Download PDF | Byzantium in the Time of Troubles – The Continuation of the Chronicle of John Skylitzes (1057-1079) | Brill, 2020.
236 Pages
Acknowledgments
This book grew out of a suggestion from my friend and colleague John Nesbitt that a translation of the Continuation of the Chronicle of John Skylitzes would be a worthy addition to the growing number of Byzantine texts available in English or other modern languages. Now that our joint undertaking has come to fruition, we wish to thank the people who helped bring this book to publication.
It is a pleasure to begin by expressing our gratitude to Professor Anthony Kaldellis of The Ohio State University who generously read over the translation and made many helpful comments on the text and the questions arising from the Continuation. Dr. Jonathan Shea was also kind enough to read over the introduction and translation and to offer similarly helpful suggestions. We are especially grateful to the two anonymous readers engaged by Brill to evaluate the manuscript; both contributed prompt, perceptive, and constructive observations on the translation and commentary. We hope that the finished product represents a fair acquittal of the debt we owe to these scholars for the improvements they helped us to make. Any remaining errors or shortcomings must be inscribed on our charge sheet.
We reserve a special thanks for Professor Ian Mladjov of Bowling Green State University who prepared a set of detailed maps which readers will find most useful as they follow the historical narrative. With the courteous assistance of Mrs Joni Joseph, Museum Collections Manager and Registrar at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Center in Washington, Dc, we have been able to reproduce photographs of lead seals relevant to the text from the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. Our thanks to the museum staff, notably Mr Joe Mills for his outstanding photography, are very much in order.
The inclusion of the Greek text of the Continuation has made this book a more useful tool for those who might wish to consult the original as they read the translation. For her collegiality in helping to secure permission to reproduce Eudoxos Th. Tsolakes’ 1968 edition of the Continuation, we express our deep gratitude to Professor Alexandra Wassiliou-Seibt of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; for granting permission to reproduce the text, we owe a particular thanks to Professor Paroula Naskou-Perraki of the Institute of Balkan Studies ("ISpuja MeAet&v Xepcovycov tod Aijov), and to the Board of the Institute.
We have both enjoyed working with Marcella Mulder at Brill. With friendly efficiency she has coordinated the submission, review, and final publication of a book that was a little longer in arriving than at first envisioned. To her must go a most sincere hartelijk bedankt, and with it the hope that we may have the chance to work with her again. We are also very grateful that Brill put the layout of the manuscript in the capable hands of Lydia Bax and her colleagues at TAT Zetwerk, to whom we express our thanks for their care in arranging the text and illustrations in such an attractive format.
Finally, a word of thanks to our families—John Nesbitt to his wife Carla, Eric McGeer to his wife Sylvia and his children Sarah and Colin—for their much appreciated support and patience as we carried on to the finish line.
Introduction
The text offered here in translation, known as the Continuation of the Chronicle of John Skylitzes, or more simply as Skylitzes continuatus, deals with a fateful score of years in the history of the Byzantine Empire. It begins in 1057 with the accession of a usurper and ends in 1079 with a murder in the wake of yet another usurpation. Within its compass the Continuation tells the story of five emperors and one female regent coping none too easily with the tasks of maintaining their hold on power, managing domestic affairs, and confronting new, aggressive, and opportunistic enemies who between them very nearly extinguished an empire that only a few years before had stood supreme from southern Italy to Syria. Comparison of a map of the empire in 1040 with another from 1081 reveals at a glance the rapidity and extent of the Byzantine collapse during the third quarter of the eleventh century, which left the Greek Orthodox polity shrunken and weakened, caught in a vise between the militant Christianity of the Latin West and the resurgent Islam of the Seljuk Turks. Hence the interest and importance of this text to students and scholars of the Byzantine Empire, mediaeval Europe, and the Middle East. The Continuation of the Chronicle of John Skylitzes provides a contemporary account of a momentous shift in the fortunes of eleventh-century Byzantium, the causes and consequences of which have long inspired debate,! and in a wider perspective contributes to our understanding of the eastern Mediterranean world on the eve of the First Crusade.”
This translation is itself a continuation, supplementing as it does the French and English versions of the Synopsis historién (“Synopsis of histories”) of John Skylitzes.3 This chronicle, a compendium of earlier histories synthesized into asingle narrative covering the reigns of twenty-three Byzantine emperors from 811 to 1057, has come down in two recensions. The one regarded as the original work concludes with the abdication of Michael v1 Stratiotikos on August 31, 1057, and the coronation of Isaac 1 Komnenos the following day, and is most likely to have been composed during the last two decades of the eleventh century. This constitutes the Greek text which served as the basis for the translations mentioned above.* The second recension, however, brings the narrative down to the reign of Nikephoros 111 Botaneiates (1078-1081). Appended to the main chronicle around the year 1100, this coda, entitled The Continuation of the Chronicle of John Skylitzes by its editor,> was published separately from the Synopsis and has until now been accessible only to a specialised readership. With the appearance of this annotated translation, the full text of a major historical source has become available for use by students and non-specialists interested in the history and historiography of the middle Byzantine period.®
This English version of the Continuation takes its place alongside the translations and studies of contemporary sources published over the last few years. First among these is The History of Michael Attaleiates,’ covering the years between 1034 and 1079 and the source on which Skylitzes relied most closely for his account of events, particularly the ill-starred reign of Romanos Iv Diogenes (1068-1071) and the battle of Mantzikert. He followed Attaleiates’ lead in challenging the version of events crafted by the best known figure of his time, the courtier and polymath Michael Psellos, whose Chronographia he knew and quoted,® and whose other works, notably his epitaphs of the Patriarchs and his letters,? shed light on many of the events and people recorded in the Continuation. The Continuation must also be studied with reference to the histories written a generation or two afterwards, the Material for History of Nikephoros Bryennios,'©° with its focus on the rebellions and pretenders of the 1070s; the Alexiad of Anna Komnene," with its account of her father’s rise to power; and the world chronicle assembled by John Zonaras, who used and carried on from the Continuation in the final sections of his Epitome of Histories describing the time of troubles that culminated with the usurpation and reign of Alexios 1 Komnenos (1081-118).!? Together with these and other sources, the Continuation takes the reader through the no man’s land separating two famous dynasties, when the empire afflicted by serious external threats was riven by the rival factions at play in the power vacuum between the extinction of the Macedonian line in 1056 and the establishment of a new régime under the Komnenoi twenty-five years later.
