Eustathios, bishop of Thessaloniki, wrote a vivid, firsthand account of the sack of Thessaloniki by the Normans of Sicily shortly after the city was captured in 1185. The work opens with a discussion of how the writing of one who experienced a disaster will necessarily differ from that of a dispassionate historian. Eustatios claims that he writes from the honest perspective of a participant and sufferer rather than a rhetorically artful historian. Eustathios's account combines complex sentences and allusions to classical Greek authors with more everyday expressions and scriptural quotations.

After an opening lamentation for the sack of the city and invective against its incompetent commander, David Komnenos, Eustathios goes back to take up the narrative of the accession of Andronikos II (1183– 1185) and the early years of his reign. Eustathios's portrait of Andronikos is deeply negative, highlighting in particular Andronikos's brutal treatment of the Byzantine nobility. Eustathios then turns his attention to the campaign launched by William II of Sicily (1155– 1189), whose army entered Thessaloniki after a brief siege, in large part the result, Eustathios argues, of the incompetent defense mounted by David Komnenos. The narrative then describes the sufferings of Thessaloniki's population at the hands of the conquerors and Eustathios's own experiences, including his efforts to mitigate the conquerors’ treatment of his fellow citizens.

Although Eustathios is a well- known figure of the twelfth century, many of whose letters and rhetorical works survive, scholars have found it difficult to reconstruct a precise biography. His year and place of birth are not known. Typical estimates have ranged between 1110 and 1115. His letters indicate that he was educated in Constantinople and embarked on an ecclesiastical career, beginning as a minister in the Church of St. Euphemia and later – around the 1160s – serving as a deacon for the patriarch. During this time he was active as a teacher and mostly likely wrote his famous commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey, along with other commentaries on ancient authors. Around 1168, he attained the high rank of maistōr tōn rhētor ōn, which also included duties in the imperial court.

This anonymous text is mostly a list of Roman emperors, beginning with Julius Caesar and ending with the death of Romanos III Argyros in 1034, with very few omissions. It survives in Codex 11376 of the Royal Library of Brussels.

The text contains three distinct sections. The first lists the emperors of Rome from Julius Caesar to Constantinius I, but contains no further information except for the years of their rule. The second section lists emperors from Constantine to Michael III, who died in 867. This is the most extensive section and includes limited details about the reigns of each emperor and a number of major events, such as the first Russian attack on Constantinople. The entry for Justinian I (527– 565) is the most extensive and detailed entry. The final section, like the first, is little more than a list and includes the emperors from Basil I to Romanos III Argyros. In addition to the succession of emperors, the Chronikon contains details regarding the churches, relics, and prominent buildings of Constantinople. The text contains several chronological errors and misplaced entries, and large segments appear to have been copied from other sources; however, in places it provides information that is not found anywhere else.

Franz Cumont suggests that the author resided in Constantinople because of the text's many details regarding places and events in the city. Cumont has speculated that he lived until at least the first years of the 1030s, during the reign of Romanos III Argyros (1028– 1034), the final entry in the Chronicon, and may have been a clergyman in the Stoudios monastery. K ü lzer agrees that the author was likely a member of the clergy – based on his keen interest in religious matters – but does not believe there is sufficient evidence to trace the text's origins to this particular monastery.

Manuscripts and Editions

Manuscripts

The only surviving manuscript of the Chronicon is Codex 11376 (folio 155r – 165r), located in the Royal Library of Brussels. It is believed to be a copy of an older original. Franz Cumont argued that the manuscript was likely written in the first half of the thirteenth century, while Andreas K ü lzer suggests a date in the second half of the same century.

This history from Creation to 1118, entitled Biblos Chronike, presents a highly theological view of human history. It has four books covering history from: 1) Creation to Adam, 2) Cain and Abel to Julius Caesar, 3) Caesar to Constantine, and 4) Constantine to the death of Alexios Komnenos in 1118. Glykas's history is ostensibly addressed to his son and makes occasional comments to a second- person reader throughout the text.

Book 1 begins with a “hexameron,” a discussion of nature and theology organized around explicating God's creation of the world in the first six days. This book is considerably longer than the other three and contains detailed discussions of cosmology, astronomy, natural history, and zoology. Glykas discusses the Hexameron of Basil of Caesarea and other classical and late antique naturalists and theologians. His work draws on a late antique bestiary known as the Physiologos.

