Download PDF | The Middle Byzantine Historians, By Warren Treadgold, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
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Preface
This book, the second of three projected studies of the Byzantine historians from Eusebius of Caesarea through the fifteenth century, is of a sort that has become unusual.1 Today the standard practice is for studies of ancient or Byzantine authors to appear in separate articles or books, which are then summarized in handbooks, usually by a group of scholars. Such handbooks, which tend to be judged mostly by the completeness of their bibliographical references, seldom try to correct earlier mistakes, to reconcile existing inconsistencies, or to arrive at overall conclusions.
Here my purpose is different: to study all the Byzantine histories themselves, to correct as many mistakes and to reconcile as many inconsistencies in the secondary literature as I can, and to arrive at some general conclusions and observations about Byzantine historiography. I try to put the historians into their historical and literary contexts, to summarize what we can know about them, to describe what they tell us and how they tell it, and to evaluate their works both as history and as literature. This is, therefore, not a handbook meant to summarize previous studies in order to prepare for future studies, but an attempt to study the historians here and now.
Accordingly I refer only to the secondary literature that I have found useful for my purposes and omit the rest. (Naturally I also omit publications that had not reached me when I finished writing, in 2012.) Readers may call this book a monograph if they find that term suitable for a book on forty-odd writers spanning six centuries. Since the word “polygraph” means something else, I would rather call the book a comprehensive study. I try to alert the reader whenever I think previous scholarship is mistaken and to explain why I think so. I have, however, avoided lengthy summarizing of opinions that I consider mistaken, especially when they are based on misunderstandings or errors already identified by previous scholarship.
A prudent colleague of mine in another field recently rejected an offer to write a general history because it would force him to take positions on controversial questions that would offend other scholars no matter what he said. I can confirm from experience that what many scholars want is agreement with their own work—certainly not a detailed refutation of it—and since they disagree with each other, some will be dissatisfied with any general treatment.2 This is probably one reason few books like the present one are written any longer.
We know middle Byzantine historiography less well than early Byzantine historiography, chiefly because fewer modern scholars have studied the later historians. For example, we have no published collection of fragments of Byzantine historians after the sixth century, even though more than a dozen middle Byzantine histories survive only in fragments, usually paraphrased in later histories. Fragmentary middle Byzantine historians like Trajan the Patrician, Sergius Confessor, or Nicetas the Paphlagonian have attracted far less scholarly interest than fragmentary early Byzantine historians like Eunapius, Philostorgius, or Priscus.
Among major historians whose works survive intact, Michael Psellus, Anna Comnena, and Nicetas Choniates in the middle period have been studied much less than Eusebius, Ammianus, and Procopius in the early period. Every good modern edition of a Byzantine historical work lists in its textual apparatus parallel passages in other Byzantine histories. Just as determining which manuscripts depended on other manuscripts is the responsibility of an editor, explaining which historians depended on others is the responsibility of any scholar who traces the development of Byzantine historiography. Whenever two historical texts resemble each other closely (unless their only resemblance is that they record the same events), one of them must somehow depend on the other. If one surviving history cannot derive directly from another surviving history, we must postulate a lost source, just as we must postulate a lost manuscript if one surviving manuscript cannot derive directly from another surviving manuscript.
Any thorough study of the middle Byzantine historians must therefore reckon with the existence of historians whose works are now lost, even if their identities may be difficult or impossible to determine. Some modern scholars who have treated Byzantine historians as if their works were entirely original may be dismayed by my attribution of much of those works to lost sources.
Yet most Byzantine historians prided themselves on repeating their sources faithfully for any events outside their personal knowledge, which of course included every event that no contemporary could remember. For example, though many modern scholars have persisted in treating the Chronography of Theophanes Confessor as if its accounts of events from 284 to 813 were mostly composed by Theophanes, Theophanes himself claims that he added to his sources “nothing of my own.” Large parts of his Chronography are demonstrably summarized from extant texts; most of it records events from long before Theophanes was born; and we have good reasons to think that even its record of contemporary events was the work of Theophanes’ friend George Syncellus.3 While Theophanes inevitably “ shaped his material by what he included or omitted, most of the time he seems to have followed the opinions of his sources.4 Modern eagerness to praise Byzantine texts and reluctance to criticize them has sometimes amounted to a renunciation of critical judgment.5
As it happens, the Byzantines wrote several excellent histories, many competent ones, and only a few truly bad ones; but all authors and scholars have their faults. While Byzantine historians should not be criticized for not doing things that they never meant to do, such as formulating a comprehensive philosophy of history, almost all of them meant (or at least said they meant) to report past events accurately, impartially, and intelligently in works that would have literary value. Sometimes they criticized each other or even themselves for doing these things inadequately. We too should feel free to criticize them when they fell short of what they were trying to do. Besides being readier to criticize Byzantine historians, I differ with some modern scholars in several main ways. First, many scholars seem to think that it is somehow safer or more cautious to postulate multiple texts or authors than to postulate only one.
For example, some scholars prefer to believe in two extremely similar histories of the late eighth and early ninth century rather than to identify Sergius Confessor with the so-called Scriptor Incertus. Others would rather believe that as many as three very similar lost histories were written around the year 921 instead of a single lost history by Nicetas the Paphlagonian. Still others have resorted to far-fetched conjectures rather than admit that the historian Symeon the Logothete was the same man as Symeon Metaphrastes.6 Yet to postulate several texts or authors needlessly is actually less cautious than to postulate one text. It is simply a refusal to use Ockham’s razor.
Second, several scholars prefer to assume that the lost sources of historians like Nicephorus and Theophanes or Genesius and the author of Theophanes Continuatus were not other histories but “dossiers” of loose notes that were somehow transmitted from historian to historian.7 While some Byzantine anthologies and collections of excerpts have reached us, as far as I know not a single “dossier” from the Byzantine period either survives in manuscript or is even attested. The Byzantines had no word for “dossier” and are unlikely to have kept anything of the sort, because their parchment and paper were too expensive, and their wax tablets too small, to use for rough notes of any length.
If a Byzantine went to the trouble and expense of combining material from several sources on parchment, he called it a chronicle, even if it was as disorganized as the chronicle of George Syncellus or as short as the chronicle of Peter of Alexandria. Until an actual Byzantine historical “dossier” is discovered, to conjecture the existence of such a thing seems to me needless and baseless speculation.
Another sort of text that has sometimes been hypothesized on the basis of inadequate or illusory evidence is the “biography,” “pamphlet,” or “family chronicle” of some private person or persons.8 Few Byzantine biographies exist even of emperors—in the middle period only the Life of Basil, on Basil I, is better described as an imperial biography than as a general history of an emperor’s reign—and I argue here that the only apparent reference to a “history” of a man who was not an emperor is based on a misunderstanding.9 In fact, not a single historical biography of someone who was neither an emperor nor a saint is credibly attested, much less preserved, from the whole Byzantine period.
The evidence that has been adduced for such biographies can be more plausibly explained as coming from oral sources, to which Byzantine historians frequently refer, or from funeral orations, of which a number survive from the middle Byzantine period. Another way in which I differ with some modern historians is that I have less to say about ideology and mentalities. Most Byzantine historians did have an ideology: conventional but sincere orthodox Christianity, with a corresponding view of the imperial office and church hierarchy as divinely ordained.
Many of them disliked or even detested some of their individual emperors and patriarchs, but without questioning the basic Byzantine religious and political system. A few of the historians do seem on rare occasions to imply doubts about that system, but in my opinion their doubts were more apparent than real, a rhetorical device for criticizing their contemporaries by invoking the virtues of the Roman Republic, which obviously could not have been reconstituted in Byzantine times.10
Byzantines could hope for the overthrow of the current emperor but not of government by emperors. Since the Byzantine historians supply us with few details about themselves or their working methods, we must often choose between saying nothing about them and guessing. My assumption has been that readers are better served by being told my best guess on the basis of all the evidence than by simply being told that we know nothing for certain. Those readers should, however, realize that such words as “probably,” “perhaps,” and “approximately” in my text and notes really do mean that the statements they qualify are in varying degrees uncertain. With so much work remaining to be done on Byzantine history, literature, and historiography, we should always be ready to revise our opinions in the light of new evidence, and I have changed my own mind many times while researching and writing this book.
Since I have, however, tried not to speculate when we have no reasonable basis for conjecture, readers may find that some of the historians whom I have tried to bring back from the dead look rather spectral. Yet I hope that drawing even shadowy portraits of them will help to clarify the development of Byzantine historiography. Whenever possible, as in my Early Byzantine Historians, I cite Byzantine texts by standard book, section, and paragraph numbers, which should ideally be the same in all editions, translations, and secondary works. Unfortunately, many Byzantinists still cite texts by the page numbers of the most recent editions. Even worse, some editors still publish Byzantine texts without numbering their books, chapters, and paragraphs continuously, and in these cases I have had no choice but to use page numbers.
This is one of several respects in which Byzantinists should follow the example of classicists, recognizing that Byzantine literature was continuous with classical Greek literature and constantly drew upon it. While I follow classicists’ traditional practice of Latinizing or Anglicizing Byzantine names and titles, I see little harm in the current fashion for transliterating names and titles on the basis of reconstructed ancient Greek pronunciation, so long as everyone realizes that no Byzantine ever pronounced Greek in such a way and that no system of transliteration is ideal.11
Although I have sought no financial support for this particular volume other than a sabbatical from Saint Louis University, I remain grateful for the grants I received from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to begin my whole project on the Byzantine historians. Cyril Mango, to whom this volume is dedicated, and Anthony Kaldellis have both read much of my text and made very useful suggestions and corrections. I have received other helpful advice from John Barker, James Howard-Johnston, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Athanasios Markopoulos, Roger Scott, and the late Ihor Ševcˇenko. My thanks go also to the staff of Saint Louis University’s Pius XII Memorial Library, especially to its Interlibrary Loan department, who have helped me obtain many obscure items. My further thanks go to my cartographer, Alan Whitaker, for his elegant work on the maps, not just for this volume but for my Early Byzantine Historians as well.
