Polycarp II of Byzantium

Saint Polycarp II was bishop of Byzantium, the city that was to become Constantinople, from 141 to 144, in the reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius. He succeeded Bishop Felix, and Athenodorus shepherded the church after him.

His episcopate

The ancient lists say he held the see for seventeen years, but the church historian Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, whose figures historians judge more reliable, speaks in his Ecclesiastical History of only three years, 141 to 144. Other lists place him beside Athenodorus in a different order or omit him.

His contemporaries remembered him as a stern and steadfast man in defending the faith of the first apostles. He opposed the heresies of his time and tried to ease the famine that struck Byzantium toward the end of his ministry.

After his death

According to tradition his body was laid, like those of his predecessors, in a marble coffin in the church of Argyroupolis. The historian Wolfram Brandes shows in a study of 2015 that the detailed list of the first bishops of Byzantium, down to Metrophanes, is a late composition, made in support of the apostolic origin of the see of Constantinople and in its rivalry with Rome for apostolic authority. For this reason nothing more can be said of his life with certainty.