The life of St Metrophanes of Constantinople
Sources disagree on exactly how long: one tradition has him reposing in 326 at a great age, while an earlier historian, Socrates of Constantinople, indicates he was already dead by 325 and had been succeeded well before that. A meeting with Constantine the Great early on left a lasting impression on the emperor, who came to hold something like paternal warmth for the man, and once Constantine had chosen to move his capital eastward from Rome, he carried Metrophanes along with him to the city that would take the emperor's own name. By tradition, a gathering of churchmen at Constantine's own urging voted to grant Metrophanes the title of Patriarch there, making him its first bearer, although history complicates that neat picture: the city itself only became the formal imperial seat in 330, and Constantinople's bishopric would not actually rise to the rank of patriarchate until 451, well past a century after Metrophanes had already died.
Before his own death, at the emperor's request, he chose Alexander to succeed him and predicted that a reader called Paul would follow after Alexander in turn. In an unrelated matter touching the distant church of Alexandria, he is also remembered to have told that city's own bishop, a different man also named Alexander, that his eventual successor there would be a deacon named Athanasius. Tradition holds he reached the age of a hundred seventeen years, though the exact date of his death is not settled among the sources.