For years one of my greatest pleasures in finishing books has been the chance to collaborate with my longtime editor, Paul Psoinos, who has done his usual excellent work on this one. My best thanks go to him and to my editors at Palgrave Macmillan for making special efforts to produce an unconventional book.
Saint Louis September 2012
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 career of Leo III before his accession, which may well have been delivered as an encomium of Leo soon after his coronation in 717.25 Other documents of historical importance included the acts of the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680–81) and of the Quinisext Council
(691–92), though neither Theophanes nor Nicephorus seems to have bothered to consult either of those. Additional works written during this period that recorded history without being histories themselves included the anonymous collection The Miracles of St. Demetrius, compiled around 683, and a sermon by the theologian Anastasius of Sinai that can be dated around 701.
Though the former appears to have been overlooked or neglected by contemporary historians, the latter was evidently used by Trajan the Patrician for his history.26 Of course, almost any type of writing could contain incidental historical material of a kind that a modern historian would use. Yet few Byzantine historians showed the originality, skill, or interest needed to extract historical information from texts that as a whole had no obvious bearing on history.
Generally, Byzantine historians used information from a text that was not a history in the same way that they used information from the imperial archives—only when they happened to find it; not because they did systematic research to collect it. Finally, almost all Byzantine historians of their own times drew on their own experiences and on the experiences of people they knew. Yet with the passage of time memories inevitably became less and less reliable, especially for complicated political or military events, faraway geography, or exact dates. Worst of all, not even an elderly informant with a good memory who had taken an active interest in war and politics from an early age could recall historical events much more than sixty years in the past with much accuracy or in much detail.
Most informants, of course, could not recall as much as that. While they might occasionally remember something that an old man had told them long ago, or even something that an old man had told them he had been told by an old man, such recollections would be short and not very trustworthy. Unfortunately for modern historians, Trajan the Patrician wrote about ninety years after the last events recorded in the “Paschal Chronicle,” which was the latest formal history at the time, and about eighty years after the last events recorded in the lost continuation of John of Antioch.27 As a result, no detailed narrative of internal Byzantine affairs by a well-informed Byzantine exists between 641, when Nicephorus’ account ceases to depend on the continuation of John of Antioch, and the 680’s, when the history of Trajan used by Nicephorus and Theophanes became fairly comprehensive as Trajan was able to draw on his own memories.
These forty-odd years comprised most of the eventful reigns of Constans II (641–68) and Constantine IV (668–85). During this period, Byzantine records supplied only the most basic chronology of emperors, patriarchs, and church councils, while Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic sources gave only a skeletal account of Byzantium’s wars with the Arabs. Measured by the quality and quantity of the historiography, this is the darkest age of Byzantine history. Some of what our sources do say about it is questionable, and they certainly omit many significant events that a knowledgeable contemporary would have included. Among other defects, the sources for this period failed to describe the transformation of the Byzantine administration and army that we can infer from earlier and later sources, the coinage, and the seals of state officials and officers. Around this time the army was reorganized into the divisions known as themes, settled in the provinces also called themes, and supported by grants designated as military lands, evidently distributed from the enormous imperial estates that virtually disappeared during this period. Around the same time, the civil service was reorganized into smaller departments under officials known as logothetes. The absence of explicit evidence has led some modern scholars to postulate that these changes happened through a gradual process of evolution.
Yet the government had no time for gradual measures when the loss of the empire’s richest regions, Egypt and Syria, suddenly eliminated the revenues needed to pay the army, which was still essential to keep the Arabs from conquering the rest of the empire. Financial and military necessity therefore indicates that at least the system of military lands must have been deliberately enacted during the reign of Constans II, probably between 659 and 662.28 Though any contemporary Byzantine historian would presumably have recorded such changes, the next Byzantine historian wrote some sixty years later, when no current officials remembered exactly what had happened and everyone had come to take the new military and administrative system for granted.
Trajan the Patrician The tenth-century encyclopedia known as the Suda includes this brief entry in the margin of its text: “Trajan, patrician. He flourished under Justinian [II] the Slit-Nosed, wrote a quite wonderful Concise Chronicle, and was very Christian and very orthodox.”29 Evidently the original author of this note had read Trajan’s work and found that Trajan referred to himself as a contemporary of Justinian II during his second reign, between 705 and 711, when that emperor regained his throne after being deposed and having his nose slit in 695. If we take forty as the canonical age when a man “flourished” (that is, his floruit) and assume that Trajan reached that age around 705, he was born around 665.30 Given the rarity of the name Trajan, a lead seal of “Trajan the Consul,” dated roughly to the seventh century, probably belonged to our Trajan at an earlier stage of his career.31 In this period patricians ranked just below members of the imperial family, and consuls ranked just below patricians.32 Theophanes must have had access to Trajan’s Concise Chronicle, because he remarks in his Chronography, “Trajan the Patrician says in his history that the Scythians are called ‘Goths’ in the local language.”33 This citation shows that Trajan affected a classicizing style, because he referred to the Goths by the ancient name “Scythians,” which had become an archaism for any barbarians from the northeast.
Theophanes cites Trajan after recording the Battle of Adrianople (378), when the Goths defeated the imperial army; but his remark would apply even better to 704. In that year, according to a passage in Nicephorus paralleled in Theophanes, Justinian II escaped from his exile in the Byzantine city of Cherson to “the country of the Goths” (the Crimea) and then to “the Scythian Bosporus” (the Straits of Kerch).34 Placed in this context, the sentence from Theophanes would explain Trajan’s reference to “the local language” as the language of the Goths who had long been settled in the Crimea. Even though this sentence of Theophanes is the only explicit citation of Trajan that we have, in all likelihood Trajan was the unnamed source shared by Theophanes and Nicephorus between 668 and 720.
That such a source existed is plain from many similar passages in the two historians, although each historian paraphrased it rather freely, Nicephorus in a classicizing style and Theophanes in a less elegant one.35 Since Theophanes could cite Trajan’s history when he covered the fourth century, he would scarcely have failed to exploit it when he came to the years on which Trajan wrote as a contemporary.
As for Nicephorus, the similarity between the titles of his Concise History and Concise Chronography and the title of Trajan’s Concise Chronicle may show that Nicephorus implicitly acknowledged Trajan as a source.36 The “very Christian and very orthodox” sentiments attributed by the Suda to Trajan evidently appeared in the common source of Nicephorus and Theophanes, which condemned the Monothelete heresy and gave credit for the failure of the Arab siege of Constantinople in 718 to God and the Virgin.37 Besides the material evidently from Trajan that Theophanes shares with Nicephorus, clear similarities of content show that Theophanes drew on the same work for events as early as 629.
Given that Byzantine historians of their own times usually continued an earlier history, Trajan seems likely to have continued the “Paschal Chronicle,” which concluded with early 630. The reason Nicephorus failed to use this part of Trajan’s text may be that he read Trajan’s history in a damaged manuscript that had lost its beginning; or perhaps Nicephorus simply found Trajan’s brief and somewhat confused account inferior to the more detailed and coherent narrative in the continuation of John of Antioch, of which Theophanes was unaware.38 Similarities of content also indicate that Trajan’s history was the source of two quotations in the Suda’s entry “Bulgars,” one relating to 680 and the other to 705.39 If we include all the passages that may plausibly be attributed to Trajan’s history, which according to its title was concise, we probably have more than half of its contents, mostly summarized by Nicephorus or Theophanes. By means of some guesswork, the material attributable to Trajan can be combined with the note in the Suda to reconstruct the outline of that historian’s career. Trajan seems to have been born in Constantinople around 665 into a family of prominent civil officials who rejected Monotheletism, which the government tolerated at that time.
He acquired training advanced enough that he could write classicizing Greek, though probably all he received was a good secondary education, since it appears that at the time no institution offered a proper higher education. Trajan apparently entered the civil service under Constantine IV, and so before 685, but perhaps not until Monotheletism had been formally repudiated in 681, so that Trajan’s hostility to it was no longer an obstacle to his promotion in the bureaucracy. Probably Trajan enjoyed the patronage of a certain John Pitzigaudium the Patrician who served as Constantine’s ambassador to the Arabs in 678, because Trajan mentioned John several times, praising his intelligence, expertise, and aristocratic birth.40
Trajan can barely have embarked on his official career when the young Justinian II became emperor in 685. From the start, the historian depicted Justinian as a fool, a monster of cruelty, and practically a madman. Trajan went so far as to accuse Justinian of ordering the massacre of the entire population of Constantinople just before he was overthrown in 695. Trajan’s denunciation of Justinian for appointing bad officials, which figured prominently in the Concise Chronicle among far more serious charges, suggests that what the historian resented most may have been his own failure to advance in the bureaucracy during Justinian’s reign.41 Trajan plainly approved of Leontius’ successful plot to overthrow Justinian and displayed such detailed knowledge of it that he may well have been one of the conspirators. Perhaps Leontius gave Trajan the rank of consul as a reward for his help.
