In the study of the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, the canons attached to it are frequently neglected. This may be because no discussion of them is recorded in the official acts of 451. Nonetheless, in the oldest Latin version and the Greek manuscript tradition of the Acts of Chalcedon the twenty-seven canons are inserted as ‘the seventh act’, as if they formed part of the agreed record of the council. The debate over Canon 28, which is numbered to follow on from the other 27, forms the seventeenth session in the Greek acts and the sixteenth in the Latin. The canons became part of the ecclesiastical law of the Church and are cited in sixth-century lists.

The purpose of this short article is two-fold: to examine the fate of Canon 28, which confirmed the standing of Constantinople as the leading patriarchal see in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the east, with an authority comparable to that of Old Rome, and to trace the continuity of concern about particular features of clerical life which feature in the 27 canons. Since the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils of 553 and 680/1 were devoted to matters concerning the ‘mystery of the faith’, rather than ecclesiastical legislation, the gathering summoned by Justinian II in 692 was the first to devote itself to canonical legislation for 240 years.