Chronicle (Chronographia)
A year-by-year chronicle from AD 284 to 813, written in Greek by a Byzantine monk. It is the fullest surviving narrative of the seventh and eighth centuries in the eastern empire, written by a defender of icons long after most of what it reports.
Read the text at archive.org ↗Volume 2 of the same edition, with the ninth-century Latin version by Anastasius ↗
Theophanes was a Byzantine monk. His preface says that he took up the world chronicle of George Syncellus at George’s request and carried it on from Diocletian; it ends in 813. Each entry is headed by the year of the world and by the regnal years of the emperor, the ruler of the Arabs and the patriarchs. For the seventh and eighth centuries he worked from older chronicles that are now lost.
Two things have to be kept in mind in using him. He wrote some 175 years after the surrender of Jerusalem and some 85 years after the first measures against icons. And he wrote as a partisan: he was a defender of images, and the emperors who opposed them are “impious” and “lawless” throughout his account. This wiki cites no narrative from the iconoclast side to set beside his.
Cited in
- AD 637/638, estimated date
- AD 680 to AD 681, firm date
- AD 726–730, estimated date
- AD 787, firm date
- 25 December AD 800, firm date