Trajan condemned Leontius’ deposition by Tiberius III in 697, but apparently avoided criticizing the new emperor directly.42 The historian considered Justinian II’s return to the throne in 705 a catastrophe for the empire and denounced the emperor’s measures with absurd exaggeration. He asserted that in 711 Justinian exulted at the death by shipwreck of seventy-three thousand of his men, an impossibly high figure in any case, and massacred all the adult citizens of Cherson, even though Trajan’s subsequent account showed that many of them survived to proclaim Philippicus emperor soon afterward. Trajan’s intense hatred for Justinian can be explained most easily if the emperor punished him in 705 for his former support for Leontius. While Trajan cannot have been one of the “countless multitude” of civil and military officials whom he alleged that Justinian killed, the historian may well have lost his government post and seen some of his friends or relatives executed.43 Trajan must have regarded Justinian’s assassination in 711 as condign punishment. Yet while giving the new emperor, Philippicus, credit for being an educated man, Trajan pronounced him incapable and dishonorable, most of all because he restored Monotheletism. Trajan also condemned the officials who accepted Philippicus’ heresy, implying that they did so to gain promotions in the Church or bureaucracy, or (in one case) a medical professorship.44 Even if Trajan had recovered his previous post by this time—and he may not have done so—he evidently resisted Philippicus’ Monotheletism and resented how others were promoted ahead of him. After the revolution of 713, Trajan approved of the next emperor, Anastasius II, who had been protoasecretis, head of the imperial chancery. Before this, Trajan may well have served under Anastasius as an imperial secretary, which was a suitable appointment for a well-educated man. Trajan praised Anastasius for promoting learned officials, one of whom was probably Trajan himself.45
The historian deplored the revolution of 715, which forced Anastasius to abdicate in favor of Theodosius III, whom Trajan considered incompetent. He also lamented the decline of what he described as “literary education” at the time. Yet he seems to have remained in office under Theodosius, and he may well have been one of the senatorial officials who persuaded the emperor to abdicate and who elected Leo III to succeed him in 717.46 That Trajan called Leo “pious,” and may well have accorded him further praise that Nicephorus and Theophanes omitted because of Leo’s later Iconoclasm, suggests that Leo was the emperor who gave Trajan his exalted rank of patrician.47 By the time Trajan composed his history, around 720, he may have been about sixty-five. If he was still alive in 726, he apparently chose not to continue his history. Perhaps he feared the consequences of expressing his disapproval of the new doctrine of Iconoclasm, which Leo proposed in that year. The earliest part of Trajan’s Concise Chronicle seems to have been full of mistakes, especially in chronology, as must be expected of a work written from scattered sources up to ninety years after the events had occurred. It evidently opened with Heraclius’ return to Jerusalem with the True Cross, which Trajan misdated to 629 rather than 630. According to Trajan, after converting a rich Jew on the way to Jerusalem, Heraclius reinstated the city’s patriarch, Zacharias (who had actually died in Persian captivity), and expelled the Jews from the holy city. Arriving at Edessa, the emperor restored to orthodox believers the churches that the Persians had given to the Nestorians (actually to the Monophysites) and learned of the death of the Persian king Siroë (which had actually occurred in 628). Next Trajan included an inaccurate list of the Persian kings up to the Arab conquest.48 From this apex of the empire’s fortunes, when Heraclius triumphed over the Persians and championed orthodoxy, Trajan portrayed a rapid plunge into disaster. The next year, presumably 630, the wicked Monophysite patriarch of Antioch, Athanasius, and the pro-Monophysite patriarch of Constantinople, Sergius, persuaded Heraclius to accept Monoenergism and Monotheletism.
The Monophysites rejoiced, because affirming that Christ had one energy and one will meant conceding that he also had one nature. Patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem (634–38) condemned the new heresy and wrote to Pope John IV (640–42 and therefore not yet pope), who had already rejected it. Heraclius was so shamed by these rebukes that he issued an edict (638) forbidding anyone to say that Christ had either one or two energies. Yet the next patriarch of Constantinople, Pyrrhus (638–41), was another Monothelete. In 641 Heraclius died and was succeeded by his son Constantine III, whom the patriarch Pyrrhus and Heraclius’ widow, Martina, poisoned in order to proclaim Martina’s son Heraclonas. The senate and people of Constantinople soon deposed the heretical Pyrrhus, Martina, and Heraclonas, proclaiming Constantine’s son Constans II as emperor (641–68) and Paul II as patriarch of Constantinople (641–53). Yet Paul too was a Monothelete. The deposed patriarch Pyrrhus traveled to Africa, where the holy Maximus Confessor converted him to orthodoxy (645); but then Pyrrhus returned to his Monotheletism “like a dog to his vomit” and became patriarch of Constantinople again (654). Next Pope Martin I held a council (actually in 649) that condemned Monotheletism, provoking the emperor Constans to bring Martin and Maximus Confessor to Constantinople to be tortured and exiled (653–62). After Martin’s exile, Pope Agatho (678–81) held another council that condemned Monotheletism (680). While impious bishops and emperors persecuted the Church, the Arabs defeated the Byzantines in Syria (634–36), overran Palestine and Egypt (638–42), and destroyed the Byzantine navy at Phoenix, in southwest Anatolia (655). The Arabs’ victories over the Christians “did not abate until the persecutor of the Church [Constans II] was miserably killed in Sicily” (668).49 The next emperor, Constantine IV, slit the noses of his two brothers after putting down a revolt in their favor in 669 (actually 681).50
Then the Arabs sailed against Constantinople and harried the Byzantines for seven years (perhaps the nine years from 669 to 678) until “by the aid of God and the Mother of God” they were defeated and lost their entire fleet in a great storm.51 In 678 the caliph sued for peace, which the distinguished ambassador John Pitzigaudium triumphantly negotiated; it was followed by favorable treaties with the Avars and others.52 Here Trajan inserted a long digression on the Bulgars, who invaded Thrace in 680, defeated Constantine, and imposed an unfavorable peace “to the shame of the Romans because of the multitude of their sins.” Seeing that this disaster “had happened to the Christians through God’s Providence,” Constantine called an ecumenical council that condemned Monotheletism and Monoenergism (680–81) and established true peace.53 In 685, however, the young and rash Justinian II became emperor.
He stupidly agreed with the caliph to remove the Christian Mardaïtes from Syria, where they had been preventing Arab attacks on the empire. Justinian broke his father’s treaty with the Bulgars, who defeated him, although he captured many Slavs, enrolling thirty thousand of them in his army. Then Justinian broke his father’s treaty with the Arabs and led the newly enrolled Slavs against them, only to be defeated when many of those Slavs deserted to the Arabs. The emperor massacred the rest of his Slavic soldiers and their families (though a contemporary seal shows that he actually sold many Slavs as slaves). Justinian appointed cruel and greedy officials, imprisoned his capable general Leontius, and gave orders to murder the whole population of Constantinople in 695. Just in time to save the Constantinopolitans, a conspiracy in favor of Leontius slit Justinian’s nose, exiled him to the Crimea, and lynched his evil bureaucrats.54 In 697 the Arabs conquered Byzantine Africa. Though an expedition sent by Leontius retook it, the Arabs quickly took it back. The Byzantine expeditionary force was returning to receive reinforcements in 698 when it mutinied and proclaimed the junior officer Apsimar emperor as Tiberius III.
The mutineers seized Constantinople, slit Leontius’ nose, and installed Tiberius. In 704, however, Justinian escaped from exile in the Crimea, first to the Khazars and then to the Bulgars, and vowed to slaughter all his enemies. He won over the Bulgar khan Tervel and with his help entered the capital in 705. After executing Leontius and Tiberius and a vast number of Byzantine officers and officials, Justinian attacked the Bulgars, who defeated him. He also sent a makeshift army against some Arab invaders, who defeated it and raided up to the Asian suburbs of Constantinople.55 In 710 Justinian decided to avenge himself on the people of the Byzantine Crimea, dispatching a naval expedition some hundred thousand strong with orders to murder everyone there. This expeditionary force killed everyone except the children, whom it enslaved, and the Khazar governor and some other prominent Crimeans, whom it sent to Constantinople. (The existence of a Khazar governor indicates that the real reason for Justinian’s expedition was that the Khazars had occupied the Crimea.) Enraged that the children had survived, Justinian ordered the expedition to return, but on its way back it lost seventy-three thousand of its men in a storm. Insanely rejoicing at the deaths of his own soldiers, the emperor vowed to kill all the men of the Byzantine Crimea (who according to Trajan were already dead). These doomed men were therefore compelled to rebel and to accept help from the Khazars. Justinian sent an expedition of three hundred soldiers and offered to restore the Khazar governor, but when the governor died the Khazars executed the three hundred men.
