Table Of ContentLATE ANTIQUE HISTORY AND RELIGION 23
CHRISTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
BETWEEN EMPIRES
4th-8th Centuries
edited by
Hagit Amirav, Cornelis Hoogerwerf, and István Perczel
PEETERS
CHRISTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY BETWEEN EMPIRES
-
L A H R
General Editor
Hagit Amirav (Oxford)
Series Editors
Bas ter Haar Romeny (Amsterdam), Emiliano Fiori (Venice),
James Carleton Paget (Cambridge), Gavin Kelly (Edinburgh)
Advisory Board
Averil Cameron (Oxford), Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony (Jerusalem),
Evangelos Chrysos (Athens), Christoph Markschies (Berlin),
Susanna Elm (Berkeley)
LAHR
Volume 23
Beyond the Fathers
Volume 3
Late Antique History and Religion is a peer-reviewed series.
CHRISTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
BETWEEN EMPIRES
4th-8th Centuries
edited by
Hagit Amirav, Cornelis Hoogerwerf, and István Perczel
PEETERS
– – ,
2021
ISBN 978-90-429-4165-6
eISBN 978-90-429-4166-3
D/2021/0602/124
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
© 2021, Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval devices or systems,
without prior written permission from the publisher, except the quotation of
brief passages for review purposes.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword and Acknowledgments ........................................................
List of Contributors ................................................................................
e Past, the Present and the Time In-Between: Some oughts on
Early Medieval Historical inking in Caucasia ........................ 1
Nikoloz A
Is the Patriarch Pyrrhos (638–641 and 654) the Author of the First
Part of Nikephoros’ Short History (Chapters 1–32)? ................... 21
Christian B
Historiography Across the Borders: e Case of the Islamic Material
in eophanes Confessor’s Chronographia ................................... 41
Maria C
Generic Concepts and Topoi of Medieval Georgian Historiography 67
Nino D
e Making of a Syriac Chronicler: e Case of Joshua the Stylite
of Zuqnīn ............................................................................................ 81
Amir H
History Writing in the Time of Islam’s Beginnings .......................... 109
Robert H
e Sack of Rome (410 ) in the Constantinopolitan Church
Histories of the Fih Century ........................................................ 123
Yonatan L
Rewriting Scripture as an Exercise in Counter-History: Apologetic
Genealogy and Anti-Judaism in the Syriac Cave of Treasures .. 143
Sergey M
Malalas and the New Age of Justinian................................................. 163
Roger S
Hagiography as a Historiographic Genre: From Eusebius to Cyril
of Scythopolis, and Eustratius of Constantinople ....................... 181
István P
Bibliography .............................................................................................. 221
General Index ........................................................................................... 245
FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
e present volume contains the proceedings of the third workshop in
a series of four international colloquia, which were generously funded
and supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the project’s
partners in several universities across Europe: the Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, the University of Oxford, the Central European University,
Budapest, and the Humboldt Universität, Berlin. e project Beyond the
Fathers (www.beyondthefathers.org) had the overarching theme In Search
of New Authorities: The Development of New Literary and Artistic Genres
in Late Antique and Early Islamic Eastern Mediterranean (5th–8th centu-
ries). e first volume is entitled New Themes, New Styles in the Eastern
Mediterranean: Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Encounters, 5th–8th Cen-
turies.1 e second volume focuses on Apocalypticism and Eschatology
in the Abrahamic Religions (6th–8th Centuries).2 e third workshop in
the series, whose material we are publishing here, was held at the Central
European University, Budapest, and was entitled Christian Historiography
between Empires (4th–8th Centuries). It explored the construction of the
Christian historiographic traditions from the fourth to the eighth cen-
tury between Byzantium, Georgia, Armenia, and the Islamic caliphates,
at the geographic, linguistic and disciplinary borders.