Book 2 contains biblical history with a particular interest in the patriarchs’ knowledge of astrology and in theological questions. The reign of the Persian emperor Artaxerxes is identified as the era of “Sophocles, Heraclites, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Euripides, Herodotus, Empedocles, Diogenes, Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle.” The two subsequent paragraphs move from Alexander the Great to the revolt of the Maccabees.

Book 3 opens with a discussion of Julius Caesar's birth but soon turns to the life of Jesus. Most of the book describes the lives of Jesus and the apostles. The rest is comprised of brief paragraphs on the successive Roman emperors up to Aurelian, and then a race from Tacitus to Maximian in two paragraphs. Book 4 is a history of the emperors in Constantinople from Constantine up to Alexios Komnenos. A brief history of all eight ecumenical councils is inserted into the section on Justinian, but otherwise the narrative follows a clear chronological course. The pace slackens as Glykas moves into more contemporary history. For the reign of Alexios Komnenos he appears to follow the history of Zonaras. In keeping with his interest in natural history, particular attention is paid to unusual phenomena – effectively setting the history of the empire at Constantinople firmly into a cosmological history of divine economy.

The name Constantinian Excerpts refers to an assemblage of the works of ancient and early medieval historians commissioned by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos (945– 959). Originally arranged into fifty- three volumes on a number of topics, now only “On Embassies” exists in its entirety, along with parts of “On Virtues and Vices,” “On Ambushes,” and “On Gnomic Statements.” These are often known by their modern Latin titles: de legationibus, de virtutibus et vitiis, de insidiis, and de sententiis. Each extant volume includes the same preface, the text of which explains that the project was intended to make the vast amount of historical knowledge more intelligible and accessible.

The point of the project apparently was not to excerpt the useful information from longer histories, but rather to rearrange all of those histories by topic. Because history was thought to be useful to emperors due to the lessons it could teach, Constantine's project reorganized history by problem or lesson rather than by chronology. The compilers organized the material by topic, so that if an emperor was concerned with an upcoming embassy, for example, he could read all the examples of embassies in Roman history at one time, rather than examining the histories in chronological order. The preface explicitly rejected summarizing events in favor of keeping the literary expression of the original texts. It also explains that “nothing contained in the texts would escape this distribution into subjects; by this division according to the content nothing of the continuous narration is omitted, but rather it is preserved entire.” The project was part of a cultural trend in the tenth century toward the collection and arrangement of ancient knowledge.

The project was initiated under the sponsorship of Constantine VII (945– 959) but may have been completed in the decades after his death. Twenty- six histories written in Greek between the fifth century BCE and the ninth century CE are included in our remaining sample. The original may have represented more texts. Many fragments of ancient histories are available only in the remaining Constantinian Excerpts, most notably much of Polybios.

This text is a prose history of Cyprus written in Cypriot demotic Greek. It begins with stories of St. Helena in Cyprus in the fourth century, then jumps to the eleventh century and runs quickly through the history of Cyprus to the beginning of the reign of Peter I Lusignan (1359– 1369), at which point it tells the history of the Lusignan kings up to 1432. The text is hostile to the Genoese and warmly supportive of the Lusignan kings. It uses many loan words deriving from Latin, French, and Italian and is an interesting example of fifteenth- century demotic Greek.

The first book begins with stories of St. Helena and the True Cross and races through the history of Cyprus until 1359 in thirty- nine pages. Books two and three, which are by far the longest and most detailed, cover the reigns of Peter I (1359– 1369) in 188 pages, and Peter II (1369– 1382) in 322 pages. The final three books cover the reigns of James I (1382– 1398), Janus (1432– 1458), and John II (1432– 1458) in ninety pages with increasing speed and decreasing detail.

Galatariotou argues that Machairas participated in the Greek tradition of history writing, innovating only in writing in vernacular rather than Attic Greek. In this she opposes the appraisal of Dawkins, who saw Machairas as culturally divorced from traditions of Byzantine historical writing, and as more of a storyteller than an historian. Anaxagorou sees Machairas as differing from the Byzantine tradition of historiography by writing for oral presentation using a “relaxed and informal style.” She sees the text as having been influenced by the French culture and as having an “astonishingly close narrative and stylistic affinity” to the chronicles of Villehardouin, Robert de Clari, and Froissart.

Machairas was born near the middle of the fourteenth century into a wealthy, educated family that was influential in the court of the Lusignan kings of Cyprus. In 1401 Machairas was working as a secretary to the nobleman John de Nores. By 1426, he had joined the service of King Janus (1398– 1432). Leontios Machairas was mentioned as an ambassador of King John II of Cyprus (1432– 1458) to Asia Minor in 1432.

