Networking to reign and survive: Constantine V’s social strategies during iconomachy

The aim of this paper is to investigate Constantine V’s social network and to find out the connections between him and his entourage. To this end, I compared the three primary sources (Cronographia of Theophaes, History of Patriarch Nikephoros and The life of Saint Stephen the Younger) on the political positions against Constantine V in order to discover what the emperor built after the reign of his father. On this purpose, I decided to use such sources because they are probably closer to the iconophile vulgata. Primary sources like these are interesting, but at the same very dangerous in the representation of the construction of a social network in this period, especially when they entail different literary genres (chronicle, history, hagiography). For this reason, in order to analyse, to a great extent, the social relationships during the reign of Constantine V, I resorted to Boissevain’s work