The Middle Byzantine Historians

W. Treadgold

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137280855
• eBook ISBN: 9781137280862
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume, which continues the same author's Early Byzantine Historians, is the first book to analyze the lives and works of all forty-three significant Byzantine historians from the seventh to the thirteenth century, including the authors of three of the world's greatest histories: Michael Psellus, Princess Anna Comnena, and Nicetas Choniates.

1

The Dark Age

No contemporary Byzantine historian recorded the empire’s seventh-century crisis. The reason was not simply that Byzantine readers were few, because Byzantines wrote a number of sermons, saints’ lives, and theological works during this time.¹ The reason was not even that a history of these years would have been unpleasant to read, because the empire’s surviving so many calamities was actually a remarkable achievement. Unresolved crises, however, have always caused problems for contemporary historians. As long as the Byzantines were unsure whether their empire would prosper or founder, they were unable to decide whether to celebrate its merits or to decry the sins for which God had punished it. As long as they harbored similar doubts about their current emperor’s ultimate success, they were unsure whether to praise or condemn him. If they wrote about the contemporary Church without knowing which of two rival doctrines would prevail, they feared that they might be unintentionally endorsing a heresy or denouncing saints. Most actual or potential historians therefore preferred to postpone writing about a war until it was over, about an emperor until he died, or about a disputed doctrine until an ecumenical council had taken a clear position on it.

From about 634 to 718, no historian could be quite sure whether the empire would win its conflict with the Arabs or even survive it. Another complication was Monotheletism, the doctrine that Christ had one will but two natures, a compromise between the Chalcedonian insistence on two natures and the Monophysite insistence on one. First introduced in 633 in the somewhat different form of Monoenergism, Monotheletism was condemned by an ecumenical council only in 681, and even so was revived between 711 and 713. Further complications for contemporary historians included the seven revolutions between 695 and 717 that overthrew six emperors, one of them twice, putting the durability of each new emperor in increasing doubt. All these uncertainties help to explain why we know no names of Byzantine historians who wrote from about 631, when Theophylact Simocatta completed his Ecumenical History, to about 720, when Trajan the Patrician apparently finished his Concise Chronicle.²

The uncertainties Byzantines felt during this period mattered less to Christians in Arab-held Egypt, Syria, and Armenia, where some historians continued to write. There Muslim rule soon became a fact for the foreseeable future, ensuring the survival of Monophysitism and Monotheletism even if they disappeared within the empire. Although no Eastern Christian could be pleased by the persistence of these doctrinal disputes, Monophysites could at least draw the lesson that God had permitted the Muslim conquest in order to punish the emperors who opposed Monophysitism. The Monophysite Egyptian historian Bishop John of Nikiu said as much in his Coptic world chronicle around 660, perhaps drawing on another Monophysite Egyptian historian, who wrote as early as 643.³ Syrians of various religious views wrote short contemporary chronicles as early as 640.⁴ Two Armenian historians wrote more detailed accounts of the seventh century around 661 and 682, even though the Byzantines continued to contest Armenia with the Arabs.⁵ Yet these historians wrote in Coptic, Syriac, or Armenian, not in Greek.⁶ No Egyptian, Syrian, or Armenian historians wrote for a Byzantine readership, and after the Arab conquest of their homelands none of them took much interest in internal Byzantine history, which from their point of view was the history of a foreign power.

History without historians

Nevertheless, even before disciplines like archeology, sigillography, and numismatics were developed in modern times to exploit nonliterary sources, historians of the conventional type were not absolutely essential for preserving an historical record. Other kinds of writers recorded historical material, which could be used later by regular historians, whether Byzantine or not. Government reports, state documents, official orations, acts of church councils, sermons, theological tracts, and saints’ lives could all include accounts of historical events, even if none of those texts could properly be considered a history. Moreover, a writer who jotted down a brief, informal, and anonymous continuation of someone else’s chronicle, like the continuer of the sixth-century Chronicle of Count Marcellinus, could compose history of a sort without claiming to be an historian in the full sense of the word.⁷

On the other hand, when a lost text was used as a source by a later historian who may well have abridged and adapted it, we should at least entertain the possibility that the original source was a history of the usual kind. The most likely candidate for such a work during this period is the source of the Concise History of Nicephorus for the years from 610 to 641. This source appears to have been a continuation of the Chronological History of John of Antioch, which concluded with 610. The author of this continuation finished writing no earlier than 645, because he refers to an event that happened in that year; but we have no reason to date him much later. He was evidently a knowledgeable resident of Constantinople who sympathized with the Monothelete heresy that at the time enjoyed some favor from the emperor Constans II.⁸

This continuer of John of Antioch appears to have relied mostly on his memory or on hearsay, not on a record compiled while events were unfolding. For example, he repeatedly misreported the name of the prominent general Priscus as “Crispus” up to Priscus’ death around 613 and gave the incorrect date of 628/29 for the reception of the True Cross of Christ at Constantinople (if such a reception ever occurred).⁹ Yet the quality of the continuer’s narrative improved as it went on, presumably because the writer could remember more recent events more accurately. Our second precise date from his work, 638/39 for the death of the patriarch of Constantinople Sergius I, is correct.¹⁰ The continuer’s account of the year 641 was detailed and apparently reliable, though Nicephorus seems to have copied it carelessly. It evidently included correct figures for the lengths of the reigns of Heraclius and his son Constantine III, a precise and accurate figure for Constantine’s military payroll in the spring of 641, and the correct month for the consecration of Paul II as patriarch of Constantinople on October 1, 641.¹¹

