Constantine the New was a Byzantine emperor commemorated in the Eastern Orthodox calendar on September 3, where he is identified as Heraclius Constantine, who reposed in 641 and was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. He is also known as Constantine III, the eldest son of the Emperor Heraclius. His epithet 'the New' reflects his formal regnal name, in which he was styled 'Heraclius novus Constantinus' (the 'new Constantine'), a title intended to associate him with the legacy of Constantine the Great.
By tradition he was born in 612 to Heraclius and the emperor's first wife, Eudokia, and was raised to the rank of co-emperor as a young child, in 613, sharing his father's throne for the long span of Heraclius's reign. On the death of Heraclius in 641 he became senior emperor, reigning together with his younger half-brother. His own sole reign was very brief: he died after only a few months, and his remains were laid in the imperial Church of the Holy Apostles, the customary resting place of the Byzantine emperors.
The synaxarion remembers him among the right-believing rulers of Byzantium. Sources note an ambiguity in some reference works, which apply the title 'Constantine the New' instead to the later emperor Constantine IV, who convened the Sixth Ecumenical Council and was likewise commemorated on September 3 and buried at the Church of the Holy Apostles; the two emperors are sometimes conflated under the shared title and feast. The Orthodox record of his life is brief, and little is preserved beyond his place in the imperial succession and his honored burial.