The Byzantines of the Crimea then proclaimed the exiled Bardanes emperor, under the name Philippicus. Justinian sent a third expedition to the Crimea, but when the Khazars reinforced the rebels Justinian’s men joined Philippicus and brought him back to Constantinople. They took the capital and killed Justinian.56 To Trajan’s disgust, Philippicus restored the Monothelete heresy. Doubtless as divine retribution, the Bulgars and Arabs raided the empire. In 713, when a conspiracy blinded Philippicus, the protoasecretis Artemius blinded the conspirators and became the emperor Anastasius II. Anastasius prepared Constantinople for an impending Arab siege, but when he sent an expedition against the Arabs in 715 it turned on him and proclaimed a provincial tax collector the emperor Theodosius III. The rebels seized Constantinople, and Anastasius abdicated and became a monk. As the Arabs advanced on the capital, matters went from bad to worse. In 717 the empire’s leading military and civil officials persuaded the incompetent Theodosius to abdicate and named Leo III emperor. Meanwhile the Arabs took Pergamum as God’s punishment when its people made a pagan sacrifice of a pregnant girl and her fetus.57
Reinforced by a fleet of eighteen hundred ships, the Arabs besieged Constantinople for thirteen months. The besiegers, however, suffered not only from the Byzantine weapon we call Greek Fire but from a freakishly harsh winter, the desertion of their Egyptian oarsmen to the emperor, famine, disease, and attacks by the Bulgars, who killed twenty-two thousand of them. In Theophanes’ words, “many other terrible things also befell [the Arabs] at that time, so that they discovered by experience that God and the all-holy Virgin and Mother of God guard this city and the empire of the Christians, and that God never completely abandons those who call upon him in truth, even if we are punished for a short time because of our sins.”58 Meanwhile the emperor put down a rebellion in Sicily. At last the Arabs abandoned their siege and sailed home, but “a tempest from God through the intercessions of the Mother of God,” a volcanic eruption, and Byzantine attacks destroyed all but five of the Arab ships.59 Apparently Trajan’s history concluded with Leo’s suppression of a revolt by the former emperor Anastasius II in 718–19 and the coronation of Leo’s little son Constantine V in 720.60 Though we cannot be quite sure of the exact form Trajan adopted for his Concise Chronicle, he certainly included some specific dates. Most probably he divided his work into annual entries like those of the “Paschal Chronicle,” which he seemingly continued, and like those of Theophanes, who used Trajan later. Apparently Trajan
dated his entries by tax indictions and regnal years of emperors, making his work much like the “Paschal Chronicle,” which labels its entries by Olympiads, indictions, and consulships, and like Theophanes, who dates his entries by the years of the world, the Incarnation, emperors, and patriarchs.61 Like both the author of the “Paschal Chronicle” and Theophanes, Trajan seems to have left some annual entries blank and to have expanded others to include related events that happened after the end of the year. Sometimes Trajan was unable to discover exact dates, and in the earlier portion of his work he often got them wrong, as we have already seen. Apart from settling scores with past emperors and fellow officials, Trajan emphasized several themes in his history. His main point was that the empire’s catastrophic decline during the years from 629 to 718 was God’s chastisement for several emperors’ toleration of Monotheletism and for the alleged crimes of Justinian II. Conversely, the defeat of the Arab siege of Constantinople in 718 showed that God would protect the empire from total destruction, especially under a pious emperor like Leo III. Trajan stressed the value of education and depicted the aristocratic officials of Constantinople as a necessary check on the power of unfit emperors. Trajan gave fairly detailed treatment to such subjects as early Bulgarian history, Justinian’s escape from the Crimea, and the Arab siege of Constantinople. Trajan’s account of events in the Byzantine Crimea in 710–11 included enough clues to show us that Justinian, far from being bent on insane revenge, was trying to suppress a revolt backed by the Khazars.62 Although Trajan must have relied chiefly on oral informants and his own memory, he also had some written sources. He seems both to have continued the “Paschal Chronicle” and to have been influenced by it. He consulted a sermon by Anastasius of Sinai written in 701.63 He quoted government documents that he had apparently found in the archives, including Constans II’s oration to the senate of 642/43 and Anastasius II’s edict appointing Germanus patriarch in 715.64 Trajan may also have sometimes misused archival documents; for example, the “up to seventy-three thousand men” drowned on Justinian II’s naval expedition of 711 look like the full official strength of the army and navy units from which that expedition had been drawn.65 Yet Trajan appears not to have used any historical narrative for his period, not even the continuation of John of Antioch copied by Nicephorus up to 641, of which Trajan seems not to have been aware. Evaluating works that are largely lost in their original form is always somewhat hazardous. The two fragments on the Bulgars preserved in the Suda suggest that Trajan wrote rather better than Nicephorus or Theophanes, neither of whom was a very skillful summarizer. No doubt Trajan held strong views on the history he recorded, and even if these led him to distort his narrative, particularly in his rancorous treatment of Justinian II, they would have given his work a certain coherence and focus. At a time when many Byzantines’ interests had become more restricted along with Byzantine territory, Trajan was interested in Africa, the papacy, the Bulgars, and higher education. He did his best to cover the ninety years since the end of the latest historical work he had found, even though those years stretched beyond the personal memories of anyone still living. He showed some historical perspective, often mentioning that a condition that had begun in the past persisted until the time when he was writing.66 While the Suda may have exaggerated a bit in calling Trajan’s Concise Chronicle “quite wonderful,” that chronicle did provide a unique and crucially important record of Byzantine internal history for at least the fifty years before 720. Tarasius and the continuer of Trajan Later in the eighth century, Trajan’s Concise Chronicle found a continuer, whose work seems to have been appended to Trajan’s history in manuscripts so that both were used by Theophanes and Nicephorus in their chronicles. Verbal parallels show that Nicephorus consulted this continuation of Trajan again when he wrote two of his theological works. The continuation also seems to have been a source of the chronicle of George the Monk, of the fragmentary Great Chronography (probably mistakenly called the “Great Chronographer”), and of a report presented by a certain John the Monk at the Second Council of Nicaea, in 787.67
Parallels between the chronicles of Nicephorus and Theophanes show that the continuation of Trajan extended at least to 769, the year with which Nicephorus’ Concise History concludes. In fact, because the continuation was sharply critical of iconoclasts, it could hardly have been written for distribution before 780, when the iconoclast Leo IV died and his iconophile widow, Irene, began ruling for her underage son, Constantine VI. If the continuer did write after 780, he would presumably have wanted to continue his story at least up to that year, which from an iconophile point of view was highly propitious. A passage in Theophanes’ chronicle describes 780/81 as the true end of Iconoclasm: “The pious [iconophiles] began to speak freely, the word of God began to spread, those desiring salvation began to renounce the world unhindered, the praise of God began to be exalted, the monasteries began to be restored, and everything good began to be manifest.”68 Yet Irene actually managed to suppress Iconoclasm only in 787, after several years of difficult maneuvering that included scotching a military rebellion and summoning an ecumenical council twice.69 So Theophanes’ premature declaration that the iconophiles triumphed in 780/81 looks as if it was copied from Trajan’s continuer, who ended his work around 781, before he saw how difficult Iconoclasm would be to subdue. Theophanes concludes his entry for 780/81 by describing a coffin unearthed in 781 with a corpse and the inscription “Christ is destined to be born of the Virgin Mary, and I believe in him. O Sun, you will see me again under the emperors Constantine and Irene.” This prediction by a pre-Christian prophet (in fact a contemporary hoax) would have made a satisfactory conclusion for an iconophile’s chronicle.70 In any case, the continuation of Trajan must have been written before 787 if it served as a source for John the Monk’s report at the Council of Nicaea. The continuer of Trajan seems therefore to have covered the sixty years from 721 to 781, which corresponded more or less to the first period of Iconoclasm. Imitating Trajan the Patrician as well as continuing his work, the continuer apparently arranged events in entries with regnal and indictional dates, because for these sixty years Nicephorus and Theophanes together mention twenty-five indictions and the lengths of all three emperors’ reigns.71 The continuer’s annual entries helped Theophanes to arrange the events of the time in annual entries of his own, which seem to be generally accurate when they are based on the continuer, though much less accurate when they are based on other sources or Theophanes’ own assumptions. Like Trajan’s original chronicle, its continuation was not a mere list of events but a work of some literary sophistication. The continuer of Trajan treated various subjects, including natural disasters and warfare with the Bulgars, Arabs, and Slavs; but his principal theme was the disastrous results of Iconoclasm. He probably began his account of Iconoclasm in 723,
with the story of a Jewish sorcerer who persuaded the caliph Yazı¯d II to destroy icons in the caliphate, thus inspiring Leo III to do the same in the empire.72 Next the continuer described how Leo—convinced by a volcanic eruption under the Aegean Sea in 726 that God disapproved of icons—introduced Iconoclasm and made it official in 730, abetted by his evil adviser Beser. After Leo died, in 741, his son and successor, Constantine V, faced a revolt by his brother-in-law Artavasdus, who killed Beser, seized Constantinople, and restored icons there before being defeated in 743. Then God’s wrath over Iconoclasm caused a catastrophic plague, which ravaged the empire from 745 to 748. In 754 Constantine nonetheless held a false council that affirmed Iconoclasm, and he then persecuted iconophiles mercilessly until his death, in 775. His less ferocious son, Leo IV, ruled until he was succeeded in 780 by the pious Constantine VI and Irene, inaugurating a felicitous new age. Who was the author of this continuation of Trajan’s chronicle? The suggestion has recently been made that he was the future patriarch Tarasius, writing anonymously. The argument for anonymity is that no one would have dared to use his own name to attack the Iconoclasm of all three previous emperors of the reigning Isaurian dynasty and of Leo III’s adviser Beser Saracontapechus, a relative of the reigning empress, Irene. Yet if even modern scholars suspect that Tarasius was the continuer, he could scarcely have hoped to hide his authorship in 781. At that date all Byzantine readers knew that Leo III, Constantine V, and Leo IV had been iconoclasts, and that Constantine had chosen Irene as his daughter-in-law; most of them must also have realized that he had selected Irene because she was related to his father’s iconoclast adviser, Beser. Irene never tried to deny the Iconoclasm of her dynasty when she began the iconophile revolution that the continuer praised in his entry for 780/81. If the continuer of Trajan wrote then, his obvious purpose was to persuade his readers to support Irene’s repudiation of Iconoclasm, and he presumably wrote with her knowledge and approval. The main argument advanced thus far for identifying Tarasius as the continuer is that he was the only iconophile writer known at this date who cannot be eliminated as a possibility.73 While this argument is hardly conclusive, since our information on writers at the time is far from complete, stronger arguments can be advanced for the identification. A learned iconophile from a family of distinguished officials, Tarasius served in the chancery until 784 as protoasecretis.74 While Tarasius’ biographer Ignatius the Deacon calls Tarasius a prolific author without explicitly mentioning that he wrote a history, neither do the biographies of Tarasius’ contemporaries Nicephorus and Theophanes mention that either of them wrote histories. We know that they did so only because their histories are directly preserved under their names, as the continuer’s history is not. That neither Nicephorus nor Theophanes mentions Tarasius as an historical source is no surprise,
because neither of them usually cites his sources by name. Ignatius does report that Tarasius composed “numerous writings of his own wisdom and learning that were calculated to combat the highly malignant heresy of the iconoclasts.”75 Nearly all these compositions against Iconoclasm, however, must be lost today—unless one of them was the anti-iconoclast continuation of Trajan’s history. Like Tarasius, the continuer of Trajan was evidently well educated, well connected, and firmly iconophile. He must be the source of Theophanes’ lament that Leo III punished iconophiles, “especially those distinguished by noble birth and knowledge, so that the schools disappeared along with the pious learning that had prevailed from St.
