Thomas 6 was a disypatos; he was the addressee of a letter from Theodoros 15 (Theodore the Stoudite), written in c. 804/806; he was a native of Constantinople who had recently been banished from there, deprived of his rank and his property, and separated from his friends and children; he was being moved around from place to place but was not far from Constantinople (πρὸ τοῦ ἄστεος); he is styled τῇ σῇ κυριότητι and addressed as ὦ δέσποτα: Theod. Stud., Ep. 12 (addressed Θωμᾷ δισυπάτῳ). See Fatouros, p. 153*ff. with n. 50. A patrikios and former disypatos, in February 815 (at the beginning of Lent) he was in charge of the Church at Constantinople, appointed by the emperor Leo V (Leo 15), following the refusal of the patriarch Nikephoros (Nikephoros 2) to yield to the emperor's iconoclast intentions (τις Θωμᾶς πατρίκιος ἀπὸ δισυπάτων γενόμενος, ὃς τότε τὴν ἐκκλησίαν παρέλαβεν ὑπὸ τοῦ βασιλέως); when a crowd of iconoclasts demonstrated outside the patriarchal palace where Nikephoros 2 lay ill, Thomas closed the entrances and drove them away on the grounds that they were acting without the emperor's permission; when he reported this to Leo V, the emperor said that they had just grievances; Thomas then suggested that it would be easy to remove Nikephoros, because he was still too ill to walk and it only required two men able to carry him on a litter; the emperor took his advice: Scriptor Incertus 358. On the status of disypatos, see Winkelmann, Rangstruktur, p. 36. Cf. Thomas 30. He is perhaps the man recorded in Theoph. Cont. I 20 (p. 32) as ὁ τοῦ ἱεροῦ συστήματός τε καὶ κλήρου τῶν βασιλικῶν αὐλῶν ἀρχηγός, who incited Leo V (Leo 15) to act against icons, drawing the emperor's attention to a relevant passage from the Old Testament (Isaiah 40. vv. 18-19).

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