In assembling his Synopsis of Histories, Skylitzes was fulfilling the task of Byzantine chroniclers to “provide a systematic account of what has befallen humanity” from the Creation to their own day.4 The task was unending. Just as he took up where his predecessors had left off, others would in turn take up from him. The Synopsis and the Continuation are part of this historiographical process. As we are inclined, for reasons to be reviewed below, to accept attribution of the latter to Skylitzes, the principles of composition and the aims set forth in the prologue to the Synopsis apply to the Continuation and lay out an approach to the text.!5 Skylitzes makes no pretence of the originality of his compendium—quite the opposite, in fact, for he asserts that its value lies in his critical reading of earlier chronicles and histories, his selection and abridgment of their contents, and the distillation of his sources into essentials, “a history pure and simple” purged of the glorification, censure, or credulity that in his view distorted so many of the works he consulted.!® Unlike his contemporaries Attaleiates and Psellos, or later historians like Anna Komnene and George Akropolites, he did not write from a firsthand perspective of events in which he had played a role, nor did he insert himself into the narrative. Intended for lovers of history (tots gtAtctopotdatww), the Synopsis served a twofold readership, those seeking a primer to the weightier histories, and those already schooled in these works who would find in the Synopsis a convenient aidemémoire.”” Working in the same spirit, to the same purpose, the author of the Continuation likewise filtered his sources into an unembellished histoire événementielle recording what he deemed worthy of recall by his own generation and those to come. Nearly a thousand years later, translated into the descendant of a language that Skylitzes may well have heard the foreigners called Inglinoi speaking in the streets of Constantinople, the Continuation offers to modern readers what the Greek original offered to contemporaries, a historical text accessible to readers new to the subject, and a reference for scholars grappling with the weightier tomes of the primary and secondary literature.
1 John Skylitzes, alias “the Thrakesian,” and the Authorship of the Continuation
It is the rule rather than the exception for Byzantine historical texts to have come down in more than one version as a result of interpolations, revisions, or extensions added by the author or by later hands. Both the History of Michael Attaleiates and the Chronographia of Michael Psellos, to cite two examples from Skylitzes’ time, represent revised and expanded editions of the original texts prepared by their authors. Since five of the nine earliest manuscripts preserving the Synopsis of Histories include the Continuation, the assumption of a first version followed by a second supplemented by the same author would seem straightforward enough.'® Yet it is not unanimously agreed that Skylitzes wrote the Continuation, even though the scales tilt heavily in his favour and most scholars now tend to regard him as the author.!® Left unasked in the discussions about the attribution of the Continuation is the question why it matters, if at all, whether Skylitzes was behind the text or not. The Continuation, like the Synopsis, is the stuff of other men’s words, and it stands to reason that another compiler familiar with the chronicle could have fashioned excerpts from other sources into a narrative carrying on from the place where the original ended. But if upon review of the evidence we accept the attribution, then we may regard the Continuation as an integral part of a second edition of the Synopsis and bring it into line with recent scholarship on Skylitzes’ career and work.20
Fora chronicler whose work is so fundamental to our knowledge of the middle Byzantine period, we know little about John Skylitzes himself. He was active during the second half of the eleventh century, and will have lived sometime between 1040 and 1no. He may have differed from his contemporaries Michael Attaleiates and Michael Psellos in his approach to the writing of history, but like them he was a self-made man of undistinguished background whose career shows how far ability and education could take one in eleventh-century Byzantium.?! In a time famous for jurisprudence and the reorganisation of the judicial system, Skylitzes rose through the judiciary to high rank in the civil administration and at court. The not entirely approving remarks in the Continuation on Constantine x’s participation in legal cases and the severity this emperor showed towards the high and mighty may represent a rare personal observation drawn from his experience as a young judicial official in the 1060s.2? Although the details gleaned from the manuscript headings to the Synopsis, or the passing mentions in other sources, add up to little more than a point form outline of his career, they make for an impressive résumé nevertheless. The two offices that he is known to have held, grand droungarios of the Vigla and Eparch of the City, mark him as one of the figures through whom Alexios 1 Komnenos will have governed during the 1080s and early 10gos. These were uneasy years for the new dynasty when the emperor, often away on military campaigns, had entrusted the management of the government to his mother, Anna Dalassene; she in turn will have had need of a trustworthy chief magistrate presiding over the main judicial tribunal in Constantinople and a reliable civic official second only to the emperor in the capital. The honorific titles granted to Skylitzes (protoproedros, kouropalates), together with his exercise of the office of pro-tovestiarios, indicate that he continued to enjoy the sovereign’s confidence and came to occupy as prominent a place in the imperial hierarchy as a man could without being related to the ruling family.