Constantine the Great up to this time; of these, together with many other fine things, this Saracen-minded Leo became the destroyer.”76 Yet the continuer of Trajan must himself have been a man of learning. Admittedly, his habit of introducing events with superfluous phrases like “it is not fitting to omit” or “it is fitting to recount” was somewhat awkward, perhaps acquired by preparing government reports.77 Nonetheless, the continuer had enough classical education to call the Avars “Scythians” and to refer to a hundred pounds of gold as a “talent.”78 He knew enough history to accuse Constantine V of Nestorian tendencies, to call Constantine a “new Valens and Julian” because of his impiety, to pronounce Constantine a “new Midas” for hoarding gold, and to compare Constantine V to Diocletian as a persecutor of the pious.79 Even the continuer’s errors showed some historical knowledge, as when he misattributed the Aqueduct of Valens to Valens’ brother, the Western emperor Valentinian I.80 The continuer made appropriate allusions to the Bible, comparing Leo III to pharaoh and Herod Antipas, the patriarch Germanus I to John the Baptist, and Constantine V to pharaoh and Ahab.81 The continuer’s descriptions of the civil war of 741–43 and the plague of 745–48 even seem to have included allusions to Thucydides (on the civil war in Corcyra) and Procopius (on the Justinianic plague).82 The continuer was also, unlike most Byzantine authors, capable of irony.
He related that the Virgin, appearing in a dream to a soldier who had thrown a stone at an icon of her face, congratulated him on “the noble deed you have done to me” a day before the man, running to fight the Arabs “like a noble soldier,” was struck by a stone in his own face.83 As protoasecretis, Tarasius was in charge of the state archives, and the continuer of Trajan cited an unusual variety of statistics that must have come from those archives. The continuer recorded how many priests attended the iconoclast council of 754, how many ships were sent against the Bulgars in 760, 763, and 766, how many Slavs fled to the empire in 761, how much the gold basins captured from the Bulgars in 763 weighed, and how many prisoners were ransomed from the Slavs in 769.84 The continuer’s information on the numbers and origins of the workmen employed to restore the Aqueduct of Valens in 766/67 was so detailed that it seems to have been derived from official government requisitions.85 The continuer was the source of several of our few recorded Byzantine food prices, some during the siege of Constantinople in 743 and others during a currency shortage in 768.86 He also provided one of our rare figures for the official establishment of the Byzantine army, though he revealed a lack of military expertise when he assumed that Constantine V sent the whole force against the Bulgars in 773.87 Tarasius may actually have been the only middle Byzantine historian who drew on more or less systematic research in the archives, having probably assigned his subordinate secretaries to collect relevant material for his history. In general, at a time when Byzantine education and literature were approaching their nadir, the continuer appears to have been a remarkably well-informed and perceptive writer.
His knowledge of government statistics, which may have been still more numerous in his complete text, was extraordinary among Byzantine historians. He showed an economic insight rare even among Byzantine officials when he explained that in 768 Constantine V’s hoarding of gold caused a currency shortage that led to low prices, which most people ascribed to abundant supplies.88 Unlike Trajan the Patrician, who shamelessly distorted events in order to vilify Justinian II, the continuer reported Constantine V’s victories over the Bulgars so faithfully that Theophanes (though not Nicephorus) decided to suppress thereports of two of them.89 Yet the continuer seems to have showed some boldness in writing a work that repeatedly denounced the Iconoclasm of the three preceding emperors, who after all were the father, grandfather, and great- grandfather of the reigning emperor, Constantine VI, and had been responsible for selecting almost every official and bishop in the empire in 781. Of course, the continuer would have needed less courage if his history had been officially commissioned by Irene to prepare her officers and officials for her repudiation of Iconoclasm. The continuer appears to have included at least one personal reminiscence in his work. In describing the frigid winter of 764, Theophanes remarks of the ice floes that floated down the Bosporus that February: “We too became eyewitnesses of these, climbing on one of them and playing on it along with about thirty others of our age, who owned both wild and tame animals that died” of the great cold. Since at the time Theophanes himself was just three or four years old, too young to have played on the ice in this way, here he seems to be quoting his source, the continuer of Trajan.
A boy who played so adventurously, and was the same age as other boys who owned wild animals, seems likely to have been in his teens.90 If so, he was born between 745 and 751, but probably closer to the later date, because Byzantines grew up fast, and boys could marry as young as fourteen. Thus the continuer should have been in his early thirties when he wrote in 781. Apparently he mentioned having oral sources for events as early as 726 and as late as 750, times that could of course have been remembered by men who were still alive in 781.91 Tarasius was presumably born no later than 754, because he should have reached the canonical age of thirty before he became patriarch of Constantinople on Christmas Day 784. Some scholars have guessed that he was born around 730, because his hagiographer Ignatius describes him as suffering from “old age and disease” before his death in 806.92 The Byzantines could, however, call a man old when he was in his fifties, and hagiographers liked to emphasize the venerable ages that their subjects attained.93 If Tarasius was born around 750, like Theophanes’ source who played on the ice in 764, he died of disease at a respectable age, in his late fifties. Before becoming patriarch, Tarasius may have served in the chancery since his late teens and risen to the rank of protoasecretis in his late twenties.94
He may then have written his history in 781, in his early thirties. Tarasius’ family included distinguished civil servants and at least three patricians. Tarasius was named for Tarasius the Patrician, the father of his mother, Encratia. An apparently reliable source records that the younger Tarasius’ father was the quaestor George the Patrician, and that George’s father was the former count of the Excubitors Sisinnius the Patrician.95 George presumably held his high judicial office of quaestor under Iconoclasm, and Sisinnius must have held his high military rank of count of the Excubitors before it was superseded by that of domestic of the Excubitors around 743.96 Though our texts based on the continuer of Trajan mention no George who could have been Tarasius’ father, both Nicephorus and Theophanes mention a Sisinnius who could well have been Tarasius’ grandfather. Theophanes gives him the nickname Sisinnacius (“Little Sisinnius”), presumably copying the continuer.97 This Sisinnius, who like Tarasius’ grandfather was both a patrician and a military commander, led the Thracesian Theme in 741, when he supported Constantine V in his war against the rebel Artavasdus; but in 744, soon after winning the war, Constantine blinded Sisinnius for allegedly plotting against him.98 During the war Tarasius’ father, George, even if he was not yet quaestor, was probably a civil servant residing in the capital occupied by Artavasdus. Since the continuer of Trajan was an iconophile and considered Artavasdus an iconophile, we might expect him to sympathize with Artavasdus’ rebels, as the continuer sympathized with the iconophiles who rebelled against Leo III in 727 and the iconophiles accused of plotting against Constantine V in 766.99 Yet the continuer seems to have been oddly ambivalent about Artavasdus’ revolt. Nicephorus says of Artavasdus’ rebellion: “Thereupon the Roman empire fell into great misfortunes, as soon as the struggle for power between [Artavasdus and Constantine V] stirred up a civil war among Christians. I believe many people have come to experience how many and how great disasters accompany such events, so that even human nature forgets itself and is set against itself—Why need I say more?”100 Theophanes writes: “The Devil, who stirs up evil, aroused such madness and mutual slaughter among Christians in those days as to incite children against parents and brothers against brothers to kill each other mercilessly, and to set fire pitilessly to the buildings and houses that belonged to each other.”101 Theophanes adds, after describing the end of the war: “Forty days later, by the just judgment of God, [Constantine V] blinded Sisinnius, the patrician and general of the Thracesians, who had taken his part and fought alongside him and was also his cousin. For he who helps the impious shall ‘fall into his hands,’ according to Scripture.”102 If this Sisinnius was Tarasius’ paternal grandfather, he apparently fought on the side opposing his own son, George, during the three-year civil war and the fourteen-month siege of Constantinople.103 Under such circumstances, while the son would not, as a civil official, have actually taken up arms against his father, the family would have been split and may well have lost other relatives in the fighting, along with some family property. That the family was related to Constantine V would have sharpened animosities among Sisinnius’ relatives during the fighting, though it may have helped George regain Constantine’s favor afterwards. If Tarasius was the continuer, he would naturally have had mixed feelings about the conflict and about his grandfather, who had supported the iconoclast Constantine and then been blinded by him. These identifications, of course, are not certain. If Tarasius was not the continuer of Trajan, the “numerous” anti-iconoclast writings of Tarasius mentioned by Ignatius the Deacon would be almost entirely lost today. In that case the continuer must have been some other brilliant, well-educated, and well-connected young official, who wrote an iconophile history in 781 either on assignment from the empress Irene or in order to win favor with her. On the other hand, if the continuer was indeed Tarasius, we can be sure that he did succeed in securing Irene’s favor. His history would have shown the iconophile empress that he was just the sort of man she wanted to be patriarch of Constantinople: clever, learned, loyal to her, and firmly devoted to the icons. Such were the qualities that led her to select Tarasius as patriarch in 784, and his tenure amply confirmed her assessment of him. Whether or not Tarasius was the continuer of the Concise Chronicle of Trajan, the continuation, as we can reconstruct it from the chronicles of Nicephorus and Theophanes, was carefully and judiciously composed. Recent scholars have tended to regard Nicephorus and Theophanes as relatively late and unreliable sources and to reject their account of eighth-century history as hopelessly biased against Leo III, Constantine V, and Leo IV, and in favor of their antagonists. Yet an examination of what remains of this account of the years from 721 to 781—the earliest Byzantine narrative that survives even indirectly—indicates that it was both early and accurate. In 781 most Byzantine readers must have been at least nominal iconoclasts, and no writer could have hoped to deceive them about events that many of them would actually have witnessed.
