Patriarch Alexius of Constantinople - Patriarchate

Patriarchate

Alexius set out to reform the church institution of the charistike. The institution of the charistike dorea (donation), which recent research dates to the period just after the restoration of Orthodoxy (843). Effectively, it involved the donation of monasteries to private individuals unrelated to the establishments founders, for a limited period of time. Ostensibly undertaken so that the monastery buildings could be repaired or conserved and the estate out to good use, while at the same time protecting and preserving its spiritual functions, in actuality it was widely abused by the landed gentry and so became a source of abused patronage by high church officials and a tool against the powerful monastic establishment. Alexius tried to temper the worst abused of the notorious charistike by appointing through Synodal legislation the patriarch's chancellor, the chartophylax, as the official to serve as the final point of approval for all grants under the system. Alexius also restricted the granting of charistike to non-dioceesan monasteries. The fact that Alexius sought reform over abolishment of the charistike dorea likely shows the inability of the Church to claim back many of these properties from the powerful land-owning elite who held them.

He promoted the zealous actions of John of Melitene whose interest it was to limit the influence of the Syro Jacobite Church in the south east of the Byzantine Empire, especially in the newly conquered themes of Mesopotamia and Telouch. For this reason the Syro-Jacobite Patriarch John VIII bar Abdoun was arrested and brought to trial in Constantinople and then forced into a monastery on Mt. Ganos. In 1034 he crowned Michael IV the Paphlagonian, the favorite of Byzantine empress Zoë, who, to make way for him, procured the death of her husband, the Emperor Romanos III Argyros. He thwarted the attempts of John the Orphanotrophos (the emperor's brother) to gain the patriarchal see in 1036, and died in 1043.