Law and history were not unrelated pursuits in Skylitzes’ time, and the influence of his legal background on the composition of his chronicle should also be taken into account. He was one of several men “learned in the law” who turned his hand to writing history during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and whose interest in the past was part and parcel of the Byzantine jurist’s necessary familiarity with custom, precedent, and a legislative tradition stretching back to ancient Rome.?° His training in the judiciary would have immersed him in the corpus of law codes that were periodically purged, updated, or condensed into handbooks and reference works for easier instruction or consultation, not unlike the task he undertook in pruning earlier chronicles into a digest of histories. His insistence on the dispassionate use of his sources, his concern with the legitimacy and policies of each emperor, his attention to plots and military rebellions, his views on the legality and propriety of imperial marriages,?* his inclusion of opposing interpretations of events,” and his awareness of the motives and the realities behind appearances?® reveal habits of mind formed by a close reading of the law and the weighing of evidence. Two broken oaths are hinge points in the Continuation;’ and a lawyer’s eye for precedent may also have alerted him to the utility of historical parallels in telling one story through another. The alternative explanation that he gives of the Byzantine defeat at Acheloos in 917, for instance, according to which Romanos Lekapenos turned a potential victory into a catastrophe by abandoning the army and sacrificing his rival Leo Phokas to his own imperial ambitions, could not but evoke comparison with Andronikos Doukas’ betrayal of Romanos Iv Diogenes at Mantzikert.28
Can we be certain that Skylitzes wrote the Continuation? Testimony from external sources points to an answer in the affirmative. The man we know as John Skylitzes was known to the Byzantine chroniclers who used his work as John the Thrakesian, apparently in reference to his or his family’s origins in the Thrakesion theme. Around the year 1100, George Kedrenos, who incorporated the first version of the Synopsis word for word into his own world chronicle, listed “the protovestiarios John, the Thrakesian by surname” among his sources, and went on to describe the methods and purpose of “the Thrakesian’s” history in very much the same terms that Skylitzes set forth in his prologue.” Half a century later, a passage from the chronicler John Zonaras indicates that the version of the Synopsis including the Continuation was taken to be the work of “the Thrakesian.” In his account of the circumstances leading to the abdication of Isaac I Komnenos, Zonaras juxtaposes the explanation given by Michael Psellos with “the story that the Thrakesian related,” which closely follows the version of events found in the Continuation.*° Now that the identification of John the Thrakesian with John Skylitzes has been confirmed beyond all doubt,*! these references in the chronicles of Kedrenos and Zonaras suffice in themselves to demonstrate that the Synopsis and the Continuation should be taken as the product of one and the same man.
Single authorship would in turn explain the recurrence of certain stock phrases, quotations, maxims, and internal references in the two texts. To support their view that Skylitzes wrote both, the editors of the Synopsis and the Continuation listed examples that appear to be more than coincidental.? These and others are noted in the translation below, of which the following stand out as indications of an author attentive to the consistence and unity of his chronicle. Towards the end of his account of the reign of Isaac Komnenos, Skylitzes informs us that the emperor and his wife had beautified the Church of the Prodromos, but he chooses to leave it at that since it would be a “Herculean task” (&9A0¢ ‘Hp&xAeto¢) to go through the whole story in detail. This or a similar phrase occurs six times in the Synopsis where, as in the Continuation, it serves the chronicler’s purpose to eliminate extraneous material, avoid digressions, and keep to the middle path between encomium and censure. The first section on the reign of Isaac Komnenos includes a detail meaningful only in connection with another in the Synopsis,33 and where the Continuation turns to the unrest in the Balkans during the 1070s, the narrative begins with reference to the account “given above” in the Synopsis.** In like fashion, the presentation of two other sets of events prominent in the Continuation, the incursions of the Turks into Anatolia and the eradication of Byzantine authority in southern Italy at the hands of the Normans,*° resumes narratives begun in the latter part of the Synopsis where the chronicler lifts his gaze to the frontiers of the Byzantine realm. The Continuation brings the story, complete with the consequences, into line with the state of affairs which Skylitzes and his contemporaries knew all too well. The encroachment of the Normans, the volatile situation in the Balkans complicated by the threat from the Patzinaks, and the repercussions of Mantzikert were the pressing realities of the late eleventh century, when Skylitzes will have compiled and extended his history; and we should recognise that the references between the two texts not only attach the Continuation to the Synopsis but in a larger sense root the events it relates in the 1040s and 1050s—namely, in the reign of Constantine 1x Monomachos (1042-1055), the years from which Skylitzes, as have historians ever since, traced the sudden and shocking decline of Byzantine power.?®
Scholars who have analysed the Synopsis have remarked on the connecting threads that hold this rather disparate “history of reigns” together.>” The narrative revolves around the emperor, beginning with his accession, recording his dispensation of rewards and titles, his initial measures and policies, any plots or attempts against his life, his exercise of power in foreign and domestic matters, the noteworthy events of his reign, his ecclesiastical appointments, and ending with his death (or deposition) and his place of burial. His age at death, the length of his reign, and his heirs or surviving issue are standard details in a conclusion summarising his character, as revealed in his words and comportment, and presenting examples of his benevolence, justice, generosity, piety, courage, or other qualities which an emperor was expected to demonstrate.38 This basic framework structures the Continuation, particularly in the accounts of the reigns of Isaac I Komnenos and Constantine x Doukas, but it is as flexible as needs be. Certain emperors, such as Michael v1 Stratiotikos in the Synopsis and Michael vit Doukas in the Continuation, are little more than spectators in their own fates, mere placeholders whose reigns consist of the revolts and civil wars that brought them down. Not every reign is dealt with in the same length and detail, or with equal attention to events, or even with equal impartiality, owing to the nature and content of the source material from which Skylitzes was working. Well over half the Continuation is given to the three and a half year reign of Romanos Iv Diogenes, in which Skylitzes concentrates primarily on the emperor's military campaigns, following the lead of his principal source Attaleiates, much as the war against the Rus’ that dominates the sec-tion on John I Tzimiskes (969-976) in the Synopsis must have been the most thoroughly documented event of that emperor's reign. There is a certain parallelism evident in the portrayal of Michael Iv (1034-1041) in the Synopsis and Michael vit Doukas in the Continuation, both depicted as weak, ineffectual rulers, the former the puppet of his uncle John the Orphanotrophos, the latter of the hated eunuch Nikephoritzes. The pejorative view of his sources towards these sovereigns and the powers behind their thrones seeps into Skylitzes’ narrative in the form of the calamities and strange portents manifesting divine disapprobation of their policies.