Moreover, the continuer, who was too young to have played any personal role in events under Leo III or Constantine V, had no plausible motive for depicting those emperors as more vehemently iconoclast than they really had been or for praising their opponents for being iconophiles if they really had not been. Since we have seen that the continuer considered Artavasdus’ revolt a tragedy, he had no reason to make Artavasdus into more of an iconophile than he actually was. If Leo III had not really been an iconoclast, and Constantine V had been only a moderate iconoclast, any iconophile writer in 781 would have been eager to emphasize those facts, because they would have benefited the reputation of the reigning dynasty and made the task of restoring the icons much easier for Irene. Since the continuer surely wanted Iconoclasm to be repudiated, he may if anything be suspected of minimizing the iconoclastic measures of Leo and Constantine. Again, however, as an author of a contemporary history, the continuer could not successfully distort the facts very much in any direction. Therefore recent efforts to discredit his accuracy, which have consisted of repeated assertions rather than reasoned arguments, seem badly misguided.104 The continuation of Trajan’s chronicle seems to have been similar in length to Trajan’s chronicle itself, if we can judge from what Nicephorus and Theophanes have preserved of both histories.
Since the continuation covered sixty years and Trajan’s chronicle covered only about fifty of its ninety years in much detail, the two works seem also to have been similar in the comprehensiveness of their coverage. While Trajan was a competent historian, the continuer appears to have been a better one: more temperate in his criticisms, more insightful in his analysis, more accurate and specific in his information, and more talented at collecting material from times before those he could remember. He apparently did nothing to conceal the victories won over the Bulgars by Constantine V, whom he detested. Though the continuer was frankly an iconophile, his opinions about the havoc that Iconoclasm had wrought in the empire deserve much more respect than they have sometimes received. Unusually well-informed and learned at a time when education was in decline, he was an intelligent and remarkable man.
He seems very unlikely to have been anyone but the future patriarch Tarasius. Nicephorus of Constantinople If Tarasius did write history, he set a precedent, because his successor as patriarch, Nicephorus, wrote two historical works that survive today.105 Nicephorus was born around 758 in Constantinople into a family of iconophile officials like that of Tarasius. Nicephorus’ father, Theodore, was an imperial secretary until about 761, when Constantine V exiled him to a fort in Paphlagonia on a charge of venerating icons. The emperor soon recalled Theodore in the hope of persuading him to relent, but on his refusal exiled him for six years to the nearby city of Nicaea, where his wife, Eudocia, and apparently his children accompanied him. After Theodore’s death, around 768, Eudocia returned to Constantinople, where Nicephorus, who had just finished his primary schooling (seemingly in Nicaea), received his secondary education. Probably soon after the accession of the moderate iconoclast Leo IV, in 775, Nicephorus became an imperial secretary, like his father, and evidently served under Tarasius when the latter was protoasecretis.106 With a father who had suffered under the iconoclasts and a connection with Tarasius, whom Irene soon made patriarch of Constantinople, Nicephorus came well recommended to the iconophile regime of Irene and Constantine VI. Still as an imperial secretary, Nicephorus took a minor part in the Council of Nicaea in 787.107 Not much later, however, he left the court, returning only after Irene was deposed in 802. Although he claimed to desire the monastic life, and founded a monastery near Constantinople and retired to it, Nicephorus took no monastic vows. Instead he stayed near the capital and by remaining a layman kept himself eligible for secular office, which he accepted soon after Irene fell. He seems, therefore, to have retired in disgrace after losing favor with Irene, perhaps for supporting Constantine VI’s attempt to seize power from her in 790.
Constantine, who was always reluctant to defend his partisans against his mother, appears to have done nothing to help Nicephorus, even after gaining a large measure of power later in 790 and keeping it until he was blinded in 797.108 Since Nicephorus’ Concise History speaks well of the patriarch Pyrrhus (638–41), who had defended the Monothelete heresy, Nicephorus probably composed the work before he knew much about theology or church history. The presumption must be that when he wrote he was fairly young and had spent little time among monks or clergy.109 On the other hand, he concluded the Concise History in 769 with the wedding of Leo IV and Irene, which marked the beginning of Irene’s role in politics. The only apparent reason for him to stop at this otherwise inexplicable date was to avoid writing about Irene. If Nicephorus had written before 790, or during Irene’s sole reign between 797 and 802, he would presumably have continued his account at least up to 780 and praised her. Probably he avoided writing about her because he was unsure what attitude to take while her power struggle with Constantine VI remained unresolved, as it did between 790 and 797. Nicephorus’ dabbling in historiography, for which he showed little passion or even talent, suggests that he was writing in order to win imperial favor, probably soon after 790, when he had recently lost it but still hoped he could regain it from Constantine VI.110 Nicephorus’ historical works probably did impress the next emperor, Nicephorus I, who around 802 appointed him head of the principal poorhouse in the capital and in 806 made him Tarasius’ successor as patriarch of Constantinople. Like Tarasius before him and Photius after him, when chosen to be patriarch Nicephorus was an unmarried layman who cultivated a reputation for learning.
One may suspect that ambition to hold high office was the main reason all three men deliberately avoided not just marrying, which would have excluded them from bishoprics or abbacies, but also taking religious vows, which might have excluded them from desirable secular posts. Nicephorus’ patriarchate was a tempestuous one. He had barely been rushed through his vows as a monk and his consecration as a deacon, priest, and patriarch when the emperor asked him to rehabilitate the controversial priest Joseph of Cathara. Although defrocked under Irene in 797 for performing the supposedly adulterous second marriage of Constantine VI in 795, in 803 Joseph had managed to negotiate the surrender of Bardanes Turcus, leader of a serious rebellion against Nicephorus I. The emperor was duly grateful and expected the cooperation of his new patriarch, who seems himself to have suffered from Irene’s displeasure after supporting Constantine VI. The new patriarch promptly called a council that restored Joseph to the priesthood. Yet by appearing to condone adultery this council began a schism with the monks of the Monastery of Studius that lasted until Joseph was again defrocked in 812 under a new emperor, Michael I. Though by no means lacking in personal ambition, Nicephorus soon showed himself a sincere iconophile. He staunchly resisted Leo V’s efforts to reestablish Iconoclasm in 814, and the next year he resigned as patriarch rather than accept it. In 820 Nicephorus refused Michael II’s offer to return him to the patriarchate if he would agree to tolerate Iconoclasm.
The exiled Nicephorus wrote several spirited polemics against Iconoclasm and managed to circulate them among iconophiles. Until his death in 828, he remained in exile not far from Constantinople, first at the Monastery of Agathus and then at the Monastery of St. Theodore, one of which was probably the monastery that he had founded during his earlier retirement from public life. After Iconoclasm was condemned as a heresy in 843, the Church revered Nicephorus along with Tarasius as ranking among its greatest iconophile saints. Nicephorus probably composed his Concise History before his Concise Chronography, because both works count Constantine III and Constans II as a single emperor, a mistake that evidently resulted from Nicephorus’ misreading his sources for his History. 111 Because the Chronography consists of lists rather than a narrative, Nicephorus doubtless compiled it chiefly from other lists rather than from literary sources, altering only his source’s list of emperors to agree with his confusion of Constantine III with Constans II in the History. Yet Nicephorus appears to have composed both the History and the Chronography around the same time, when he was trying to make a reputation for himself as a writer and historian. He does, however, seem to have added a few entries on contemporary emperors and patriarchs to update the Chronography as late as 821, when he was in exile. Still later it was updated in part by other hands.112 Interestingly, we possess what appears to be a copy of a rough draft of Nicephorus’ Concise History.
