Byzantine Historical Writing

Historical writing is important in order to understand past societies, by giving us their own views of their past, recent and not so recent. In the case of Byzantium, we are fortunate that a plethora of histories and chronicles have survived. In this collection of essays, James Howard-Johnston carries out the evaluation of these historical sources. In this collection of essays, James Howard-Johnston evaluates historical sources from across the entire existence of the Byzantine empire. Byzantium was peculiarly well endowed for the writing of history, given a relatively high degree of literacy, a large governing class running a centralised state and its associated church, and its inheritance of the historical habit developed independently in classical Greece and Judaea. Historical coverage is complete save for one short period, the reign of Constans II (641–9). Unsurprisingly, in what was a thoroughly bureaucratic state, officials and ex-officials of state and church predominate among historians. The histories they wrote were of two principal sorts: compendia which might reach back to the beginning of time, succinct, concerned primarily with chronology, and written in relatively plain language; and contemporary histories presenting fuller narratives, more interested in causes and effects, and generally written in a higher style, with classical touches. They used the bureaucratic vernacular, were primarily concerned with high politics and foreign affairs, and calibrated time by financial years. Particular emphasis is put on their use of documentary sources, the surest and safest conveyors of detailed information from the past to the historian. A small number of individual historians are singled out for closer scrutiny, because of the importance or unusual character of…