Peter the Patrician

Venerable Peter the Patrician was a senior Byzantine military commander at the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries, who became a monk and was canonized. He is known only from the synaxaria. He was the son of the patrician Constantine, strategos of the emperor, and was born during the joint reign of Irene and Constantine VI (780 to 796). He studied philosophy and other sciences in the best schools, married, and after his father's death became Domestic of the Scholai and patrician, under Irene and then under Nicephorus I.

In the disastrous campaign against the Bulgars in 811, at Pliska, he was captured along with fifty other dignitaries. Tradition says that Saint John the Evangelist appeared to him, freed him and accompanied him home. Peter despised the things of the world, went up Mount Olympus in Bithynia and became a monk, a disciple of Venerable Ioannikios the Great, with whom he remained thirty-⁠four years. After Ioannikios died (846), he returned to Constantinople, built a church in the Evandrou quarter and lived eight years in a hut nearby, in a struggle pleasing to God. He died in peace on 1 July 854, the day on which he is commemorated (new style).