However, the power of the patriarch of Constantinople continued to grow. Eastern Orthodox state that the 28th canon of the Council of Chalcedon (451) explicitly proclaimed the equality of the Bishops of Rome and Constantinople, and that it established the highest court of ecclesiastical appeal in Constantinople. The patriarch of the imperial capital succeeded in his efforts to become the leading bishop in the Byzantine Empire: he "headed a vast curia and other bishops who resided in Constantinople constituted a permanent synod, which became the real governing body of the church".