Nicholas Mystikos

Origins and imperial service

Nicholas was born in 852 in the Byzantine provinces of southern Italy, of Greek stock. He came young to Constantinople and was formed in the household and the learning of Photios the Great, to whom the sources make him a kinsman as well as a disciple. When Photios fell a second time in 886 and the Ignatian party triumphed, Nicholas withdrew from the world; he founded, or richly endowed, the monastery of Galakrenai on the Bithynian shore near Chalcedon, which remained his refuge to the end of his life.

He did not stay in retirement. Under Leo VI he entered the palace as mystikos, an office of the emperor's private chancery — the keeper of the confidential correspondence, close to the emperor's person and to his secrets. The surname stayed on him ever afterwards, so that the Church remembers him not as Nicholas I but as Nicholas the Mystikos. On the death of the patriarch Antony II Kauleas he was raised to the patriarchal throne on 1 March 901.

The tetragamy of Leo VI

The affair that defines him is the tetragamia — the fourth-marriage crisis, the gravest struggle over canonical order between the Church and the throne between Iconoclasm and the eleventh century.

Leo VI had married and buried three wives: Theophano, whom the Church herself canonised; Zoe Zaoutzaina; and Eudokia Baïana, who died in childbirth in 901 with her son. Byzantine canonical practice regarded even a third marriage as a scandal tolerated only under penance; a fourth it did not regard at all. Yet Leo had no heir, and he took as his mistress Zoe Karbonopsina, "of the coal-black eyes," who on 3 September 905 bore him a son.

Nicholas consented to baptise the child in the Great Church on 6 January 906 — the infant was the future emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos — on the express condition that the emperor put the mother away. Leo instead married her, the ceremony performed by a court priest named Thomas and Leo crowning her himself, since no bishop would do it. Nicholas answered by barring the emperor from the churches: Leo was made to stand outside the doors of Hagia Sophia among the penitents at the great feasts, as the Church's discipline required of a man in an unlawful union.

Leo, unable to move his patriarch, went round him. He gathered the opinions of the other patriarchs and obtained from Pope Sergius III a dispensation by economy for the marriage. Then, in February 907, on the pretext of Nicholas's supposed sympathy with the conspiracy of Andronikos Doukas, he had him deposed and shut up in his own monastery of Galakrenai. In his place was set the holy monk Euthymios the Syncellus, himself venerated as a saint — so that the schism which followed had a saint on either side of it, and the Byzantine Church was divided for years into "Nicholaites" and "Euthymians."

Restoration, regency, and Simeon at the walls

Leo VI died on 11 May 912. His brother Alexander, who had no love for his brother's arrangements, restored Nicholas on 15 May 912; Euthymios was deposed, and handled with brutality by Nicholas's partisans — a violence the sources report to Nicholas's discredit. Restored, he struck at the whole settlement of 906: he deposed the clergy who had communed with the emperor in his fourth marriage, refused the Roman dispensation, and for a time had the pope's name struck from the diptychs.

Alexander died on 6 June 913, leaving the seven-year-old Constantine VII on the throne, and Nicholas became the leading member of the council of regency. He sent Zoe Karbonopsina to a convent. Almost at once Simeon of Bulgaria came down on Thrace and appeared before the land walls. Nicholas went out to meet him at the Hebdomon and bought peace with a recognition that scandalised the court: he placed on Simeon's head — the tradition says his own epirriptarion, for want of a crown — acknowledging him in some measure as basileus of the Bulgarians, and agreed that a daughter of Simeon should marry the boy emperor. The court would not have it. Zoe returned from her convent in February 914, overthrew the regency, and repudiated the Bulgarian marriage; the war resumed and lasted a generation. Nicholas kept his throne but lost his political power, and turned back to the Church.

The Tomos of Union and his letters

His last years were his best. Under Romanos I Lekapenos the wound of the tetragamy was at length closed on 9 July 920 by the Tomos of Union (Τόμος τῆς Ἑνώσεως), read in the presence of the emperors and subscribed by both parties: fourth marriages were forbidden absolutely and without exception, third marriages hedged about with conditions of age and childlessness, and the two factions reconciled. It was in substance the vindication of the stand Nicholas had taken in 906, and it remains a foundation of Orthodox marriage law to this day. Communion with Rome was restored a few years later when papal legates accepted the tomos.

Nicholas is also, unexpectedly, one of the best-documented churchmen of his century, because his correspondence survives — some hundred and ninety letters, a body of material of the first order for the tenth century. He writes to Simeon of Bulgaria in the tone of a father rebuking a son and pleading for the peace of Christians; he writes to the emir of Crete and to the caliph's court at Baghdad on behalf of Christian captives and of the churches under Muslim rule, invoking the common humanity of the two peoples; he writes to bishops on discipline, to monks on their quarrels, and to the palace on the limits of imperial power in the Church. The letters, more than any hagiography, show why he was remembered as a saint.

He reposed on 15 May 925, and was buried at his monastery of Galakrenai.