Contextualizing Constantine V's radical religious policies: the debate about the intercession of the saints and the 'sleep of the soul' in the Chalcedonian and Nestorian churches

Abstract

This article argues that in the last years of his reign Constantine V came to reject the intercession of saints, despite the fact that the Council of Hieria, which he himself had convened only a decade earlier, had explicitly anathematised those who held such a view. Moreover, it makes the case that the emperor participated in a broad religious discourse that began in the sixth century and continued into the ninth century, both among the Chalcedonians of Byzantium and the Levant and among the Nestorians of the East.