Psellos is one of the greatest figures in Byzantine literature. His baptismal name was Constantine; he took the name Michael during a monastic retirement in 1054. Born in Constantinople in 1018, Psellos received an outstanding education and, after serving in the provincial judicial administration, had a successful career as a court rhetorician and philosopher. By his own account in the Chronographia, he was an influential courtier, although he may have been less important than he would like his readers to believe. He taught philosophy and had the title Hypatos ton Philosophon, “consul of the philosophers,” during the reign of Constantine IX (1042– 1055). Psellos became a monk in the monastic community at Mt. Olympus in 1054 but returned to the capital shortly thereafter. It is widely assumed that his brief monastic retirement was politically motivated and that his return was due to a renewal of imperial favor. While he presents himself as at the center of court politics during the ascension of Michael VII, he disappears from view during Michael's reign (1071– 1078). The date of his death has been a matter of discussion, but it seems most likely that he died in 1076.

Other Works: Psellos was a prolific and highly versatile writer in most genres of Byzantine literary activity of the eleventh century. As well as his two histories, he wrote several philosophical and theological treatises, legal texts, numerous orations and hundreds of letters.

Chronographia

A vivid and artfully constructed literary masterpiece, Michael Psellos's Chronographia is also a key source for political history of the eleventh century. Psellos creates detailed, vibrant descriptions of individual emperors and events within Constantinople. He gives rich descriptions of his characters’ physical and emotional states, and uses a wide variety of literary and rhetorical techniques that make his writing a high point of Byzantine literature as well as history. Psellos maintains a strong authorial presence throughout the narrative, drawing attention to his role in various affairs and his close proximity to certain emperors. His account is highly personal and provides his individual view of the physical appearances, personalities, and psychologies of the emperors. Psellos is entirely concerned with imperial politics in Constantinople and provides very little information about external affairs or events outside the capital.

This narrative provides an eyewitness account of the Ottoman capture of Thessaloniki in 1430 and the aftermath of the fall of the city. It is relatively brief, around thirty- eight printed pages. The text is framed as a response to a request for an account of the fall of the city. It is attributed to John Anagnostes, about whom nothing else is known. From his surname, Anagnostes (reader) it can be assumed that he was a member of the clergy.

The account was written sometime after the conflict itself in 1430. Melville- Jones suggests that Anagnostes must have composed the narrative after 1440 due to a reference to a building built by Murad II. The building can be dated to the 1440s based on inscriptions carved on the building.

Giannēs Tsaras argued that Anagnostes's narrative was written by multiple authors because he saw the text as having at least two levels of writing, one more simplistic, and one more emotive and rhetorically elaborate. This assertion has not been generally accepted. Paolo Odorico suggests that an initial account of the sack of the city was later elaborated with detailed descriptions of the aftermath of the city's fall. John Melville- Jones argues that Anagnostes wrote the entirety of his account of the fall of Thessaloniki himself, but chose to use different styles in order to reflect variations in emotion and gravity. At one point in the narrative, Anagnostes refers to others who have written about Thessaloniki, which could refer to his knowledge of John Kaminiates's narrative of the 904 capture of the city by Leo of Tripoli, or to the lamentation by Demetrios Kydones.

Anagnostes begins his narrative with a description of the beauty of the city of Thessaloniki before quickly noting how much the city has suffered under the rule of the Venetians, to whom the city had surrendered in an effort to avoid being conquered by the Ottomans. Archbishop Symeon died in September of 1429, and soon after a series of three messengers came to the city to warn them of imminent attack by the Turkish forces.

After he had been forced to retire, Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos (1347– 1354) wrote a history in which he tried to explain his actions throughout his career. It is an account of political and military affairs, primarily covering the years 1320– 1356 in four books. At over 1,700 pages in the Bonn edition for a span of thirty- six years, it is a highly detailed history. The History is the only surviving history written by an emperor concerning his own reign.

The first book concerns the civil war between Andronikos II and Andronikos III (ca. 1321– 1328). It focuses on the friendship between Kantakouzenos and Andronikos III. The second deals with the reign of Andronikos III until 1341. Book 3, the most extensive section of the work, covers events of the 1341– 1347 civil war that brought Kantakouzenos to power. The subject of book 4 is the reign of Kantakouzenos himself and subsequent events up to 1356. The history also contains limited information up to the year 1363. The overarching story is of Kantakouzenos's heroic struggles, his rise to power, and his fall.

