In the fourth century the names of Eusebius, Macedonius, Eudoxius, and Demophilus in the see of the capital are marked as supporters of the Arian heresy. In the fifth century the Nestorian heresy springs from its author in the very chair of Constantinople. Fifty years later the Acacian schism springs in like manner from the ambition of its author in the same chair, and the names of four successors, Fravitas, Euphemius, Macedonius II, and Timotheus are struck from the diptychs of their own church, when the schism was terminated under Pope Hormisdas. In less than twenty years after this, Anthimus, put into the see of the capital by the intrigues of the same empress Theodora who violently deposed Pope St. Silverius, was deposed by Pope Agapetus in his visit to Constantinople, as a Monophysite heretic. In the sixth century the Monothelite heresy was owing mainly to the political intrigues of Sergius, sitting for twenty-eight years in the see of Constantinople, also the prime minister and guide of the emperor Heraclius; he and his three successors, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, were the main-stay of that most insidious and stubborn heresy, which for forty continuous years kept the Church in peril, and strove to overthrow the efforts of ten Popes to maintain the faith, and brought one of them to die a martyr under the rule of Constans II. But in the seventh and eighth centuries, the most terrible Iconoclast persecution found in six bishops of Constantinople its main support, in that they put to the service of the emperors Leo III. and Constantine Kopronymus, Leo V. and Theophilus, these immense ecclesiastical powers with which the emperors themselves had invested them over the eastern bishops. The single patriarch had himself become a despot in wielding the tyranny of the civil despot as his chief instrument. These six ecumenical patriarchs wielded their authority under Iconoclast emperors for a long time: Anastasius I. from 730 to 753; Constantine II. from 754 to 766; Nicetas I. from 766 to 780; then an orthodox sovereign brought with him an orthodox council. The patriarch Tarasius and union with the West might seem to have secured a deliverance from a renewed reign of the Iconoclast violence. On the contrary, three succeeding patriarchs, Theodotus from 815 to 821; Antonius I. from 821 to 832, and John VII. from 832 to 841, did what they could to carry out the wishes of their masters for that heresy. Such was the conduct, as guardian of the faith, of the line of pseudo-popes set up by state policy at Constantinople, in virtue of the pretension that the bishop of Nova Roma should enjoy equal rights with the bishop of Old Rome.