At a level below the emperor, Skylitzes took pains to people the Synopsis, especially its section on the heroic age of Basil 11 (976-1025), with the figures whose descendants belonged to the aristocratic families prominent in the late eleventh century and were likely to represent much of his readership.?9 He appears to have been working in reverse when composing the Continuation, since he kept an eye out for the notables whose ancestors had come in for mention in the Synopsis. One such is the proedros Theodore Alyates, “a valiant and distinguished man most remarkable for his size and appearance,” who was descended from Anthes Alyates, a seemingly minor character whose adventures during the rebellion of Bardas Skleros are nevertheless rendered in brief but dramatic detail, perhaps in light of the family’s subsequent service under Alexios Komnenos.*° Another striking example, this time of the “bon sang ne peut mentir’ variety, is the proedros Constantine Theodorokanos, “a distinguished man renowned for the nobility of his lineage and the brilliance of his career,” whose ancestor (possibly his grandfather) had been one of Basil 11’s trusted subordinates during his wars in Bulgaria and whose relatives had held prominent military posts during the first half of the eleventh century.*! It seems too that Skylitzes had seen the influential families that had thrown their lot in with Nikephoros Botaneiates regain a place in the new élite created under Alexios Komnenos. One of the men he lists among Botaneiates’ allies, the protoproedros and megas hetaireiarches Romanos Straboromanos, played a leading role in the dynastic struggles of 1077-1079. He backed the wrong horse in 1081 and saw his fortunes decline after Botaneiates relinquished the throne; but within a generation the protonobelissimos Manuel Straboromanos (likely a son) is attested in the office of megas hetaireiarches at the court of Alexios Komnenos, which suggests that Skylitzes saw no need to remove from his narrative an unlucky member of a family since restored to favour.#” From these examples it would appear that the Continuation perpetuated one of the unspoken purposes of the Synopsis in rallying the noble families under Alexios 1 Komnenos around a common history of their participation in the military and political affairs of the empire.**
Chronology is as much a secondary concern in the Continuation as it is in the Synopsis. Although the succession of reigns imposes a natural chronological framework, in neither text does Skylitzes lay out his history in a strictly linear sequence, year by year, preferring instead to organise his material by theme or in discrete episodes. He records a number of dates throughout the Continuation (world year, indiction year, or days in the Liturgical calendar), but for the most part these merely pinpoint events of note (imperial acclamations, natural disasters or phenomena) and are incidental to the main narrative.*> Nor are all the events of a given reign necessarily located within that time span. Each reign is part of a continuum, in that the cumulative effect of decisions and actions taken, or not taken, by an emperor’s predecessors has a great deal to do with the options or policies that he pursued. The story of Michael vi1’s fruitless attempt to forge a marriage alliance with Robert Guiscard, for example, begins with the emperor's despatch of a Byzantine envoy to Italy; but this detail leads not forward to the course and result of the negotiations but back to the reign of Constantine 1x Monomachos to review the events which led Michael to seek such a desperate solution to the crises he faced in east and west.46 This arrangement by theme allows Skylitzes greater freedom of movement across time and place as the spotlight shifts from the capital to the eastern frontiers, to the Balkans, to Italy, then back to the capital once more, and as the narrative advances or backtracks from different points in time. It is in the selection and deployment of his source material that we can appreciate Skylitzes as an author-compiler attempting in the Continuation to record the interplay of events that had, within his lifetime, brought his world to the brink of collapse.
2 The Sources and Purpose of the Continuation
There has been a good deal of scholarly investigation into the sources for Skylitzes’ chronicle.*” Some of his sources are cited in the preface to the Synopsis, some have been identified by comparative reading, and others have been posited in an attempt to reconstruct works known to the compiler but which are no longer extant. Nor were all his sources written documents, for he states that he has included oral testimony gained through consultation with the aged. It has long been known that the Continuation is based primarily on the History of Michael Attaleiates, seasoned with small doses of the Chronographia of Michael Psellos and excerpts from other unknown sources.** At a fifth the length of Attaleiates’ History, the Continuation could be read either as a primer to the principal source for the period after 1057 or as an aide-mémoire, in keeping with the methods and aims enunciated in the prologue to the Synopsis. How he adapted these sources for his own purposes, why he extended the Synopsis when a detailed narrative of the period between Komnenian emperors already lay to hand, and what influences guided his presentation of the recent past are the topics to be considered here.
The discussion of the sources in the Continuation, as opposed to the Synopsis, takes on a different hue when we note that Skylitzes was bringing his chronicle to within a decade and a half of its composition, well within the realm of living memory. This will inevitably have had some bearing on the way he chose and presented his material. His readership consisted of a small élite of court and government officials, all of them avid producers and consumers of “the chatter, dialogue, and squabble of the Byzantine corridors of power.’49 And if, as is generally agreed, he undertook to extend his chronicle in the 1090s, he was working within a different political context and from a more distant vantage point than had his lodestar Attaleiates. He did not have to be as circumspect in his judgment of certain members of the Doukas family, for the kaisar John, his son Andronikos, the emperor Michael vi, and their apologist Michael Psellos were dead and gone by the time he embarked upon the Continuation. On the other hand, he had to proceed with an eye to the realities, sensitivities, and personages of Alexios Komnenos’ not untroubled regime. Unnamed but undoubtedly a light to steer by when composing a history of recent times was the emperor's mother, Anna Dalassene, whose career and views would have been well known to the kouropalates John Skylitzes. She will have regarded the years between 1059 and 1081 as an interregnum. She hated the Doukas family for elbowing her husband John Komnenos out of the way when the emperor Isaac abdicated; she had lent her family’s support to the beleaguered Romanos Diogenes in a mutually beneficial alliance against the Doukai, only to see her hopes dashed once again when Romanos was deposed and blinded through the machinations of her nemesis, the kaisar John Doukas. She had tolerated the marriage of her son Alexios to Eirene Doukaina only because it achieved the rapprochement necessary to the restoration of Komnenian rule; she played a leading part in Alexios’ coup in 1081, and she supervised the civil administration of the empire during the first decade and a half of Alexios’ reign.5° She also frequented a church which Skylitzes saw fit to mention in his account of her late brother-in-law, Isaac Komnenos. This was the church of the protomartyr Thekla, dedicated to the saint by the emperor in gratitude for his miraculous escape from death on the same day as her feast-day. An item of special interest to a Komnenian readership,*! inserted into a passage taken from Attaleiates,>? this nod in the direction of Anna Dalassene reveals the political considerations governing the treatment of the major events and people in the Continuation. He did not forsake the principles laid out in his preface by indulging in excessive praise or condemnation, but he knew which way the wind was blowing and tacked with it.