In his revised and final version, Nicephorus made purely stylistic revisions that are concentrated in the earliest section of the work and gradually become fewer until the rough draft breaks off about two-thirds of the way through. Apparently at that point Nicephorus decided to write a new version of his rough draft, then composed the rest without bothering with any preliminary draft, having become more confident of his abilities, or bored by his task, or both. How his rough draft came to be preserved and copied we can only guess. It shows that in revising Nicephorus did no further historical research and corrected none of his historical mistakes. One of the stylistic revisions he made was to change his work’s title to Concise History from Chronography, another indication that he was writing before he composed the work he later called his Concise Chronography but also a sign that in his final draft he was aiming to write not just a chronography but a true history, with real literary pretensions.113 The main virtues of Nicephorus’ Concise History can be attributed to its sources, and its main faults to Nicephorus’ lack of skill in using those sources.114 Nicephorus did write in formal Attic Greek, as he made clear by using the archaic dual number twice in his first chapter.115 Yet he began his history without any sort of preface, though he was continuing a series of histories by Procopius, Agathias, Menander, and Theophylact that all had elaborate prefaces. Nicephorus neither divided his history into books, as his predecessors had done, nor recounted events in nearly as much detail as they had, though his sources surely contained material that he failed to use, because Theophanes used some of it. Theophanes also found more sources than the four whom Nicephorus consulted, who were John of Antioch, John’s continuer (perhaps John himself), Trajan the Patrician, and Trajan’s continuer (probably Tarasius), presumably found in just two manuscripts since continuations were normally appended to the text they continued. Beginning abruptly with Phocas’ murder of the emperor Maurice, in 602, where Theophylact had left off, Nicephorus runs through the reign of Phocas (602–11) by making minimal use of the history of John of Antioch and even omitting some of the relevant fragments that we possess from it.116 Then Nicephorus covers the thirty years of the reigns of Heraclius, Constantine III, and Heraclonas (611–41) in somewhat more detail by using the continuation of John of Antioch, including such trivial details as the lynching of a servant girl who inadvertently spat on the coffin of Heraclius’ first wife, Eudocia.117 Nicephorus says nothing about the twenty-seven years from just before the accession of Constans II to just before his assassination (641–68), referring to Constans as if he were the same man as his father, Constantine III. For the next fifty-two years, from Constans’ assassination to the baptism of Constantine V (720), Nicephorus abridges the Concise Chronicleof Trajan. Finally Nicephorus covers the next forty-nine years up to the wedding of Leo IV and Irene (769) by using the continuer of Trajan. Photius in his Bibliotheca delivers this judgment on “the Concise History by Nicephorus, the sainted archpriest of Constantinople”:118 In his style he is simple and clear, using a beautiful vocabulary and a syntax that is neither careless nor unduly compressed, but of the sort that a truly accomplished rhetorician would use; for he avoids neologisms and does not overstep ancient and established practice. Moreover, in his composition pleasantness is mixed with grace, and on the whole in this work of history he overshadows many of his predecessors, except that because of his excessive brevity he seems not quite to attain perfect gracefulness. In other words, Nicephorus wrote thoroughly archaic Attic Greek but narrated events too concisely to be Photius’ ideal historian.
Since Photius cites the title Concise History and mentions that the work concluded with “the joining of Leo and Irene in marriage,” he must have read the final version rather than the rough draft. The rough draft reveals that a number of grammatical errors in the final version were the fault not of copyists, as we might otherwise suppose and Photius probably assumed, but of Nicephorus himself, who failed to correct them in his final draft. Even in the part of the Concise History for which we have no rough draft, we can see that Nicephorus copied a sentence without a verb from the text of his source, because Theophanes used the same source and omits the same verb. We may also reasonably guess that several other unintelligible or incorrect passages are the result of careless paraphrasing by Nicephorus, or at least of his not correcting textual corruptions in his source.119 Nicephorus therefore emerges as less than expert not just at theology but at grammar, though he knew a few features of Attic Greek that won him credit with Photius, like the dual number and the optative mood. Even some of these Atticisms may well have been copied by Nicephorus from Trajan the Patrician and his learned continuer. Nicephorus must have noticed that no continuous history covered the years since the end of Theophylact’s work in 603.
He found a few good sources that spanned the gap, then set out to combine them in consistent Attic Greek. Since he impressed Photius, who was well educated (if largely self-educated), Nicephorus presumably impressed his less educated contemporaries. Yet though he may have assumed that intelligence, education, and good sources were all that anyone needed to write a good history, he proved himself wrong. Photius noticed that Nicephorus rushed through events much more rapidly than predecessors like Theophylact and Procopius and that Nicephorus stopped before his own times and added none of his own experiences, unlike predecessors going back to Thucydides. For all its Atticizing, Nicephorus’ Concise History became less popular among Byzantines than the unsophisticated but more complete and coherent Chronography of Theophanes. Nicephorus’ separate Concise Chronography is a set of tables rather than a work of literature. In the absence of a satisfactory modern edition, we cannot easily determine its sources or even exactly what Nicephorus’ version contained, since our manuscripts vary and include later additions. The unsatisfactory modern edition consists of several lightly annotated lists with dates of the Jewish patriarchs, judges, and kings, the Persian kings, the Hellenistic rulers of Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, and the Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Nicephorus’ own time (presumably until Constantine VI in the first edition and until Michael II in the second). Then come similar lists of the bishops of Constantinople (presumably until Tarasius in the first edition and until Theodotus I in the second), the popes, the bishops of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, and the books of the Bible, both canonical and apocryphal. Although Nicephorus may possibly have done something like research in compiling his Concise Chronography, the example of his Concise History suggests that he simply copied a handful of sources, perhaps abridging as he went. Neither of Nicephorus’ historical compilations can be considered important histories. The Concise History seems to have been inferior to its sources both as history and as literature, and inferior as history to the parallel summary of the same and other sources in Theophanes’ chronicle. Nicephorus’ Concise History differed from its sources and from Theophanes primarily in being shorter and in combining its sources’ annual entries into continuous prose, omitting most of their dates in the process. Nicephorus’ style is elevated only in the technical sense that he uses archaisms and neglects chronology. The main reasons Nicephorus’ History and Chronography survived while their sources did not were presumably that his brief summaries were convenient to use and that he was revered as a saint, so much so that someone thought even one of his rough drafts was worth copying. The recovery of historiography One further work of history may well belong to the 180-odd years between the “Paschal Chronicle” and the complementary histories of George Syncellus and Theophanes. The history usually, but probably wrongly, attributed to “the Great Chronographer” is represented by fifteen fragments written in an eleventh- century hand in leftover spaces in our tenth-century manuscript of the “Paschal Chronicle.”120 Though in theory the two heavily abbreviated headings in this manuscript could be read either as “from the Great Chronographer” or as “from the Great Chronography,” the former interpretation would appear to be unparalleled.121 For example, in all the headings of excerpts in the Bibliotheca of Photius and the Historical Excerpts of Constantine VII “from” introduces the name of the work excerpted, and never the name of its author.122 In all probability, therefore, the history excerpted in the manuscript of the “Paschal Chronicle” was entitled the Great Chronography. Applied to the work rather than its author, “great” presumably refers not to excellence but to size, suggesting that the Great Chronography was longer and more detailed than Nicephorus’ Concise Chronography, which is after all just a series of tables. The fifteen surviving fragments of the Great Chronography describe various disasters that befell the empire from the reign of Zeno (474–91) to that of Constantine V (741–75), or more precisely from 477 to 750. The events in the first fourteen fragments include nine earthquakes, two plagues, a rain of volcanic ash, the Nika Riot of 532, the collapse of the dome of St. Sophia in 558, and a shower of meteorites in 750. The fifteenth fragment, on how the emperor Maurice’s alleged betrayal of his army to the Avars in 598 portended his murder in 602, has the heading “On Portents, from the Great Chronography.”123 This heading, which is at least as appropriate for the first fourteen fragments as for the fifteenth, implies that the excerptor chose only extracts on portents from the Great Chronography, not that the Great Chronography recorded only portents. Possibly these fragments derive from a lost section “On Portents” of the tenth-century Historical Excerpts of Constantine VII. If so, however, the Great Chronography cannot have had much to say about embassies, plots, proverbs, or virtue and vice, since our text of the Historical Excerpts never cites it on those subjectsOur fragments of the Great Chronography show clear parallels with our texts of John Malalas, John of Antioch, Nicephorus, and Theophanes. Yet none of our texts of those four historians includes quite all the information in the parallel fragments of the Great Chronography; nor do our fragments of the Great Chronography include quite all the information in the parallel parts of our texts of those four historians. Since our text of Malalas is abbreviated and our text of John of Antioch is fragmentary, the Great Chronography probably drew on their complete texts; but since our texts of Nicephorus and Theophanes are complete, the Great Chronography evidently depended not on Nicephorus and Theophanes themselves but on their sources. Of the twelve fragments that record events between 477 and 598, ten show parallels with Theophanes and our text of Malalas; since Theophanes used the full texts of both Malalas and John of Antioch, these were presumably the sources of at least these ten fragments of the Great Chronography. Then all three remaining fragments, which concern events in 740, 747, and 750, parallel Nicephorus and Theophanes, indicating that their source was presumably the continuation of Trajan that served as the common source of Nicephorus and Theophanes from 720 to 781.125 Thus in covering the period from 477 to 750 the author of the Great Chronography apparently took material from the complete texts of Malalas, John of Antioch, and the continuer of Trajan. Since these sources would leave a gap from 645 to 720 even if the compiler knew of the continuation of John of Antioch from 610 to 645, we can reasonably conjecture that the compiler also