Theophanes the Confessor

Origins and early life

Theophanes was born about the year 759 or 760 in Constantinople, into the higher nobility of the empire. His father, Isaac, was a man of rank and wealth — the sources make him governor (strategos) of the maritime theme of the Aegean Sea and connect the family to the imperial house — but he died when the boy was only about three years old, leaving Theophanes to be raised, on one account, under the care of the emperor Constantine V himself, in whose service the family stood. The child inherited a great estate and grew up amid the splendour of the capital in the middle iconoclast period, when the veneration of icons was proscribed and the young were formed in the imperial ideology. That Theophanes, so reared, became the age's most celebrated chronicler of the iconoclast persecution and one of its confessors is the first surprise of his history.

By the wish of his guardians — and, the tradition says, by the arrangement of the emperor Leo IV — he was married while still young to a noblewoman named Megalo (Megalis). But Theophanes had already conceived a longing for the monastic life, and he persuaded his bride that they should live together in continence, as brother and sister rather than as husband and wife. When after some years the way opened — his father-in-law's death releasing him from worldly obligation — the two parted by mutual consent to take up the monastic habit: Megalo entered a convent, and Theophanes gave himself to the ascetic life he had desired from the first.

The renunciation and the monasteries of Sigriane

Theophanes now did what his whole after-life would be measured by: he scattered his immense fortune — freeing his slaves, giving to the poor, and turning his lands into houses of prayer. On the peninsula of Sigriane, on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara in the region of Cyzicus (Mysia), he first established himself in a small monastery, and on the nearby island of Kalonymos he founded another. But his great and enduring foundation was the monastery of the Great Field — Megas Agros — built on the slopes of Sigriane, which he governed as abbot and which became a centre of monastic life and of learning. It is from this house that he takes his surest title in the calendars: Theophanes of Sigriane, or of the Great Field.

He was, by every account, a monk of rigorous asceticism and gentle rule, esteemed for his humility and his gift of spiritual discernment; the hymnography credits him with the working of wonders and with foreknowledge of things to come. Throughout these years he was afflicted by a painful and chronic disease — a stone and kidney complaint that the sources describe as a torment he bore for the rest of his life, and which would make the hardships of his last imprisonment and exile the more cruel.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council

When the empress Irene and the patriarch Tarasius convoked the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787 to restore the veneration of the holy icons, Theophanes, then abbot of Megas Agros, was among the fathers. Ill though he was — the tradition has him carried to the council or riding worn with disease — he took his place among the monastic superiors, subscribed to the Council's definition, and set his hand to the restoration of the icons. His presence at Nicaea binds him to the central dogmatic act of his age and gives his later confession its full weight: he did not merely suffer for the images at the end of his life, he had helped to vindicate them in council.

The Chronographia

The work that carried his name farthest was written in his last years, and almost by inheritance. His friend George the Synkellos — a learned monk and sometime secretary (synkellos) to the patriarch — had compiled a great chronicle of the world from the Creation, but died before he could bring it down to his own day. On his deathbed George entrusted to Theophanes his materials and notes, and charged him to complete the work. Theophanes, reluctant and pleading his lack of learning and his ill health, undertook it out of love for his friend, and so composed the Chronographia — an annalistic chronicle covering the years from the accession of Diocletian in 284 to the fall of Michael I Rhangabe and the accession of Leo V in 813, the point at which George's narrative had broken off and Theophanes's own memory could carry it.

Arranged year by year, dated by the year of the world, of the Incarnation, and by the regnal years of emperors, popes, patriarchs, and caliphs set in parallel columns, the Chronographia is written in a plain, unliterary Greek close to the speech of its day. Its value is out of all proportion to its modest style: for the seventh and eighth centuries — the "dark age" of Byzantium, from which little else survives — it is a primary source of the first rank, our chief connected narrative of the Arab conquests and the rise of Islam, the Persian wars of Heraclius, the sieges of Constantinople, the reigns of the iconoclast emperors, and the affairs of the Bulgars and the West. It was translated into Latin within two generations by Anastasius Bibliothecarius, and through that version, and its Greek continuators, it shaped the whole medieval memory of these centuries. The historian's craft and the confessor's crown belong to the same man.

Confession under Leo V and exile

On the death of Michael I, Leo V the Armenian (813–820) came to the throne, and in 815 revived the iconoclast policy that Nicaea II had condemned, deposing the patriarch Nikephoros and convening a council to renew the ban on images. The old confessors of the icons were sought out and pressed to conform. Leo summoned Theophanes — by now aged, famous, and gravely ill — to Constantinople, hoping that the submission of so revered an abbot would carry weight. He tried first flattery and then threats; Theophanes, unmoved, openly professed the veneration of the icons and refused to subscribe to the heresy, rebuking the emperor for overturning the faith of the Council. He was thrown into prison, where for about two years he lay in harsh confinement, his disease unrelieved, enduring, the sources say, both bodily torment and the emperor's continued attempts to break him.

At last, his constancy unshaken, Theophanes was sent into exile on the island of Samothrace in the northern Aegean. Worn out by imprisonment, illness, and the hardship of the journey, he survived only a short time there — the tradition counts some seventeen (some say twenty-three) days — and reposed on 12 March, in the year 817 or 818, a confessor who had not been slain outright but had died of his sufferings for the icons, which is the very definition of his rank.

Relics and later cultus

After the death of Leo V and, more fully, after the final Triumph of Orthodoxy under the empress Theodora in 843, the memory of the iconodule confessors was honoured throughout the empire. Theophanes's relics were carried back from Samothrace to his own monastery of the Great Field, where they were enshrined and where miracles and a flow of healing myrrh were reported at his tomb. His feast entered the Synaxarion of Constantinople and the Menaia, and his memory was kept the more warmly because his Chronographia was read and copied in every generation. His widow Megalo, who had shared his renunciation, is herself remembered in some synaxaria among the holy women.