Autocephaly of Cyprus confirmed

other · 431 · Ephesus

Rheginus of Constantia came to Ephesus in 431 with his fellow bishops Zeno and Evagrius to report that the bishop of Antioch had been holding ordinations on the island, against ancient custom. The council's eighth canon ruled that the rulers of the churches in Cyprus should ordain their own bishops "without dispute or injury", and made the principle general: no bishop was to take a province that had not been under his hand from the beginning. The privilege outlasted the island itself — when the Cypriots fled the Arab raids for the Hellespont, Trullo's thirty-ninth canon carried it with them to New Justinianopolis.