Although after Paul’s consecration Nicephorus records no further events for twenty-seven years, his manuscript of this source may have lost its final page or two, because he breaks off suddenly in the middle of the intrigues that caused Heraclonas to be replaced by Constans II on November 5, 641. The original continuation of John of Antioch probably reached that date, and possibly ended with the lynching of Constans’ general Valentine in September 644, which finally settled the power struggle that had begun in 641.¹² If John of Antioch was a young man when he finished his Chronological History around 610, he may still have been alive in 645 and continued his own work.¹³ Perhaps more likely, given that the Historical Excerpts of Constantine VII, our main source for John’s history, include nothing from it after 610, is that a later writer without serious literary pretensions continued John’s history.¹⁴ Yet however brief and hastily written John of Antioch’s continuation may have been, it was an almost contemporary account of thirty-odd years that are otherwise poorly documented.

In a different category from more or less formal chronicles was the historical raw material in the bureaucratic reports and battle dispatches that the imperial government and army routinely prepared for their own use. Examples of these sorts of documents from the early Byzantine period can be found in diplomatic reports by Olympiodorus of Thebes, Nonnosus, and Peter the Patrician, and in battle dispatches by Maurice’s general Priscus and the emperor Julian when he was Caesar.¹⁵ From the early seventh century we have the official text of the emperor Heraclius’ announcement of his victory over the Persians in 628, which is quoted in the nearly contemporary work now known somewhat misleadingly as the “Paschal Chronicle.”¹⁶ Theophanes Confessor’s ninth-century Chronography appears to paraphrase other dispatches sent from the front by Heraclius, and it demonstrably paraphrases passages from two of George of Pisidia’s poems, the Persian Expedition and the Heracliad.¹⁷

In other places Theophanes seems to be paraphrasing verses resembling George’s extant poems but not found in our collections of them. Some modern scholars have postulated that the military dispatches reached Theophanes in the form of an “official history” of Heraclius’ Persian campaigns that George compiled, composing verses of his own to give the documents a context.¹⁸ Yet such a deliberate mixture of bureaucratic prose and formal poetry in a single work would be utterly unparalleled in Byzantine literature or anywhere else.¹⁹ A more plausible version of this hypothesis would be that someone other than George compiled an account of Heraclius’ Persian campaigns by combining official communications with an otherwise unknown poem by George that described the campaigns in detail. The failure of this poem to reach us despite the general popularity of George’s poetry in Byzantium may mean that George left it unfinished at his death around 632. If a contemporary of George’s compiled the composite account, he seems to have muddled the chronology and geography somewhat and produced a composition that could barely be called history or even literature. The most likely explanation, however, is that Theophanes himself (or his friend George Syncellus) found both the dispatches and the poem and combined them into his own chronicle, which we know drew on other poems by George of Pisidia and other documents.²⁰

Naturally the imperial government kept many other sorts of records in its archives. These included an official register of the dates of death or deposition of the emperors and the lengths of their reigns, since this information was needed to date government documents by emperors’ regnal years. In the form of an elementary chronicle now conventionally called the Necrologium, this record survives today in a fragmentary palimpsest of Constantine VII’s On Ceremonies and in a corrupt Latin translation in the thirteenth-century Chronicon Altinate.²¹ The register must have been kept current for several hundred years in several easily accessible copies so that it could be consulted by many government officials. Contemporary historians, however, show little if any knowledge of its dates, which they often omit or compute in a different way from the register.²²

Otherwise the Byzantine archives seem not to have been organized in a way that made them easily consultable, and the Byzantines had no tradition of doing systematic archival research in any case. As a result, even an historian with access to the archives tended to use only whatever documents he found there by chance and thought were interesting.²³ Thus Theophanes, probably relying on research already done for the lost history of Trajan the Patrician, was able to quote part of an oration delivered to the senate by Constans II in 642/43, as well as a decree by Anastasius II in 715 appointing Germanus I patriarch of Constantinople.²⁴ Theophanes also drew on a favorable account of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• 1 The Dark Age
• 2 George Syncellus and Theophanes Confessor
• 3 Theophanes’ Successors
• 4 Historians under Leo the Wise
• 5 The Official Histories of Constantine Porphyrogenitus
• 6 Symeon the Logothete and Pseudo-Symeon
• 7 Historians of the Age of Expansion
• 8 Michael Psellus
• 9 Psellus’ Contemporaries
• 10 Nicephorus Bryennius and Anna Comnena
• 11 Anna Comnena’s Contemporaries
• 12 Nicetas Choniates
• 13 The Historians as a Group
• Chronological Table of the Middle Byzantine Historians
• List of English Translations of the Middle Byzantine Historians
• Bibliography
• Index