The Founding of Byzantium

Among the traditions of St. Andrew the First-Called, none carried greater weight in the later Byzantine Church than the claim that the apostle himself preached at Byzantium — the small Greek city that Constantine would refound as Constantinople — and there consecrated Stachys as its first bishop. The claim made the imperial capital an apostolic see, a foundation to set beside Rome’s. Yet it is a tradition whose attestation can be dated, and the dating is late. To honor the tradition and to date it honestly are not at odds; the Church venerates the founders, and the historian records when the foundation first appears in the sources.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Tradition

In its developed Byzantine form the tradition runs as follows. St. Andrew, on the Black Sea circuit assigned to him by the Church’s memory — the wide field that Origen had called simply “Scythia” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.1, NPNF II/1) — came down the western shore of the Pontus to Byzantium, the modest Greek polis on the Bosphorus that had been founded by Megarian colonists in the seventh century B.C. There he preached the Gospel, gathered a Christian community, and before departing ordained for it a first bishop: Stachys. The see thus established was, on this account, no ordinary foundation but an apostolic one, and the long succession of the bishops of Byzantium — later the patriarchs of Constantinople — was held to begin not with the Christianization of the empire under Constantine but with the hand of one of the Twelve.

The figure of Stachys is drawn into the tradition through Scripture. The first bishop of Byzantium is identified with the Stachys greeted by the Apostle Paul in the closing salutations of Romans: “Salute Andronicus and Junia… Greet Amplias my beloved in the Lord. Salute Urbane, our helper in Christ, and Stachys my beloved” (Romans 16:9, RSV: “Greet Urbanus, our fellow worker in Christ, and my beloved Stachys”). By this identification Stachys is counted among the Seventy (or Seventy-two) disciples whom the Church numbers alongside the Twelve, and he is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar on October 31 among that company. The tradition therefore binds together two scriptural names — Andrew of the Gospels and Stachys of Romans 16 — into a single foundation narrative for the see of the capital.

The Episcopal List of Pseudo-Dorotheus

The textual anchor of the Stachys tradition is an episcopal list — a roll of the “first bishops of Byzantium” beginning with Stachys — transmitted within the Synopsis of the lives of the prophets and apostles attributed to Dorotheus of Tyre. The attribution is the heart of the problem. A historical Dorotheus, a presbyter or bishop associated with Tyre, is placed by tradition in the late third and early fourth centuries; but the Synopsis that bears his name is not his. It is a pseudonymous compilation — conventionally cited as Pseudo-Dorotheus — whose materials are Byzantine and whose episcopal catalogue for Byzantium is later still, a product of the Byzantine middle ages rather than of the age of Constantine [Disputed: the Synopsis/episcopal list ascribed to “Dorotheus of Tyre” is pseudonymous; it is not the work of the early-4th-century Dorotheus, and the list of the bishops of Byzantium beginning with Stachys is a Byzantine compilation conventionally dated to the 8th–9th century or later — see Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium (1958)].

This dating matters because the list is precisely what supplies the apostolic succession — the unbroken line from Stachys forward — that an apostolic foundation requires. A see does not merely need a founder; it needs a chain of named successors linking the founder to the historical episcopate. The Pseudo-Dorothean catalogue provides exactly that chain, naming Stachys and his early successors as bishops of Byzantium before the city’s refoundation. That such a list should first surface in a pseudonymous Byzantine source, and not in any document of the first four Christian centuries, is the decisive fact for the historian, however venerable the names it carries.

The Silence of the Early Record

Against the tradition stands the silence of the earliest stratum, and the silence is total. The foundation of Byzantium by Andrew, and the consecration of Stachys, are absent from every surviving source of the first centuries. They are not in the New Testament, which closes on Andrew while he is still a disciple and never narrates his missions. They are not in the Apostolic Fathers, nor in the apologists, nor in the apocryphal Acts of Andrew in its early form, which supplied the later tradition with narrative color but not yet with the Byzantine foundation.

Most tellingly, they are absent from the earliest attestation of any apostolic field for Andrew at all. That attestation is the single sentence of Origen, preserved because Eusebius quoted it: “Thomas, tradition tells us, obtained as his portion Parthia, Andrew Scythia, John Asia” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.1, NPNF II/1). This is a bare geographical assignment — one word, “Scythia,” a wide and literary designation for the lands north and around the Pontus — introduced by Eusebius with the explicit qualification that it is what paradosis (“tradition”) reports. There is in it no Byzantium, no Stachys, no founded see, no consecrated bishop. The whole detailed apparatus of the foundation claim lies beyond the horizon of this earliest record. Whatever historical kernel “Scythia” may preserve, the foundation of Byzantium is not part of it, and the Church historian Eusebius — who lived and wrote at Caesarea in the very generation that built Constantinople, and who knew the see of Byzantium well — nowhere reports that an apostle had founded it.

