In order to comprehend what this canon gave to the see of Constantinople, it is requisite to bear in mind the actual condition of the eastern Church at the time. We are now at the year 692, that is full fifty years since the other eastern patriarchates fell under Saracen dominion.(143) They had become more and more powerless. They depended upon the alms and the support given to them from Constantinople. In fact at this time the archbishop of the Grecian capital was the only real patriarch in the diminished empire. The courtiers of Constantinople, as we have seen thirty years before in the persecution of St. Maximus, affected to consider the conquests of the Saracen barbarians as transitory. Since then Constantinople itself had only been saved by hurling the Greek fire on the assailing Saracen fleet. A shadow only of their old right remained in the Saracen provinces of Alexandria and Antioch; they had still their old names. These were put down for them, if, as is supposed, they were not present at this council, because there were none at the moment. Four years later Carthage was taken by the Saracens; within eight years the whole Roman domination in Africa to the Atlantic was at an end. The empire had not yet lost everything in the West, for there were still some Byzantine troops and possessions in Italy. The Pope still acknowledged the emperor as his sovereign; and to Pope Sergius the emperor Justinian II. sent these canons, with the request that he would sign them. It is obvious that the position given in them to the bishop of Constantinople was no longer mere rank as in the first step taken in this direction by the Council of 381 under the great Theodosius. It was a higher jurisdiction similar in the East to that which the Pope held in the West. The Byzantine conception, as shewn in this Council, is clearly that the emperor was head of the Church, who, as he did it the honour to call it together, so he did it the further honour to confirm its decrees. Not, as in the case of the first Constantine, that he should make them laws of the empire, over and above their intrinsic spiritual force, as canons of those to whom Christ had committed the government of His Church, but that the emperor’s signature, in the same way as he created a law in civil matters, made a canon in spiritual.