The refashioning of Attaleiates’ History into a historical narrative both acceptable and useful in this milieu began with the rehabilitation of the precursor of the Komnenian dynasty. Isaac Komnenos’ reputation was tarnished by the bloody rebellion that brought him to power, his rapacious taxation, the confiscation of monastic and church lands, and the natural disaster (always a sign of divine displeasure) that befell his army on the way back from his Danube campaign. These made for disturbing parallels with his nephew Alexios’ own coup, when his troops had ransacked the capital, his seizure of church property and holy objects to pay for his campaigns, and a string of military reversals in the early years of his reign. Skylitzes does not suppress Isaac’s flaws nor does he downplay the drastic and unpopular measures that the emperor took, and he states more emphatically than Attaleiates that he deserved punishment for his transgressions. Yet he palliates his criticisms with edifying examples, not given in Attaleiates, that furnish proof of Isaac’s sincere repentance after his abdication.5? His voluntary relinquishing of power, his embrace of the monastic life, and his humility while serving as gate-keeper at the Stoudios monastery expi-ated the severity and pride he displayed as emperor.5+ Moreover, if he taxed heavily, revoked entitlements, and confiscated church lands, he did not do so to dispense largesse in return for political support but, as a second Nikephoros Phokas or Basil 11, to restore the empire’s military strength and, for their spiritual benefit, to curtail the excessive and distracting accumulation of wealth among the clergy and monks. In other words, he faced and dealt with painful realities. The same could not be said of either Doukas emperor in the Continuation.
The transition from chastisement to repentance in Skylitzes’ account of Isaac Komnenos brings to mind the speeches addressed to Alexios Komnenos by the Patriarch of Antioch, John Oxeites, in 1091.° Delivered at a time of crisis before the high-ranking officials assembled in the palace—an audience which will surely have included Skylitzes—the Patriarch denounced the injustices of Alexios’ actions and policies which in provoking God’s anger had brought misfortune upon his subjects, and called for genuine repentance on the emperor’s part.5° Skylitzes may thus have seen Isaac Komnenos as an example of the contrition that John Oxeites demanded of Alexios and therefore cast Isaac as the prototype for his nephew’s sincere and necessary atonement. The suspicion grows that as an official whose fortunes were bound up with the ruling family, he composed his account of Isaac Komnenos as a word to the wise not to leave repentance too late.
The influence of the Patriarch’s address on the composition the Continuation may be discerned in two other ways. According to Oxeites, in the years before he became emperor, Alexios had enjoyed God’s favour and served notice of his ability in his successful campaigns against three rebels, but after seizing power by force and scouring his subjects for any and all revenues he had suffered many reverses and calamities as divinely ordained punishments for his transgressions.°” The Continuation gives due attention to Alexios’ exploits during the 1070s, but it cannot be mere coincidence that the chronicle concludes with the murder of the deposed Michael vis minister Nikephoritzes, early in the reign of Nikephoros Botaneiates. It is precisely at this point that the chronicle of Zonaras, which largely parallels the Continuation, turns to the story of Alexios’ rebellion against Botaneiates and other awkward subjects that Skylitzes deemed best left to others, especially while the emperor lived and ruled.5® It is noteworthy, too, that in his address John Oxeites goes on to portray the desperate situation Alexios faced in 1091 as a consequence of collective impiety and the failure to propitiate God, for which sins He has punished emperor and people alike by suspending His protection. Collective expiation was therefore necessary. This argument, bolstered by abundant references to Old Testament theodicy, might explain the most striking departure from Attaleiates’ text in the Continuation. Skylitzes follows this line of argument in a digression derived from the History that he both rearranges and relocates. After the Turks captured and desecrated the shrine of the Archangel Michael at Chonai, the inhabitants suffered yet another disaster when the springs running through the caverns where many had taken refuge overflowed and drowned them.°9 Skylitzes reports that in the wake of this catastrophe contemporaries were at a loss to understand why God permitted the barbarians and the very elements of nature to afflict the Orthodox faithful, when previously such calamities were reserved for the heterodox populations dwelling on the eastern frontiers of the empire—deservedly so, since these heretics had offended God and brought His wrath upon themselves.© Not only does Skylitzes acknowledge the inscrutability of providence in a very different place and context than does Attaleiates,®! he adds references from Scripture to argue that the lesson here is that both correct belief and righteous conduct are necessary to avert divine chastisement, which would descend upon all who erred in thought and deed. Underlying this was the charge that the real enemies lay within, among the palace factions who knowingly and brazenly committed injustices and fought each other more ferociously than their external foes. After comparing the fate of the Orthodox to that of the Amorites, who had been driven from their land once they had reached the full measure of their iniquity (Genesis 15:16), Skylitzes then alludes to the words of Christ in Matthew 5:19 on the necessity of acting and teaching in full accordance with the commandments. While it would be going too far to insist on a direct link between the Patriarch John Oxeites’ and Skylitzes’ arguments on collective sin and punishment, and the need for repentance and strict obedience to the laws of God, both typify the reasoning framed in explicitly Christian terms to make sense of events and to respond spiritually as well as practically. Neither here nor in another digression condensed from the History does Skylitzes venture beyond a conventional Christian rationale to explain the causes of events or their meaning, unlike Attaleiates who in a remarkable passage turned to the ancient, and pagan, Roman past to seek the reasons for failure or success not only in theological terms but in historical or cultural contrasts.®3 Under an emperor who portrayed himself as the guardian of Orthodoxy and whose mother was famed for her ascetic piety and association with monks and holy men, we may wonder if another of Skylitzes’ unstated purposes was not just to condense but to Christianise Attaleiates’ explanation of events.
