Constantinople, New Rome?

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 02, 2026 | In Lives of the Popes

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After affirming Pope Leo’s formulation of the doctrine of the Incarnation, the Council of Chalcedon turned its attention to various disciplinary rulings, mostly concerning clergy. I will pass over these, in order to focus on the most consequential aspect of Chalcedon other than its doctrinal content: its so-called twenty-eighth canon, which, by attempting to raise the see of Constantinople to near-equality with Rome, became one of the root causes of the great Eastern schism which has lasted to this day.

It should already be apparent that in the early Church as now, not all dioceses were equal in rank. Some had higher status because of their connection to imperial residence, others due to canon law, and some because they were said to have been founded by an apostle or other important saint. The Council of Nicaea had invoked “ancient custom” in naming Alexandria and Antioch the pre-eminent sees aside from Rome, the bishops of these cities being pre-eminent over the other bishops in their respective civil provinces. While Nicaea did not say why they were important, presumably it was because they were apostolic sees: St. Peter had spent time in Antioch before he went to Rome, while St. Peter’s disciple, St. Mark, had preached the Gospel at Alexandria. Thus Antioch was the chief church of the East, while Alexandria was chief in Egypt.

However, in 381, at what is now called the First Council of Constantinople, the fathers made a canon decreeing that this city, founded by Constantine fifty years earlier as the eastern capital of the Roman Empire, was the “New Rome,” and had the second place of honor in the Church next to Rome itself.

Constantinople I was not, to be clear, a general council representing the whole Church, since only eastern bishops attended. But this council gained new significance when, seventy years later at Chalcedon, its definition of the Christian faith was affirmed as a reliable guide to orthodoxy. Thus Constantinople I retrospectively gained ecumenical status. The popes too would affirm it as an ecumenical council carrying great doctrinal authority. Yet its legislative canons, including the one about Constantinople being second only to Rome, were a different matter—these were never ratified by the popes.

But the bishops at Chalcedon would pick this up and run with it in Canon 28, which was passed on a day when both the papal legates and the imperial commissioners of the council were not present (both probably absented themselves deliberately to avoid having anything to do with the discussion). The new canon first of all confirmed the former canon from 381.

Importantly, when speaking in this canon of the primacy of Rome, the bishops made no reference to her being the See of Peter. Instead, they attributed Rome’s ecclesiastical primacy to her being the seat of the Empire: the logic being that if Rome’s privileges were a matter of imperial status and ecclesiastical law, then Constantinople could also be privileged by the canons—for was she too not an imperial city?

So, said the bishops in Canon 28:

We therefore define and declare the same about the privileges of the see of Constantinople, New Rome. The city now honored with the presence of the emperor and the senate, and which enjoys the same privileges as the old royal Rome, should be as great as she in what relates to the church, and rank second to her.

This canon conspicuously ignored the fact that the bishops of Rome had always claimed primacy on the basis of Apostolic succession, not mainly because they shared the same city with worldly rulers. But Constantinople now claimed a greater honor than the other two apostolic sees, Antioch and Alexandria, on the basis of worldly power. And it claimed for the bishop of Constantinople the right to consecrate the twenty-six metropolitans of the civil dioceses of Thrace, Asia, and Pontus, as well as the bishops of churches in barbarian lands east of the empire.

When the papal legates heard the new canon read at the last session of the council, they objected strongly, saying it was contrary to the decree of Nicaea which had given pride of place to Antioch and Alexandria next to Rome. They read the passage from Pope Leo’s letter which had tasked them with preventing any ruling contrary to Nicaea or to the dignity of Rome. In response, Bishop Eusebius of Dorylaeum claimed that while visiting Rome, he had read the relevant canon of 381 to Pope Leo, who had approved of it. After further heated debate, Canon 28 was declared as passed, to the applause of the bishops. In a final protest, one of the papal legates, Lucentius, said to the commissioners:

The Holy See ought not to be basely treated while we look on. And therefore, all that was done yesterday, in our absence, to the prejudice of the canons and laws, we demand of your highnesses to order that it be annulled. Otherwise, let this our appeal in law against the canon be attached to the minutes, that we may know what it is we must report to the apostolic bishop who is the first personage in the whole church, so that he may be able to pronounce sentence on the unjust act against his see, and on this overthrowing of the canon law.

In the letter the council fathers wrote to St. Leo summing up the proceedings at Chalcedon, they presented Canon 28 in the most deferential light, asking Leo to confirm it. Emperor Marcian and Bishop Anatolius of Constantinople also wrote urging Leo to approve the canon.

But responding to Anatolius, whom he believed to be principally responsible for the canon as its beneficiary, Leo expressed disappointment with his attempt to use the council to usurp the traditional rank of Antioch and Alexandria and claim power over other metropolitan bishops. Anatolius was in danger of breaching communion with the universal Church. Leo said that the popes had never even been presented with the canon of 381 which was claimed as the basis for the new canon.

