Stephen Hagiochristophorites

[3] In September or October 1183 Andronikos dispatched Hagiochristophorites, assisted by Constantine Tripsychos and Theodore Dadibrenos, to murder Alexios II.

The young emperor was strangled with a bowstring, and Andronikos rewarded Hagiochristophorites with the rank of pansebastos sebastos and the post of logothetes tou dromou.

After wounding the attendants and forcing them to flee, Angelos galloped down the Mese thoroughfare on horseback to the Hagia Sophia, shouting to the populace of his deed.

[8] The rise of this "most celebrated of the parvenues" (Charles Brand) to such power, his haughtiness and ruthlessness, and his complicity in the murder of Alexios II and in Andronikos's increasingly tyrannical rule, with its bloody purges of the aristocracy, combined to make Hagiochristophorites an object of hatred for the traditional elites, as attested in the writings of contemporaries and subsequent historians.

"[10] Indeed, Choniates records that his surname, literally meaning "Holy Bearer of Christ"—although originally probably reflecting a place of origin dedicated to Saint Christopher[11]—was popularly changed to Ἀντιχριστοφορίτης, Antichristophorites, literally meaning "bearer of the Antichrist", for, in the words of Choniates, "he was the most shameless of Andronikos's attendants, filled with every wickedness".