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Rh drove a wedge between the two halves of the Christian Church. It was, long before the 9th century, the slowly climbing ambition of Constantinople that bred mutual jealousy and hatred; the thin end of the wedge was when, in 381, the Bishop of Constantinople was given the "precedence of honour after the Bishop of Rome."

But the first development of this see was not made at the cost of Rome, but at that of the Eastern Patriarchs around her. At first no bishop was smaller than the Bishop of Byzantium. He was not even a metropolitan. Centuries afterwards, when he had become the first of Eastern prelates, when he was jealously trying to rival the unquestioned Primacy of Rome, he tried to hide the humble beginning of his see. To be of any great importance a bishop had to count his diocese among the Apostolic Churches. There was really no question of anything of the kind in the case of Constantinople; all her greatness came from the presence of the Emperor and his Court. But in the 9th century especially, a story went about that the first Bishop of Byzantium had been St. Andrew the Apostle; his successor then was the Stachys mentioned in Rom. xvi. 9. This story is found in a forgery attributed to one Dorotheus, Bishop of Tyrus, and martyr under Diocletian. It served its turn in fighting Rome, but has now long been given up.

Really the first Bishop of Byzantium of whom we hear was Metrophanes at the time of Constantine (323–337). And he was a local bishop of Thrace under the Metropolitan of Heraclea. The bishops of this small city would no doubt have remained in that position, and Heraclea would have become an exarchate over Thrace, as Ephesus over Asia and Cæsarea over Pontus, but for one most important fact that changed the whole development of Eastern Church history. In 330 Constantine "turned the Eagle back against the course of heaven," moved