Photios I of Constantinople

Photios I of Constantinople, who lived from about 815 to his death on February 6, 893, served as Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 858 to 867 and again from 877 to 886, and is venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church as Saint Photius the Great. He is widely regarded as the most powerful and influential church leader of Constantinople since John Chrysostom nearly five centuries earlier, and is described as the most important intellectual of his time and the leading light of the ninth century renaissance. His scholarly reputation rests chiefly on the Bibliotheca, a vast systematic compilation and review of earlier Greek literature, which established him as one of the great compilers and systematizers of Byzantine learning.