GERMANUS II, Patriarch of Nicaea-Constantinople. - Born at Anaplusa on the Bosporus ca. 1175, deacon of St. Sophia, then monk in Asia Minor after 1204, elected patriarch against his will at the request of the emperor John Vatatzes and ordained at the end of June 1222, died on his throne at Nicaea (1240), after having received in extremis the habit under the name of George; after his death he enjoyed a reputation as a thaumaturge and was the object of liturgical acclamations if not of cult on the part of individual Churches (for example, the Greek one).
His administration had to resolve four serious problems: the struggle against the autonomist tendencies of the European episcopate supported by the despots of Epirus, then emperors of Thessalonica; the regulation of the statute of the Bulgarian Church, whose independence G. sanctioned by creating there the patriarchate of Tirnovo (spring of 1235); soundings for an approach to Rome which did not succeed (1232-34); negotiations, continued by his successors, for the union of the Armenian Church of Cilicia with the Byzantine one (1239-40). Internally, moreover, the long pontificate of G. made it possible to reorganize and reassert the ecumenical throne within its Anatolian frontiers and to make the principles of patriarchal continuity prevail.
The writings of G. are as diverse as they are numerous. Besides the chancery acts which do not necessarily come from his pen and whose critical inventory is found in fasc. IV of the registers of the acts of the patriarchs of Constantinople, the following are distinguished: 1) a series of letters that can be attributed to him and that fall into the preceding category; 2) polemical treatises strongly anti-Latin; 3) religious poems whose authenticity is not always certain; 4) a long series of discourses, homilies and catecheses preserved for the most part in the valuable codex Paris Coislin Greek 278. Many other works attributed to G. belong instead to his celebrated namesake and predecessor G. I. A critical work on this subject is still lacking.
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Vitaliano Laurent