used the history of Trajan itself, which would have filled the lacuna in his information. After all, Nicephorus and Theophanes used both Trajan’s history and its continuation, which were fairly brief and complementary texts likely to have been copied together in manuscripts. The Great Chronography, therefore, seems to have had at least four sources, which taken together could have provided continuous coverage of events from the Creation to 781. Of course the author may also have added information from his own experience and oral sources. The beginning and concluding dates of the Great Chronography can only be guessed. The earthquake of 477 may have been the first portent it mentioned, or simply the first one selected by the excerptor “on portents.” The meteorites of 750 seem to have been the last portents it mentioned, but it doubtless covered events that were not portents. Probably it extended at least to 781, like its latest source, the continuer of Trajan. Yet the Great Chronography seems to have ended before 790, the date of an earthquake at Constantinople mentioned by Theophanes, which the excerptor on portents would almost certainly have included if he had found it in his text.126 Since the Great Chronography refers to Constantine V as “Copronymus” (“Name of Dung”), its author was an iconophile, and unless he was unusually brave or well protected, like the continuer of Trajan, he would probably not have written before the iconophile Council of Nicaea in 787, whichwould have made a suitable conclusion for his work. On the other hand, if the author had written after Constantine VI’s fall, in 797, he would have been likely to include it as the end of the last complete reign, and the earthquake of 790 along with it. A date of composition around 787 therefore seems reasonable. As for the starting date, the title Great Chronography implies extensive coverage. Perhaps the work began with the Creation or the Incarnation, even if its earlier parts failed to mention any portents that attracted the interest of its later excerptor. More fragments of the Great Chronography may well be preserved in the so-called Anecdota Cramer, a collection of excerpts including four that closely resemble fragments attributed to the Great Chronography in our manuscript. The Anecdota Cramer, conventionally named for its nineteenth-century editor John Anthony Cramer, is preserved in a fourteenth-century manuscript under the title “Excerpts from Ecclesiastical History.” The main group of these excerpts extends from the birth of Christ to the murder of Patriarch Anastasius II of Antioch “while Phocas was still ruling,” showing that the complete work ended no earlier than Phocas’ deposition in 610.127 The complete work also had at least eight books, because the manuscript inserts the title “From Book VIII” among its excerpts on Anastasius I (491–518).128 While most of these excerpts derive from the church histories of Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodore the Lector, Theodore’s history ended with 518.129 The excerpts on later events could then derive from the full texts of Malalas and John of Antioch, which ended with 565 and 610, respectively. All the parallels with the Great Chronography appear in a group of eighteen excerpts in the Anecdota Cramer that follow the main group and extend from Constantine I’s victory in 324 to the rededication of St. Sophia in 562. These fragments seem to derive chiefly from Malalas.130 Cramer himself was unsure whether these excerpts, ten of which have little to do with ecclesiastical history, came from the same text as the others.131 Yet the excerptor, after copying passages on ecclesiastical history, may simply have decided to return to the same text and copy some additional passages, most of them on secular history. The alternative would be to assume that the first and second groups of excerpts in the Anecdota Cramer come from different chronicles and that the fragments explicitly ascribed to the Great Chronography come either from the second of these or from a third chronicle.
Given the scarcity of histories during this period, however, that three similar, extensive, and overlapping chronicles were composed between 562 and about 787, and that at least two of them were composed between 610 and about 787, seems quite unlikely. If all the Cramer fragments do derive from the Great Chronography, it had at least eight books and perhaps as many as ten, though these books were probably short, and it summarized the histories of Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodore the Lector, Malalas, John of Antioch, Trajan the Patrician, and the continuer of Trajan. Even if the Great Chronography began with the Creation or the birth of Christ, apparently its record of disasters began only with the reign of Zeno, and naturally its ecclesiastical history began only with the Resurrection. In any case, the Great Chronography was a compilation of considerable size and extent, as we might expect from its title, and showed an interest in events going back at least as far as 477 and probably much farther.
If the compiler of the Great Chronography wrote around 787, Nicephorus could have been aware of it when he compiled his Concise History and Concise Chronography around 791. Perhaps Nicephorus had seen the Great Chronography and intended to distinguish his Concise Chronography by its title from its recent predecessor, which Nicephorus’ short but convenient tables were not meant to rival. The Great Chronography presumably surpassed Nicephorus’ Concise Chronography in length and Nicephorus’ Concise History in both length and chronological scope. On the other hand, the Great Chronography was presumably compiled before George Syncellus and Theophanes produced their own more comprehensive and more thoroughly researched Selection of Chronography and Chronography between about 810 and 814. The Great Chronography can hardly have been meant to compete with George and Theophanes, whose own titles may on the contrary imply that they were trying to replace the Great Chronography.
Although we need not assume that the author of the Great Chronography failed to identify himself in his original text, without further evidence we cannot reasonably identify him from the excerpts that we have, even if these include the Anecdota Cramer. He can hardly have been Tarasius or Nicephorus; neither of them would have been likely to record the same material twice in slightly different ways, and any excerptor would probably have recognized either of their famous names and included it in his heading along with the title.
That the author of the Great Chronography was an iconophile is of little help, because around 787 most educated men were iconophiles. The task of summarizing a few earlier histories was not beyond the powers of anyone with a standard secondary education, and what we have of the text suggests no unusual literary ability. The texts of John of Antioch, Trajan the Patrician, and the continuer of Trajan, however, are likely to have been available only in Constantinople and perhaps only to patriarchal and civil officials. There must, however, have been a number of patriarchal and civil officials with a passable education in Constantinople around 787. Whoever the compiler was had the bad luck that his work was soon superseded by the more ambitious chronicles of George Syncellus and Theophanes. One last composition appears to belong to this period and has a title that implies it was a history, though that implication is essentially false.
The title has been briskly translated as Brief Historical Notes, but can be better rendered as Expositions of a Concise Chronicle to reflect its vagueness, pretentiousness, and similarity to the title of Trajan’s Concise Chronicle. 132 The date of the Expositions remains somewhat controversial, though it must be later than Trajan’s history, which may have influenced its hostility to Justinian II.133 Because it criticizes Leo III and Constantine V for their iconoclast measures, refers to Constantine V’s burning a monk “in our time” (certainly before 775), and may have mentioned the icon of Christ above the entrance to the imperial palace, the date of composition seems to be after the restoration of icons in 787, but not very long afterward.134 This hopelessly ahistorical work deals in no logical order with the monuments of Constantinople, of which its superstitious explanations are mostly fabricated, along with its forged references. Thus Herodotus is cited as a source for the reign of Constantine I, and we are told that Constantine defeated Byzas and Antes, the legendary founders of Byz-Antium, whereas the senate house was built by a man named Sinatus.135
The anonymous author appears to be trying to write in a style too elevated for his capacities and to have invented the names of some high- ranking associates in order to claim a social position higher than the one he actually held.136 In a period when few men had a sophisticated sense of humor and most were ignorant of history, the Expositions is too elaborate to be a parody and must be a genuine attempt to deceive its readers.137 It actually succeeded in misleading some Byzantine writers who used it in the late tenth century, when Byzantine scholarship was more advanced than it had been two hundred years earlier butknowledge of the eighth century had naturally faded.138 Yet the Expositions is no proof that Byzantines were incapable of sound scholarship in the late eighth century. It shows only that some eighth-century Byzantines were superstitious and poorly educated, as many people have always been everywhere.
The remains of the works of Trajan and Trajan’s continuer demonstrate that the best-educated Byzantines could still write erudite histories. The Byzantines’ darkest age never plumbed the depths of the Dark Ages of Western Europe. Nonetheless, by early Byzantine standards, what occurred in the seventh and eighth centuries amounted to a sharp decline. After about 631, when Theophylact finished his Ecumenical History, no one appears to have written a large-scale formal history for over 150 years, even if we, rather questionably, consider the Great Chronography to have been a formal and large-scale work. After about 645, when the continuation of John of Antioch seems to have come to an end, Byzantine historiography evidently consisted only of the Concise Chronicle of Trajan the Patrician until Trajan’s own continuer wrote around 781. When we include Trajan, we still have a gap of about seventy-five years before him and about sixty years after him.
Such long silences had no parallels in earlier Byzantine historiography.139 The main reason for these silences was not an absence of men with the education needed to write history, though no doubt such men had grown fewer. Byzantium’s uncertain prospects for survival largely explain the gap between 645 and 720 but not the gap afterwards. Iconoclasm must be much of the reason for the interruption between 720 and 781, both because Iconoclasm was unpopular with potential historians and because potential historians were unsure how long it would last. This explanation seems confirmed by the prompt recovery of historiography during the relatively brief eclipse of Iconoclasm between 780 and 815. These thirty-five years produced five iconophile historians: the continuer of Trajan, Nicephorus, the compiler of the Great Chronography, George Syncellus, and Theophanes Confessor, not counting the iconophile who pretended to write history in the Expositions.
Yet none of these authors wrote a full-scale contemporary history in the tradition of Thucydides, as Procopius, Agathias, Menander, and Theophylact had all done in the sixth and early seventh centuries. Trajan, his continuer, Nicephorus, and the compiler of the Great Chronography wrote relatively unpretentious histories resembling the contemporary parts of the “Paschal Chronicle.” Only toward the end of the iconophile interlude did George and Theophanes definitely revive history on the grand scale, if not in the classical style. 138 See Dagron, Constantinople. 139 For convenience, see the table in Treadgold, Early Byzantine Historian
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