees on terms — the removal of the images from the churches of their dioceses.

Michael refused. The account of his examination preserves his answer in the first person and in the form of a creed rather than an argument: he venerated the holy icons of his Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the All-Pure Virgin His Mother, and of all the saints. He would not put the icons out of the churches of Synnada. He was stripped of his see, subjected to punishment, and banished — the place of exile is given as Eudokias (Eudokiada), and there, worn out, he reposed on the twenty-third of May. His fellow disciple Theophylact was exiled in the same purge and died in his own exile at Strobilos.

Michael's name was entered in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, the acclamation read on the Sunday of Orthodoxy after the final restoration of the icons in 843, among those who had contended for the images: which is the Church's formal verdict on his case, pronounced by the council that closed the controversy.

Relics and later veneration

His relics were afterwards translated, and portions of them are recorded at monasteries of Mount Athos, where the memory of the iconodule confessors was cultivated with particular care. In the Greek books he holds May 23 as the day's principal commemoration, with a full set of propers; the Slavonic calendars keep him on the same day with the title prepodobny Mikhail ispovednik — the venerable Michael the Confessor — and it is under that Russian style that the illustrated Lives of the Saints engrave him first among the saints of May 23.