eugyppius

Now another precondition, which I don't to spoil too much in this introductory throat clearing, because there's a lot to say about it. I mean the whole problem of the Monophysites vs. the Chalcedonians.

This is a huge religious divide that splits the Eastern Roman Empire in half. In the east, the ancient patriarchal sees at Antioch and Alexandria believe that Christ had *one nature*, namely a divine one.

The patriarch at Constantinople, however, is further West, and he believes that Christ had *two natures*, a divine and a human one. This was also what the monumentally crucial Council of Chalcedon had decreed in AD 451.

The emperors generally fall under the sway of the patriarch of Constantinople and profess Chalcedonian orthodoxy, but sometimes – as under Justinian – they seem less than totally convinced.

(Theodora, Justinian's whoar wife, has Monophysite sympathies.)

It sounds perhaps like an arcane theological dispute to you, but it mattered graetly to many ordinary people on the ground. As big, or bigger, than the Roman Catholic vs. Protestant divide in 15th/16th centuries. Of huge political significance.

Again, we will talk more this in the course of the coming week, but you need to keep in mind that the territories that the eastern empire loses, in the Disaster of the 7th Century, are predominantly Monophysite.

This is also a cornerstone of important conspiracy theories we will come to entertain.

Finally, just a broader cultural note about the steady transition from classical antiquity to a more mediaeval world. This is an era in which there is a general movement, away from civic political structure, to more overt apolitical religious expression.

A big part of what lends a 'mediaeval' or post-Roman feel to the era we are discussing, is the vanishing of civil society (no roles beyond clerical & military positions), the movement of artistic production into exclusively religious spheres, etc.

OK. Now to sources. This is the tweet, way down here, where I give away all my secrets and remove all your reasons for my thread, and indeed for reading any other histories of seventh century Byzantium.

Because the major narrative sources for this period exist in excellent English translations and you can read them yourself and develop your own ideas. In my fantasy of how this thread develops, some of you even go to library, look things up, pick a fight with me. Maybe we do that

Historians, a strange dusty breed of scholar, mainly depend on narrative sources to develop a basic political/chronological frame, upon which they then hang the evidence of other non-narrative sources, be they numismatic, documentary, archaeological.

For 7th century Byzantium, we have (only) two major narrative sources, that is, things that actually try to relate the history of political events as they occurred.

Both date to the 9th century. That is, they are substantially *later* than the events they describe. What is moar, the manuscripts that transmit them are even later.

Also keep this in mind going forward, when we begin to probe the boundaries of what might possibly be true about 7th century history (as opposed to the boring stuff we are fed in Wikipaedia-adjacent pseudo-oracles).

The first and most important is the Chronographia, or Chronicle, of Theophanes the Confessor. Available to everybody in excellent English translation: Mango & Scott, Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor, Oxford 1997.

I have much to say on the details of Theophanes, but I feel your exhaustion. You are tired. This is tedious. We pass over all of that unless there is demand. You want detail on these sources, I will drown you in it. We go to the second major source.

What's interesting about the Short History, is we only have this and one other manuscript, and the other manuscript has an entirely different version of the text. It seems Theophanes produced two unfinished rather different drafts.

Anyway, there is a lot of other evidence for the 7th-century world, but this is the narrative frame we hang everything on. Both Theophanes & Nikephorus depend upon the same set of lost sources, so they're not totally independent. But we must believe them, or not.

Soon (almost surely tomorrow): A by-the-book post-Justinian political history. You survive that, we get to Interesting Things.