In deciding to extend his chronicle as far as the reign of Nikephoros 111 Botaneiates, Skylitzes was also enlisting in a sort of Byzantine Historikerstreit in which opposing views of the recent past had taken shape. One was propounded by Michael Psellos in his Chronographia, the other by Michael Attaleiates in his History. At the heart of the dispute was the figure of Romanos Iv Diogenes, either defamed as an interloper, haughty and impetuous, who brought ruin upon his army at Mantzikert and hence an admittedly cruel but not undeserved fate upon himself, or held up as the one ruler conscious of his duty to protect his subjects from the Turks, an emperor who did no harm to his Doukas adversaries, only to be undone by the intrigues of these lesser men whose ruthless pursuit of their ambitions played into the hands of the empire’s enemies. Where one stood on the matter of Romanos Diogenes depended very much on one’s leanings in the larger rivalry between the Komnenoi and Doukai which played out in the years covered by the Continuation.™ Psellos, who had thwarted Komnenian ambitions in 1059 when he helped orchestrate the abdication of Isaac Komnenos and the succession of Constantine Doukas, sought to diminish Diogenes’ reputation so as to exculpate both himself and the principal beneficiary of that emperor’s removal, his student cum patron Michael vii Doukas, and thus preserve his own position at court. Attaleiates, who devoted a good portion of his History to Diogenes’ three years in power, while taking care to include the emperor’s promotion of the Komnenoi and to portray the emerging Alexios Komnenos in a favourable light, answered Psellos’ polemic by contrasting Diogenes’ efforts to save the east with the selfinterest of the Doukai and their sabotage of his reign. It was in some measure a debate between detailed narrative and court rumours, with Attaleiates setting his eyewitness account of Diogenes’ campaigns against Psellos’ palace gossip of Diogenes’ incompetence and arrogance, displayed in his aimless expeditions and the tales of mutual exploitation and marital discord between him and the empress Eudokia.®
Given Skylitzes’ standing in the court and government of Alexios Komnenos, it was to be expected that he would rely on Attaleiates’ History as his source for the reign of Romanos Diogenes. But it was not mere partisanship that dictated his choice, nor did Skylitzes hesitate to rework Attaleiates’ text for his own purposes or to leaven his own narrative with contributions from other sources. The unjust and gruesome demise of Romanos Diogenes haunted Byzantine memory long afterwards.®® There are signs in the Continuation that Skylitzes shared the sympathy felt by many of his contemporaries towards the forsaken emperor, and the outrage towards those who had betrayed him. Even if Skylitzes, in the frank assessment of one historian, reworked his material into prose as flat as a newspaper,®” the story of Romanos Iv Diogenes’ downfall, with its foreshadowing, irony, and vindication, nevertheless achieves a kind of tragic grandeur. Diogenes’ rise and fall are framed by two memorable scenes: the first introduces him with reference to his handsome eyes and features, and the captivating effect upon the beholder; the second shows him with his eyes gouged out, a living corpse, his life ebbing away in agony from his dreadful injuries.®° Even in bare outline it is a troubling and unforgettable story, almost Shakespearean in design and pathos.
To strengthen the brief for Diogenes, Skylitzes makes some small changes to his often verbatim repetition of Attaleiates. Whether these variants consist of his own words or extracts from other sources is immaterial, since in either case they represent his interventions and offer his judgment of events. He inserts the story of Diogenes justifying his promotion to the rank of vestarches,®9 thus heightening the worthiness of this capable outsider for the throne. He goes a step further than Attaleiates in absolving Diogenes of blame for the failure to stop the Turkish raids into Anatolia,” and he bluntly assigns responsibility for the Byzantine collapse in the east to the people whose malfeasance all but ensured disaster from the moment Diogenes took power. Ranking first among the blameworthy were the members of the Doukas family, who resented the emperor as an intruder and “impeded him from beginning to end and mismanaged the affairs of the Romans with the results we can see now.””! Their chief accomplice was Michael Psellos whom Skylitzes criticises in harsher terms than does Attaleiates for his scheming against Diogenes and for his baneful influence on the pliable Michael v11 Doukas.’* Equally culpable in their own way were the calculating, irresolute army commanders who sought maximum rewards in return for minimal risk and results, and who refrained from acting or taking initiative unless the emperor was on hand to supervise them directly.’? If any blame attached to Diogenes for the defeat at Mantzikert, it lay in his misplaced trust in the “men full of deceit and malice” he selected as his commanders on the campaign,” not least the faithless Andronikos Doukas whom—in contrast to Attaleiates—Skylitzes names and implicates directly for his intention to abandon the emperor as soon as the chance arose.”> And when “one by one” Diogenes’ men begin to desert him at the crucial moment during the battle, Skylitzes alters Attaleiates’ wording ever so slightly to allude to the betrayal of Christ.”