Dvornik and the Scholarly Judgment

The development by which the bare “Scythia” of the third century grew into the detailed Byzantine foundation legend is the subject of the classic critical study: Francis Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (Harvard University Press, 1958), still the foundational work on the question. Dvornik traced the Andrew tradition through all its sources and reached a conclusion that has governed scholarship since: the claim that Andrew founded the see of Byzantium and ordained its first bishop is a medieval construction, not an early memory surfacing late.

Dvornik set the legend in its historical motive. The Church of Constantinople, raised by the councils to the second rank after Rome and then claiming parity with it (Constantinople I, canon 3, 381; Chalcedon, canon 28, 451), found itself pressed in its long rivalry with the Roman see by Rome’s possession of an apostolic — indeed a Petrine — founder. Constantinople, a city without an apostolic past, needed an apostle of its own. The Andrew tradition supplied one, and supplied him with a peculiar fitness: Andrew was Prōtoklētos, the “First-Called,” and the elder brother of Peter himself, so that an apostolic foundation by Andrew could be set against the foundation by Peter without conceding the Roman primacy. On Dvornik’s analysis the foundation legend was elaborated precisely in the centuries — from roughly the eighth onward — when this need was sharpest, built up out of the older and thinner materials of the list-tradition and the apocryphal Acts. The earlier monograph of Peter M. Peterson, Andrew, Brother of Simon Peter (Brill, 1958), assembles the same evidence and reaches a comparably cautious verdict. (The comparison of the Andrew and Peter claims, as Constantinople’s apostolic title over against Rome’s, is treated in the companion file The Apostolic Throne of Constantinople.)

Veneration and the Historian’s Note

Two things are true at once, and the method of this collection (METHODOLOGY §4) requires that both be stated, sourced, and without polemic. The Orthodox Church venerates Stachys as a disciple among the Seventy and as first bishop of Byzantium, commemorating him on October 31, and it honors Andrew as founder of the see that became the imperial capital; this veneration is the living tradition of the Church, and the foundation narrative is the form in which the Church transmits the apostolic dignity of Constantinople. The historian, weighing the same tradition by the rule that hagiography is pinned to its earliest attestation, notes the late attestation: the founding of Byzantium and the consecration of Stachys appear only in late Byzantine sources, are absent from the earliest record, and are judged by Dvornik a development serving the apostolic dignity of the see. Neither statement cancels the other. The Church may venerate what the historian cannot certify; the historian may date what the Church does not cease to honor.

[Disputed: the tradition that St. Andrew founded the church of Byzantium and consecrated Stachys as its first bishop is attested only in late Byzantine sources — the episcopal list within the Synopsis ascribed to Pseudo-Dorotheus of Tyre (a pseudonymous compilation, the list conventionally dated 8th–9th c. or later) and later chroniclers — and is absent from the earliest record, Origen’s bare assignment of “Scythia” to Andrew in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.1 (NPNF II/1). Scholars, following Francis Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (Harvard, 1958), regard the apostolic foundation of Byzantium as a later development serving the apostolic dignity of the see of Constantinople in its rivalry with Rome. The Orthodox Church venerates Stachys (Oct 31, among the Seventy) and honors Andrew as founder; the historian records the late attestation. The Rome-vs.-Constantinople comparison is treated in the companion file.]

References

Dvornik, Francis. The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. (The foundational critical study: the foundation of Byzantium and the consecration of Stachys as a medieval construction serving Constantinople’s apostolic claim.)
The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version. Romans 16:9 (Paul’s salutation to Stachys, identified by tradition with the first bishop of Byzantium).
Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History, 3.1, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 1 (NPNF II/1). (The earliest attestation of an apostolic field for Andrew — the bare word “Scythia,” with no mention of Byzantium or Stachys.)
Peterson, Peter M. Andrew, Brother of Simon Peter: His History and His Legends. Supplements to Novum Testamentum 1. Leiden: Brill, 1958. (Source survey of the Andrew traditions, reaching a cautious historical verdict.)