Writing to the Empress Pulcheria, Leo said that everything in the canons of Chalcedon which were contrary to Nicaea “we dismiss as without legal effect…. By the authority of the blessed apostle Peter we quash it utterly by a general sentence.” He wrote similarly to the bishops of the council, while of course approving their doctrinal definition about the Incarnation.

And Leo wrote to the emperor himself concerning Anatolius:

The principles which regulate secular affairs and those which regulate the affairs of God are not the same: nor can any structure be stable apart from that Rock which the Lord laid as a foundation. He who covets what is not his due loses that which is his own. Let it suffice him that with the aid of your favor and by my gracious approval he has received the bishopric of so great a city. Let him not think too little of a city which has imperial rank, but which he cannot make into an Apostolic see; nor let him hope that its prestige can be increased by wrongs inflicted on others.

Emperor Marcian, like Anatolius, stood to benefit from any increase in Constantinople’s ecclesiastical prestige. But he had a greater need to maintain papal support in the face of threats to the unity of the empire coming from the anti-Chalcedonians, among others. So in the end, he brokered a reconciliation between Leo and Anatolius.

The conditions set by St. Leo were, speaking generally, that Anatolius must abandon his ambitions, keep to the canons of Nicaea, and not hold to any more recent canons that contradicted them. In the end, two and a half years after the passing of Canon 28, St. Anatolius of Constantinople wrote a letter expressing his submission to the pope. He claimed that he had never wanted the canon, blaming it all on his diocesan clergy and the other Eastern bishops, and saying it was intended as merely tentative: “Whatever was thus done, all its worth and the confirmation of it was reserved to the authority of your holiness.” Pope St. Leo, though likely unconvinced that Anatolius had been quite so innocent as he claimed, wrote a generous response indicating his satisfaction, and the matter was ended.

Before moving on from Canon 28, we should be clear about what this did and did not mean to the people proposing it or opposing it at the time. In particular, what did it mean to say that Constantinople should “be as great as [Rome] in what relates to the church, and rank second to her”?

It seems to mean that Constantinople would be to the East as Rome is to the West in terms of jurisdiction—that is, Constantinople’s patriarchate in the East would be equal to Rome’s patriarchate in the West—but not that Constantinople would be equal to Rome in primacy over the universal Church. Evidence for this is that the council approved a statement by the imperial commissioners which summed things up by saying:

The primacy before all others and the chief dignity shall belong to the archbishop of Old Rome, yet the archbishop of New Rome shall enjoy the same privileges of honor and possess the right to ordain metropolitans in the dioceses of Asia, Pontus, and Thrace.

And in their letter to Pope Leo, the bishops acknowledged his primacy—indeed, they depended upon it in asking him to confirm the canon. Nor did Leo take them to be denying Rome’s Petrine primacy, but he objected to their violating Nicaea in an attempt to surpass the other apostolic sees, and to their doing so on purely secular grounds.

To be clear, the Church had long organized her dioceses and episcopal spheres of jurisdiction according to the borders of civil provinces and the geopolitical importance of various cities (the very term “diocese” comes from Roman civil administration). But the Apostolic sees took precedence over all other metropolitan sees.

None of this is to say that the ecclesiastical importance of Rome had nothing to do with being the imperial city; Erick Ybarra has an excellent chapter in his book The Papacy discussing what he calls the “multi-layered” primacy of Rome. This multi-layered primacy has even been implicit in the organization of my series on St. Leo, since I discussed first his government of the diocese of Rome, then his government as metropolitan of the Roman province and primate of the wider suburbicarian church of southern Italy, then his government as Patriarch of the West, and finally his government of the universal Church including the East.

But back to the point, at the time, neither Rome nor the bishops of Chalcedon took Canon 28 as an attack on Roman primacy. Only later would it be invoked as an argument against the universal jurisdiction of Rome.

In fairness, we must acknowledge that while St. Leo believed all the canons of Nicaea to have been divinely inspired and thus immutable, the Church would ultimately not hold to the view that the disciplinary decrees of ecumenical councils can never be changed. Even in the policies of the Roman Catholic Church, the Nicene hierarchy by which Alexandria and Antioch were second only to Rome would not last forever. By the thirteenth century, the popes would explicitly affirm Constantinople’s status as the most powerful see after Rome.

Rome in the long run would not object to Constantinople having a certain primacy beneath Rome due to that city’s importance as seat of the Eastern Empire—but Constantinople in the long run would not be satisfied with even that exalted position, further claiming equality or even superiority to Rome. Ultimately, in the West would triumph the Petrine principle, and therefore the spiritual independence of the Church from the state. Constantinople would choose to judge its own status according to the criteria of worldly rule, ensuring the Eastern church’s fate to be a subsidiary of the civil power.