The first Christian emperor built a church in honour of St Michael on the headland called Hestiæ on the Bosphorus. It was built on the spot called Anaplus, distant from Constantinople seventy stadia by land and thirty-five by water. The place afterwards took the name of Michaelion, after the church. On the opposite headland on the Asiatic shore Justinian also erected a church of St Michael. Nicephorus makes Constantine the founder of both churches, but Theophanes speaks only of one built by him.[699] According to Du Cange, there is said to have been no fewer than fifteen churches and chapels of St Michael in Constantinople and the neighbourhood in the Middle Ages. Other towns also erected, at an early date, churches dedicated to St Michael, as, for example, Ravenna in 545. St Michael enjoyed special veneration at the same period at Chonæ in Phrygia,[700] an ancient and celebrated place of pilgrimage, and the chief centre in the Byzantine Empire of the cultus of the angels. Chonæ, the present Khonas on the Lycus, situated on a tributary of the Mæander in the ecclesiastical province of Laodicea, is the name given since the ninth century to the ancient Colossæ, to the Christian community of which city St Paul addressed one of his epistles, wherein he already speaks of the worship of angels. Even in the time of the apostles there existed a half-Jewish, half-Gnostic sect which disturbed the peace of the local church by teaching that Christ was inferior to the angels, who must be worshipped and invoked in preference to Him; St Paul (Colossians ii. 18) rejects this teaching as heretical, nevertheless, it did not die out, for in the fourth century the Council of Laodicea was compelled to censure this false worship of the angels in its thirty-fifth canon.[701] This was not a prohibition of the cultus of the angels in general, for at the same period St Ambrose and St Hilary in other parts of the Church exhorted the faithful to invoke them.[702] The true worship of the angels existed also in Colossæ, for Metaphrastes tells us that an apparition of the Archangel Michael himself took place there, in honour of which Manual Comnenus later on prescribed that the Festival of the Apparition of St Michael should be kept as a festival of the second class on the 6th September (Apparitio S. Michælis in Chonis).