Skylitzes names Psellos among his sources for the Synopsis and briefly mentions his role in the rebellion of 1057. Although he dipped into the Chronographia for bits of information in the Continuation, he used Psellos more as a foil than a source when dealing with the reign of Diogenes and the catastrophic 1070s.”” Yet Psellos’ influence on the Continuation is apparent in other ways. It would seem, for instance, that Skylitzes’ somewhat dismissive mention of Psellos in his preface refers not to the Chronographia but to his Historia syntomos, a pastiche of imperial biographies from the founding of Rome to Basil 11.78 The character sketches and bons mots of Isaac 1 Komnenos (and his wife Aikaterine) and Constantine x Doukas in the Continuation may have been inspired by the example of the Historia syntomos, in which nearly every imperial biography records sayings (apophthegmata) meant to illustrate the character of the emperor.’? And if Psellos’ memoirs, dealing with the inhabitants and inner workings of the palace, regaled an audience of court officials keen on gossip and intrigue, Skylitzes showed himself no less susceptible to their allure. He preserves a strange anecdote, found nowhere else, recounting the devious means by which the empress Eudokia achieved her desire to marry Romanos Diogenes. He follows Attaleiates closely but merges history with gos-sip in the scurrilous tale of the empress tricking the Patriarch John Xiphilinos into releasing her from the oath she had sworn to her late husband, Constantine x Doukas, not to remarry and endanger the succession of their children.®° The inclusion of two rather colourful colloquialisms makes it hard to know how seriously to take this story, which must have been a rumour concocted by the Doukai after Mantzikert to undermine Eudokia’s position at court, deny the legitimacy of Diogenes, and disparage Xiphilinos for acceding to a union that went against their interests.5! The story is also a good example of the hybrid image of Diogenes that grew out of the conflicting historiography of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, one as the betrayed hero, the other as a powerseeking upstart in a marriage where both spouses sought to use the other.8? Working the recent past into a chronicle composed during the 1090s meant walking a fine and sometimes contradictory political line. The positive account of Romanos Diogenes had to be carefully delimited, since in 1094 his son Nikephoros raised a revolt against Alexios which in its wide support among the nobility and army showed the enduring popularity of the Diogenes name.®? This rupture of the alliance between the two families and the betrayal of Alexios’ generosity towards Nikephoros Diogenes would explain the pejorative additions slipped into the narrative that, without detracting from Romanos Diogenes himself, in retrospect foreshadow his son’s rebellion and his family’s fall from favour.8* Rebellion ran in the family, implies Skylitzes who, unlike Attaleiates, names Romanos’ father Constantine Diogenes (wasn’t he the one who committed suicide after his second failed rebellion?); he makes no mention of his sons Nikephoros and Leo born in the purple; and he rephrases Attaleiates to state plainly that Romanos was jealous at the success of Manuel Komnenos (the brother of Alexios).8> Selectivity was another tool the chroni-cler used to eliminate extraneous material or to add corrective tinges. He picked his way through Attaleiates’ interminable panegyric to Nikephoros Botaneiates to extract only the information required for a description of the political upheavals during the reign of Michael vu; and he includes unflattering details Attaleiates chose to omit, namely the scandalous marital unions that Botaneiates sought after he became emperor, as well as his reliance on his two henchmen, Borilos and Germanos, who were not remembered fondly by the Komnenoi.86
The dealings between Patriarchs and emperors, as described in the Continuation, reflect the often contentious relations between church and state in the eleventh century.®” After the famous clash between Isaac Komnenos and Michael Keroularios in 1058, a decidedly Pyrrhic victory for Isaac, emperors in times of instability had good reason to be wary of strong Patriarchs and sought ways to control them or limit their influence. Not for nothing does Skylitzes inform us, as Attaleiates does not, that Michael vit chose the pious monk Kosmas as Xiphilinos’ successor precisely because of his lack of political connections and formal education.8* Although Skylitzes says all the right things about Constantine Leichoudes and John Xiphilinos, neither of the venerable Patriarchs associated with Psellos and the “government of the philosophers” escapes the whiff of scandal in the Continuation. Another bit of hearsay unique to Skylitzes is woven into his account of Leichoudes’ elevation to the Patriarchate. It relates how Isaac Komnenos made return of a profitable source of revenue a condition of his confirmation, intimating that its cession would put an end to the whispering campaign against him.8? Leichoudes took the hint.
Whatever the veracity of this story, the point was that this time the emperor gained the upper hand, showing his determination to reclaim imperial rights in the wake of his deference to the domineering Keroularios. A comparative reading of Attaleiates’ account of Keroularios’ deposition with the much reduced version in the Continuation shows that a generation or so after the event, Skylitzes had no wish to revive the reputation of a Patriarch who in life and in death had fatally undermined the first Komnenos to reach the throne, much less at a time when the second was involved in similar disputes over the extent of imperial versus ecclesiastical jurisdiction.9° Skylitzes excises Attaleiates’ praise for Keroularios’ fortitude in his arrest and exile, and he diverges from his principal source (and Psellos) in not assigning equal responsibility to both parties for the rupture.®! His partiality for Isaac is slight yet discernible. He contrasts Isaac’s nigh filial respect for the Patriarch, his beneficence to him and his nephews, and his forbearance towards the Patriarch’s arrogance and presumption. By quoting the Patriarch’s contemptuous words to the emperor, he captures his character in an utterance that shows that his notion of parrhesia would have been /ése-majesté coming out of anyone else’s mouth. The Continuation is the only source to record the Patriarch’s appropriation of the imperial symbols of power and his claims to higher status, details that underline Keroularios’ notorious political ambitions and present Isaac in a more favourable light as an emperor defending his position and prerogatives against a Patriarch seeking to vest supreme power in himself.92
In editing the History to the desired length and content, Skylitzes refocussed the lens through which readers of his extended chronicle would view certain events and people, but for the most part he did not fundamentally alter Attaleiates’ main narrative. He shared his predecessor's attitudes, particuarly the conviction common among Byzantine historians that portents, etymologies, or omens were an important part of the historical record, in that they made manifest God’s judgments and intervention in human affairs, and offered perceptive observers guidance as to the right course of action. A key distinction that Attaleiates makes in human beings, one that Skylitzes retains, is between those with the acuity to decipher such signs correctly and those oblivious to their true meaning—emperors, rebels, generals, and high officials could all reflect profitably on instructive examples from the past to read the signs of the everchanging present.9? Even though he was writing more than a decade after Attaleiates, when the relations between westerners and Byzantines had been vitiated by the aggression of Robert Guiscard, Skylitzes does not contest Attaleiates’ generally favourable view of the Frankish and Norman soldiers who sought service or opportunities in the Byzantine realm.%* It was politic in the 1090s, when Alexios was seeking military aid from the west to recover the territories lost to the Turks, to overlook bones of contention that might obstruct the alliances Alexios hoped to forge.°°
Only in the section on the reign of Michael v11 Doukas does Skylitzes add to his chronicle significant material not derived from Attaleiates or from any known source. He has two lengthy digressions, one dealing with a revolt against Byzantine authority in Bulgaria,°® the other the loss of the last Byzantine possessions in southern Italy and the rise of Robert Guiscard.9’ Both enhance the interest of the Continuation as the only Greek source for these events. Skylitzes’ attention to the Balkans and southern Italy is consistent with his extensive coverage of those regions in the Synopsis,98 and it is clear from his placement of these sections in his narrative that he saw these developments in close connection with the collapse of the eastern frontier and the destabilising civil unrest that followed. He also regarded them as the result of a longer process, beginning in the 1040s when the combination of neglect, mistaken policies, pressing issues elsewhere, and internal rivalries had opened the way for the Serbo-Croat ruler Michaelas and the Norman warlord Robert Guiscard to exploit the Byzantines’ preoccupation with the Turks and the correlative vulnerability of their northern and western frontiers. The silence about these events in the History, not to mention the Chronographia, appears to have been a deficiency in the historical record that Skylitzes identified and set out to correct, not only for sake of comprehensiveness but for the context necessary to understand the situation that Alexios inherited in the first years of his reign. The most dire threat to his, and the empire’s, survival had come not from the Turks but from the Normans under Robert Guiscard; and one of the allies on whom Alexios called for support was Constantine Vodinos, placed by his father Michaelas at the head of the rebelling Bulgarian nobles but defeated, imprisoned, and subsequently compelled to acknowledge Byzantine overlordship.99 His vacillations, however, before and after the death of Robert Guiscard complicated the Byzantine position in the Balkans throughout his time as ruler which, as Skylitzes notes, lasted well into the reign of Alexios Komnenos.
