The emperor Anastasius, so strangely chosen from a first secretary to succeed a fallen usurper, and undo his establishment of heresy, was both orthodox and blameless in conduct, and strove to defend his much endangered empire. He had armed a fleet, but it rebelled and killed its commander. The end of a civil war, lasting six months, was that Anastasius retired of his own accord on condition that his life should be spared: he became a monk and priest and was banished to Thessalonica. He had reigned two years and a half. Anastasius, some time after his retirement, made, when Leo III. was established on the throne, an attempt to regain it. For this he was publicly executed at Constantinople. So he was added to his predecessors, Leontius, Apsimar, and Justinian II., making the fourth of the seven emperors reigning from 685 to the accession of Leo III. in 717, to whom the throne was a scaffold. Theodosius III., a good man but an incapable ruler, had in vain tried to escape the crown imposed on him by the rebellious fleet. After a year the general of the army of the East, a soldier of great capacity and vigour, was advancing to dethrone him. The senate and patriarch advised him to resign. His private property was secured to him on condition that both he and his son became priests. Theodosius III. yielded possession of a throne from acquiring which he had fled, and lived in peace at Ephesus. He gave himself up to good works, and when he was buried in St. Philip’s Church he had ordered the single word _health_ to be engraven on his tomb: a silent intimation that he was the sole among Leo’s six predecessors who had escaped unhurt, and no less that he found in death the healing of all sorrows. In the year 717 Leo the Isaurian mounted the throne thus vacated, and entering by the golden gate on the 25th March, 717, was crowned in Sancta Sophia by the patriarch Germanus, after he had taken before him the oath to maintain the faith of the Church intact. On the 8th April, 715, Pope Constantine died, after a pontificate of seven years, “a strenuous and successful defender of Rome’s orthodox faith, and a worthy predecessor of greater successors, under whom Rome was delivered from the Byzantine yoke”.(161) After forty days St. Gregory II. became Pope on the 19th May, 715.