John V

John was a Syrian from Antioch, the son of a man named Cyriacus, and one of the three legates Agatho had sent to the Third Council of Constantinople, where he had seen the Eastern church condemn Monothelitism and a pope. He came home a deacon of standing, and when Benedict II died in May 685 the clergy, army, and people of Rome elected him and, under the emperor's new decree, had him consecrated on 23 July without sending to Constantinople first. The Liber Pontificalis notes that the ceremony took place in the Lateran rather than at Saint Peter's, as if to mark that the pope no longer needed to wait at the apostle's tomb for an answer from the East.

He was ill from the start and governed from his bed. His one recorded judgment was for Sardinia: the archbishop of Cagliari had consecrated a bishop for the see of Turris without reference to Rome, and John annulled the consecration and reasserted the pope's right to consecrate Sardinian bishops himself, a claim Gregory the Great had made and the island's archbishops kept forgetting. The emperor's new favor showed in a reduction of the taxes owed by the papal estates in Sicily and Calabria, which Justinian II, succeeding his father in September 685, confirmed.

His death produced the first disputed election in a generation: the clergy wanted one man, the army another, and the compromise was an old Sicilian priest named Conon.