Throughout the text Kantakouzenos describes his actions in the third person. The text opens with an apparently fictive letter from Neilos asking Christodoulos for a history of the emperors. Christodoulos's reply is the history. After a first paragraph addressed to Neilos, he is not mentioned again until the final lines of the text. This fictional frame allows Kantakouzenos to freely talk about himself and present the history so that he looks good. The manuscript tradition attributes the text to Kantakouzenos, and given the way it narrates events from his perspective, his authorship seems secure.

The History constitutes Kantakouzenos's attempt to justify the decisions he made during his time in power. He uses a number of rhetorical strategies to convince the audience that he is a trustworthy narrator and a man of good character. For example, a deliberately limited vocabulary works to make him appear guileless; emphasis on his failures makes the text seem like an anti- panegyric, etc. Kantakouzenos constructs himself as a tragic hero who fought implacably against evil.

This text is a historical memoir in which George Sphrantzes recounts his life of service to the last three Palaiologos emperors, including events from 1413 to 1477. Sphrantzes wrote in vernacular Greek, making his history an unusual example of non- classicizing fifteenth- century Greek. He occasionally makes use of Turkish and Italian words. The text does not try to conform to the stylistic conventions of a classicizing Greek history.

Sphrantzes's history is known as the Chronicon Minus. A much longer elaboration of his text is known as the Chronicon Maius. The Maius contains nearly all of Minus but expands it into a much larger text. It is now known that the Maius was composed in the sixteenth century, by Makarios Melissenos, the Metropolitan of Monemvasia. His motives for writing the Maius remain unclear. The Maius contains a more extensive account of the Palaiologos dynasty, various additions to the narrative in the Minus, a long description of the siege and conquest of Constantinople, and further details about the fall of Morea. Margaret Carroll has attempted to rehabilitate sections of the Maius dealing with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople as originating with Sphrantzes – and hence as an eyewitness. These efforts are rejected by Philippides.

Sphrantzes's chronicle, the Minus, begins with a brief prologue in which the author introduces himself, cites his birth year, and discusses the political situation of the Ottomans and the empire during his childhood. He then quickly moves to the events he personally remembered beginning in 1413. Sphrantzes carries his story down to 1477. The text includes events in Sphrantzes's family life as well as major political events. Since Sphrantzes was a diplomat involved in many of the political events of his era, his personal memoir functions as a detailed political history. The history includes accounts of his many diplomatic missions, his administrative duties in Morea, his friendship with the Emperor Constantine IX, a digression regarding a conversation between Emperor John VIII and a Jew, and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, although the latter receives only brief treatment in the Minus.

The Chronicle of Morea is a history of the Frankish Peloponnese, focusing on the Principality of Morea in the thirteenth century. It survives in a Greek verse version and French, Italian, and Aragonese prose versions. The diverse versions of the history reflect the cultural mixture of the society in which the text was composed. The Greek and Italian manuscripts end in 1292. The French version ends in 1333 and the Aragonese version runs from 1200– 1377.

In most of the extant manuscripts, the Chronicle opens with a prologue describing the beginnings of the Crusades, including the events of the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople. It then describes the Crusaders’ conquest of the Peloponnese and the formation of the principality of Morea. Thereafter follows an account of its government under Geoffrey I de Villehardouin (1209/ 10– 1229) and his successors, up to the reign of Isabelle de Villehardouin. One manuscript also covers the war of succession that followed Isabelle's death. The Chronicle includes a great deal of information regarding court proceedings, council deliberations, and diplomacy, alongside political and military developments in the principality of Morea.

Due to its numerous documented factual errors, the Chronicle has been criticized as an unreliable historical source. Teresa Shawcross believes that it nonetheless provides important clues about how history was imagined and reconstructed by contemporaries.

Shawcross argues that the chronicle was most likely begun in the mid- 1320s and subsequently enlarged and modified over the following two decades. She sees the text as written during a period of crisis in the principality and representing an attempt to conjure up a mythical past in which Greeks and Latins lived in harmony and forged a new collective identity. Harold Lurier, however, prefers a slightly earlier date of composition – somewhere between 1304 and 1314. The text has a high level of detail, and seems not to rely on other sources. This suggests that the author or authors lived in the region it describes and witnessed many of the events in question firsthand.