The sections on the Balkans and southern Italy make a good place to conclude with a cautionary note about the use of the Continuation as a source. Compiled under the aegis of the Komnenoi and hence with a pro-Komnenian slant, serving as something akin to the standard history of recent times, the text can distort as much as it informs. Skylitzes lays the responsibility for the failed marriage negotiations with Robert Guiscard at the door of Michael v1, and assigns the cause of the Bulgarian revolt to his chief official Nikephoritzes, but this need not mean that their policies were wrong. It was not misguided to seek an alliance with Robert Guiscard and get western soldiers to do the fighting against the Turks (exactly as Alexios Komnenos proposed to do twenty years later), and it was not Michael vi1 but Nikephoros Botaneiates who put an end to the project. This was not the only marriage alliance sought by Michael vi1's regime, since there is a garbled reference in the Continuation to such a union with the king of Hungary which testifies to his larger diplomatic initiatives to secure the northern and western frontiers.!°° We should not forget that one emperor held up by the Patriarch John Oxeites as an example to Alexios Komnenos was Constantine x, of all people, whose penitence during the Uze invasion of 1064 had been rewarded with a deliverance greater than any in recent memory—one that Skylitzes cited as proof of divine favour to rulers who propitiated God and showed true obedience and humility before Him.!°! More than forty years ago, Paul Lemerle ventured to suggest that the Doukas emperors, and particularly Michael vi1, were not necessarily as hapless or ineffective as the sources would have us believe.!©? It is a reminder that had he been working in different circumstances, Skylitzes could easily have selected or altered his material to give a very different impression of the people and events that had shaped his time.
3 The Translation
The aim of this translation is to provide scholars and students alike with a reliable, readable English version of a Greek text that for the most part poses no great difficulty to the translator. What few problems occur surface in the places where the text appears to be corrupt,!°3 or where the meaning is not entirely clear owing to Skylitzes’ overly spare paraphrase of his source.!4 In these instances we refer the reader to notes discussing the problem and possible resolutions; in other instances it has been necessary to add a note pointing out another way in which a word or phrase might be understood, or elucidating usage in the Greek text that cannot be captured exactly in English. In four places we have opted for readings at variance with the editor’s choices, but these make for only minor differences.15
Many of the names (Philaretos, Nikephoros) and all of the offices and titles (doux, kaisar, proedros) have no equivalent in English and are given in transliteration. Readers may refer to the glossary for an explanation of specialised terminology encountered in the translation. On the other hand, where a Greek name (Ioannes, Isaakios, Konstantinos) has an English counterpart, we have preferred to use John, Isaac, and Constantine, not only as the names familiar to English readers but as forms attesting to the diffusion of a common heritage throughout the societies and civilisations rooted in classical and JudaeoChristian culture. In any event, it is impossible to be completely consistent in the rendition of Byzantine names, much less the Armenian, Slavic, Turkish, or French names rendered in Greek, so a list of the persons appearing in the text has been provided to help the reader keep track of characters known by different versions of the same name (e.g. Rouselios/Roussel de Bailleul).
The Greek text of the Continuation runs for eighty pages without division. To make the translation easier to read and to use, we have broken the narrative into chapters and sections, the former titled in accordance with the reigns of each ruler and the section on the battle of Mantzikert, the latter numbered in accordance with discrete themes or topics. The Greek text has been refor-matted in accordance with these chapters and sections, but markers indicating the pagination of Tsolakes’ 1968 edition have been placed in the text of the English translation, with the page numbers given in the margins of the Greek and English texts. The notes accompanying the translation serve two purposes: first, to discuss technical details, such as points of chronology, citations from Scripture or other texts, links between the Synopsis and the Continuation, and significant differences between Skylitzes’ text and the History of Attaleiates. We have also included passages translated from Zonaras that in supplementing or contrasting with Skylitzes’ version of events suggest that the later chronicler was working from other sources or presenting alternative views. Secondly, and more importantly, the notes refer the reader to the most recent scholarship on the subjects on which the Continuation sheds light, particularly the events and people in this and other sources and the way in which they are portrayed, and the interpretations of this period by contemporaries and by modern historians. The references to other historians or chronicles direct the reader to the English translations of these works where such exist, or to translations in modern languages. Our aim has been to collate the principal primary and secondary sources so that students and specialists may pursue topics of particular interest the more easily. And finally, the maps show the placenames mentioned in the Continuation (where known) and assist the reader in following the narrative as it traces the course of events in Anatolia, the Balkans, and southern Italy.
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