Peter the Patrician
Our Venerable Father Peter the Patrician, who struggled at Constantinople
Venerable · b. c. 784, Constantinople — d. 854, Constantinople
Commemorated 1 July — Repose at his monastery of St Euandrus in Constantinople
Peter was a patrician of Constantinople and an officer of the imperial army who was taken prisoner in the catastrophic Bulgarian campaign of 811, in which the emperor Nikephoros I was killed; released from his captivity, the tradition says, by the Apostle John the Theologian, who appeared to him in the night and loosed his chains, he returned to the City, gave up rank and career, and was tonsured a monk on Mount Olympus in Bithynia. There he lived thirty-four years under the direction of Joannicius the Great in extreme austerity — perpetual fasting and vigil, a hair shirt, and bare feet — and passed his last eight years in Constantinople, where he founded a monastery and a church of St Euandrus. He reposed in 854, aged about seventy, and is commemorated on July 1.
Patrician and soldier
Peter was born into the patrician order at Constantinople at the end of the eighth century — the rank of patrikios was by then the senior dignity of the Byzantine hierarchy below the imperial family, so that the epithet by which the calendars know him is a statement about his birth and standing rather than a place-name or a nickname. In the ordinary way of his class he entered the emperor's service and held military command in the reign of Nikephoros I (802–811).
The disaster of 811 and the captivity
The reign ended in the greatest military catastrophe the empire had suffered in four centuries. In the summer of 811 Nikephoros led a large army deep into Bulgaria, sacked the khan Krum's capital at Pliska, and on the return march allowed himself to be trapped in the passes of the Haemus; the army was destroyed on 26 July, the emperor himself killed — the synaxarion notice, characteristically gentler than the chronicles, says only that he was mortally wounded — and his skull was made into a drinking-cup by the victor. Peter was among the many Byzantine officers taken alive; the same disaster stands behind the martyrdom of the 377 martyrs of Bulgaria and behind a whole generation of Byzantine captivity narratives.
How long Peter's captivity lasted the tradition does not say. Its end it tells plainly: the holy Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian appeared to him in a vision by night and set him free from his bonds. Deliverance of a prisoner by a saint is one of the commonest motifs of the middle-Byzantine synaxaria, and it had a particular currency in the years after 811, when the ransoming and escape of prisoners from Bulgaria was a live public question in the capital; but the attachment to John rather than to a soldier-saint is unusual and is likely to be Peter's own, remembered because he told it.
Mount Olympus and Joannicius
He came back to Constantinople and did not resume his career. Renouncing rank, property and the world, he crossed into Bithynia to the Mount Olympus of the monks — the mountain west of Prusa that was the chief monastic centre of Asia Minor in the ninth century and the nursery of the iconophile resistance — and received the tonsure there.
For thirty-four years he lived on the mountain as a disciple of Joannicius the Great (†846), the greatest of its ascetics and himself a former soldier of the imperial guard who had left the army for the desert. Under him Peter practised the severities his notice enumerates: unremitting ascetic labour, a strict rule of fasting, vigil that allowed almost no sleep, a garment of coarse hair-cloth worn next to the skin, and bare feet in every weather. The pairing is worth noticing — a patrician and an imperial guardsman, both brought to the same mountain by the same road out of the army — and it says something about how the Bithynian monasteries were peopled in the generation of the second iconoclasm.
Return to the City, and repose
The last eight years of his life Peter spent back in Constantinople. There he established a monastery and built a church dedicated to St Euandrus, of which nothing is now known beyond the name preserved in his notice — one of the several hundred small foundations of the capital that vanished without leaving a stone or a document. He reposed in 854, at about seventy, and was buried in his own monastery.
Feast and commemoration
July 1 on the church calendar (Old Calendar civil July 14). Greek, Russian and OCA usage keep him on this day, the Russian books as Преподобный Петр патриций. He has a synaxarion notice and no proper service, the day's offices belonging to the unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian of Rome; the common of a venerable monastic supplies what is needed.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable monastic)
In thee, O Father, was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross, thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Peter, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Peter is painted in the ordinary type of the venerable monastic: an aged man with a long grey or white beard, in the analavos and mantle of the great schema, holding a scroll and raising the hand in blessing or in prayer. Nothing in his notice has generated a distinguishing attribute, and he is not among the saints of Olympus whom the menologia illustrate. Where his story is depicted at all it is by the scene of the apostle John appearing to a chained prisoner and loosing his bonds — an image occasionally found in Byzantine cycles of the deliverance of captives, but not securely attached to this saint. No pre-1900 icon of Peter the Patrician has been identified for this collection; the Menologion of Basil II, which would ordinarily furnish the portrait of a minor ninth-century ascetic, covers only September to February and has nothing for July.
Disputed questions
- Which Peter. The July 1 notice is thin, and the name and century are shared with several better-documented saints. This Peter is not Peter of Atroa (†837), the Bithynian abbot and confessor of the same mountain country whose feast is September 13 and whose Life by his disciple Sabas is one of the major ninth-century hagiographies; nor Peter of Monembasia (February 7); nor the sixth-century civil official and historian Petros Patrikios, magister officiorum and ambassador under Justinian, who carries the identical epithet, lived three centuries earlier, and is not a saint at all. The distinguishing facts of this Peter are the patrician birth, the Bulgarian captivity, the deliverance by St John, the thirty-four years under Joannicius, and the monastery of St Euandrus. He is also not Peter the New, the martyr of July 14 whose feet were cut off — a confusion made easy by the fact that this Peter's Old Calendar civil date is July 14, so that working lists compiled from civil dates repeatedly place him on the martyr's day.
- The dates. Repose in 854 at the age of seventy gives a birth about 784 and an age of about twenty-seven at the disaster of 811; thirty-four years on Olympus and eight in the City together account for forty-two years of monastic life, placing the tonsure about 812 — that is, immediately after the campaign. The figures are internally consistent, which is not always true of synaxarion arithmetic, and they are followed here.
- His teacher's death. Joannicius the Great reposed in 846, eight years before Peter — which coincides exactly with the eight years Peter is said to have spent in Constantinople. The notice does not say that the death of his elder was what sent him back to the City, but the arithmetic invites the inference.