The objective of this chapter is to examine the most important primary sources for the period of the Byzantine expansion in the tenth century. These include two Byzantine sources, namely Leo the Deacon and John Skylitzes, whose accounts of the Byzantine wars in the Balkans are considered by several modern historians as the best and most detailed in hand; a local Syriac source, Yahya ibn Said al-Antaki from Antioch; and three Muslim sources, al-Mutanabbi, Abu Firas and Ibn Zafir, who provide us with invaluable information about the Byzantine–Arab conflicts of the 940s–60s in Cilicia and Syria. I will focus my analysis on the chroniclers’ social, religious and educational backgrounds, the dates and places of the compilation of their work, their own sources and the way they gleaned information from them, and their biases and sympathies, which shed light on their level of impartiality as historians. This section will be followed by a comparative analysis of the sources strictly from a military perspective, reaching significant conclusions regarding their value as ‘military historians’.

Leo the Deacon

The work of Leo the Deacon is considered one of the best histories of the so-called period of the ‘Reconquest’ in Byzantium and a much-valued source of tenth-century Byzantine warfare. The few facts we know about Leo and his life come primarily from scarce references in his History, as this was the trend amongst Byzantine classicising historians like Procopius and his successors who followed in the footsteps of Herodotus and Thucydides, neither of whom provided much personal information in their own works. Leo was born around the year 950 in the small town of Kaloë in western Anatolia, a bishopric dependent on Ephesus, just south-west of Philadelphia. He was already in Constantinople as a youth around the year 966 pursuing his secondary education (ϵγκύκƛιος παίδϵυσις), as he tells us in his fourth book. The language in his work reveals a writer with a classical education, who was well versed in the ancient authors – especially Homer, as attested by the frequent quotations in his work, but also Herodotus, Diodorus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Arrian, Dio Cassius, Herodian, Procopius, Agathias and Theophylact – whose books he had probably found in the imperial library.