Ten Martyrs of Constantinople
The Holy Ten Martyrs who suffered at Constantinople for the holy icon of Christ of the Chalke Gate
Martyr · d. c. 730
Commemorated 9 August — Martyrdom for the icon of Christ over the Chalke Gate
Ten Christians of Constantinople — Julian, Marcian, John, James, Alexius, Demetrius, Photius, Peter, Leontius, and Maria the Patrician — were put to death about the year 730 for defending the ancient icon of Christ that hung over the Chalke, the bronze ceremonial gate of the Great Palace. When the emperor Leo III the Isaurian sent an officer with a ladder to cut the image down, the crowd threw him from the ladder and killed him; these ten were seized as ringleaders, held some eight months and scourged daily, and at last burned with hot irons and beheaded. They are the first company of martyrs of the iconoclast century, and they suffered in the same tumult as the nun Theodosia of Constantinople, whose feast is kept separately on May 29.
The icon over the Chalke Gate
The Chalke — "the Bronze" — was the great vaulted vestibule that formed the ceremonial entrance to the Great Palace of Constantinople, standing where the palace, the Augustaion and the Hippodrome met. Over its outer face hung an image of Christ Chalkites, which the tradition of the city held to have stood there since the days of Constantine the Great, so that every embassy, procession, and imperial triumph passed beneath it. It was the most publicly visible sacred image in the empire, and for that reason it was the first that Leo III (717–741) moved against when he turned the power of the state against the veneration of icons.
The synaxarion sets the deed in the aftermath of the imperial decree forbidding icons in churches and public places, and remembers that the Patriarch Germanus refused to subscribe it and laid down his office rather than consent. Taking down the Chalke image was not iconoclasm in a corner; it was a proclamation, staged where the whole city would see it.
The tumult at the ladder
An officer — the sources variously call him a spatharios or spatharokandidatos — was sent with a ladder and an axe. A crowd gathered as he climbed, largely of women, and begged him to stop; when he struck the face of the image, they seized the ladder and shook him down, and he was killed by the fall and by the crowd. The riot spread through the streets. The emperor sent soldiers, who cut down many in the tumult; and out of those taken alive, ten were held for the exemplary punishment which the synaxarion commemorates on this day.
The couplets of the Menaion treat the company in two parts, as the martyrs themselves divide: for the nine men, that in killing the enemy of God they became by the sword the friends of God; and for the woman, Maria's own word to the Saviour — receive my blood as Thou didst receive the myrrh of Mary.
The martyrs
The names transmitted are Julian, Marcian, John, James, Alexius, Demetrius, Photius, Peter and Leontius, and with them the noblewoman Maria, called the Patrician (ἡ πατρικία) from the rank her family held at court. Some notices add the protospatharios Gregory, a court officer of high rank, which would make the number eleven and suggests that the round "ten" of the title is the synaxarion's tally rather than a closed roll. Nothing is transmitted of any of them beyond their names, their rank where they had one, and their death — which is itself the point of the commemoration: the Church remembers here not ten biographies but ten laypeople of the capital, men and one great lady among them, who would not let the image of Christ be struck in the face.
Martyrdom
They were imprisoned for about eight months, and through that time were brought out and scourged daily — the notices say five hundred stripes a day, a figure the hagiographers use for extremity rather than for arithmetic. When they would not yield, they were burned with red-hot irons and then beheaded. Their bodies were buried near the shore, by the church of the Martyr Theodore in the quarter called ta Karbounaria; and the tradition adds that one hundred and thirty-nine years later — that is, in the generation after the Triumph of Orthodoxy of 843, when the relics of the martyrs of the icons were being sought out and honoured — they were found incorrupt.
Feast and commemoration
August 9 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 22), within the afterfeast of the Transfiguration and within the Dormition Fast. The day's office in the Menaion belongs to the Apostle Matthias; these martyrs are commemorated by their synaxarion notice and couplets, with the stichera of the common of martyrs where a local usage adds them. They are honoured throughout the Orthodox world as martyrs of the holy icons, and their memory belongs with the confessors of the eighth and ninth centuries whose vindication the Church keeps on the Sunday of Orthodoxy.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Kontakion — Tone 2
Ten lamps kindled before the image of the Master, ye would not suffer His countenance to be dishonoured; and washing the Bronze Gate with your own blood, ye were shown to be the first-fruits of them that contend for the holy icons: wherefore we cry unto you, Rejoice, O glorious martyrs.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
There is no single received type for the company. Where they are painted they appear as a rank of nine men in the tunics and mantles of laymen, of varied ages, each holding the martyr's cross, with Maria at one end in the maphorion and the jewelled collar of a patrician lady — the rank being shown, as Byzantine practice always shows it, by dress rather than by inscription. The proper subject of the day is narrative rather than portrait: the Chalke Gate with the image of Christ above it, the ladder, the soldier falling, and the crowd below — the same scene that serves the icon of Theodosia of Constantinople, where she is shown with her hands on the ladder. In post-iconoclast manuscripts of the Psalters with marginal illustration, the striking of the image of Christ is drawn deliberately alongside the Crucifixion, the soldier with his lance set against the soldier with his axe.
No pre-1900 image of these ten martyrs as a company has been located for this collection. The Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for a minor company, covers only September to February and offers nothing for August 9.
Disputed questions
- The year. The removal of the Chalke icon is dated by the chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor to 726, and by other reckonings to 730, the year of the formal iconoclast edict and of the deposition of the Patriarch Germanus; the notices for these martyrs commonly give 730, while the parallel tradition of Theodosia gives 729 and dates the tumult itself to 19 January. This repository records the variants and does not adjudicate between them.
- Whether the episode happened as told. Modern Byzantine scholarship — following Marie-France Auzépy's study of the Chalke icon (1990) — has argued that the whole narrative of the icon, the ladder and the women is a construction of the post-iconoclast period, unknown to the earliest witnesses to Leo's iconoclasm and answering the polemical need of the victorious iconodules for a foundation-martyrdom. The counter-position holds that a genuine riot at the Chalke underlies the later elaboration. What is contested is the literary form of the account; the cultus of a company of lay martyrs of the icons at Constantinople is early and firm.
- Relation to Theodosia. The Byzantine books keep the nun Theodosia on May 29 with her own office, and these ten on August 9; both belong to the same episode, and Theodosia is remembered as the one who actually shook the ladder. They are not to be merged: her passion is that of a venerable-martyr with a developed Life, a church and a great pilgrimage in the city, while this company is transmitted only as a roll of names with a common death.
- Maria the Patrician. Not to be confused with any of the several other Marias of the Byzantine synaxaria; the epithet patrikia is a court dignity, not a place-name, and identifies her as a woman of senatorial family who died in a street riot for an icon.