Athanasius II of Constantinople

Athanasius II of Constantinople is reckoned in some lists the last Ecumenical Patriarch before the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, in the years 1450 to 1453. Almost nothing certain is known of him. The only source for his appointment is the "acts of the last council in Hagia Sophia", of 1450, generally regarded by scholars as forged, and for that reason his very existence as patriarch is disputed. The sources at hand contain no information on any veneration of him as a saint or on a canonization, so his case must be decided with great caution.

What the sources say

According to the patriarchal tradition, Athanasius was first abbot of the monastery of the Mother of God Peribleptos at Constantinople and was an opponent of the union of Florence. After the departure of Patriarch Gregory III Mammas from Constantinople, in August 1450, he is said to have been elected patriarch by a council held in 1450 in Hagia Sophia, with the participation of representatives of the Churches of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. His consecration is said to have been performed by the metropolitans Mitrophanes of Cyzicus, Macarius of Nicomedia and Neophytus of Nicaea, who came from lands already held by Muslims. It is said that, in the presence of the new patriarch and the others, the council reconfirmed the renunciation by the Churches of the East of the union proclaimed at the Council of Ferrara-⁠Florence of 1439. By then, however, the empire had already declared itself a vassal of the Ottoman sultan.

No news has survived of his resignation or death. It is supposed that he perished, like the emperor himself and most of the inhabitants, in the assault on the city or right after it, but there is no proof for the date of 29 May 1453. If Athanasius II was indeed patriarch, he would have been the last relatively independent head of the Church of the Byzantine Empire, since the appointments of all later patriarchs were made with the consent of the sultan or his entourage. In the traditional list he is placed after Gregory III Mammas and before Gennadius II Scholarios, and his name is in the official historical list of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

The doubts

The only basis for his inclusion in the historical lists is the text called "the acts of the last council in Hagia Sophia" (of 1450). The document was questioned already in the early modern period. The seventeenth-⁠century scholar Leo Allatius, who knew a copy brought from the island of Chios, doubted its authenticity. Still, Patriarch Dositheos II of Jerusalem published the acts in the collection "Tome of Reconciliation" (Iași, 1692) and defended their authenticity in 1715. At the end of the nineteenth century the scholar Christos Papaioannou devoted a study to the problem, showing the late and forged origin of the acts. In his 1900 review Louis Petit upheld his arguments. Scholars have pointed to mismatches with the verified chronology of the fifteenth century. Among others, among the participants in the council appears Mark of Ephesus, who died already in 1444 and could not have been at an assembly of 1450. Sure contemporary testimonies are also lacking.

Historians today therefore regard the existence of Athanasius II as a historical person as unproved. Some of them suppose that the unionist Patriarch Gregory III, who lived in Rome from 1451, remained the city's nominal patriarch throughout the Ottoman conquest, dying in 1459, and so there may have been no intermediate patriarch. The historian Jonathan Harris points out that Gregory's departure proves neither his canonical removal nor the election of a successor. Of Athanasius are not known his name in the world, his place and date of birth, any verified activity as hierarch or the circumstances of his end.