The life of St Nicephorus the Confessor
Nicephorus himself was brought to court while still young and rose to hold that same office of imperial secretary, and in 787 he stood among the officials representing Empress Irene at the Second Council of Nicaea, the council that formally restored the Church's teaching on images. Only later did he set that career aside for monastic life, before being raised, in 806, to the patriarchal throne of Constantinople, where he took up the same defense of icons his father had once made.
That defense cost him his freedom: the iconoclast emperor Leo the Armenian exiled him to Prokonnesos in 815, and there he spent his final years writing treatises against the heresy, works that happen to preserve otherwise-lost fragments of the iconoclast emperor Constantine V's own writings, alongside a short historical chronicle covering the years 602 to 769. He died in exile in 828. Nearly two decades later his relics were found incorrupt and fragrant, carried back to Constantinople, rested for a day within Hagia Sophia, and finally laid to rest in the Church of the Holy Apostles.