History as a science has been defined by nineteenth-century historians,
such as Leopold von Ranke and eodor Mommsen. As these German
historians were inspired by ucydides and Tacitus, for a long time, his-
torians, and Byzantinists especially, adhered to the tendency to give prec-
edence among our sources to a small set of high-bred historiographical
writings, produced in Constantinopolitan court circles in a high-style
Atticizing Greek language, relating political history, war, diplomacy
and court life, and written in a generic imitation of the classical histo-
rians. is literature is transmitted in a small number of manuscripts.
Oen, it is highly ideological, and its handling of the sources is far from
Mommsen’s requirements. However, the bulk of the historical narrative
1. Hagit Amirav and Francesco Celia (eds.), New Themes, New Styles in the Eastern
Mediterranean: Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Encounters, 5th-8th Centuries (Late Anitque
History and Religion 16; Leuven, 2017).
2. Hagit Amirav, Emmanouela Grypeou, and Guy Stroumsa (eds.), Apocalypticism and
Eschatology in Late Antiquity: Encounters in the Abrahamic Religions, 6th-8th Centuries
(Late Antique History and Religion 17; Leuven, 2017).
VIII
that exerted real influence in its own time and is transmitted in a great
number of manuscripts has been written down in other than ucydid-
ian and Tacitian genres, and belongs mainly to chronography, ecclesias-
tic history and saints’ lives (hagiography). Also, polemical and legend-
ary literature, apocrypha and apocalypses served as additional narrative
genres. Greek was far from having a unique position and our informa-
tion derived from the Greek historiographic literature should be con-
stantly checked against what there is in Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopian,
Armenian, Georgian, Persian, Latin – the list could be continued. As an
interesting proof of continuity and entanglement between the Christian
and the Islamic worlds, the Eusebian genres have inspired the Islamic
Arab historiography as well, which in its turn was providing source
material to the Christian one, so that oen it is difficult to separate the
two. However, much recent development toward the opening of perspec-
tives notwithstanding, Eastern Christian narrative sources still tend to
be treated in a nationalistic framework, with the implication that Syriac
sources are there for the history of the peoples of Syriac culture, Armenian
for the history of the Armenians, Georgian for the history of Georgia,
and so on. Concomitantly, nationalistic stereotypes loom large over our
studies.
An inspiring book on the question of genres is the book by Velcheru
Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of
Time.3 ey show that one should look for history-writing in South India
through subtle generic indicators in literary texts instead of looking for
the classical historical genre in the Mommsenian sense. All of a sudden,
the idea that the Indian mind is a-historical, disappears. e same meth-
odology can be applied, for example, to Byzantine hagiographic texts, such
as Nicetas Stethatus’ Life of Symeon the New Theologian. It is hagiography
with all the generic requirements of a hagiographic text. However, supra-
generic markers indicate when and in which way it turns to history pre-
cisely when the author abandons, or feels uneasy about, the hagiographic
topoi, or when he handles them in an awkward manner. Mutatis mutan-
dis, similar methods are being applied in historical Jesus studies vis-à-vis
the Gospels. A standard error coming from the neglect of the question of
genre is the judgement that pseudo-historical writings, or writings writ-
ten in mixed genres are falsifying history, whereas generic and supra-
generic markers indicate the fluctuation between history and fiction.
Another example is the ‘principle of elimination’ which oen results in
3. Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of
Time: Writing History in South India (New York, 2003).
IX
eliminating a source as unreliable, because it contains contradictory infor-
mation in the Aristotelian sense, instead of understanding first the authors’
agenda and, so, the reason why they gave contradictory information.
e last decade has seen much development and many new results
in the assessment of the historiographic traditions of the period under
investigation. Byzantinists have explored new sources and approached
well-known sources in innovative ways, new editorial and commentary
projects are under way, sources in Oriental languages ceased to be the
subject of the Orientalist disciplines and entered the major historiographic
discourse, areas previously considered peripheral entered the mainstream
narrative, and narrative genres that previously had been neglected as
having little value as historical sources, such as hagiography, have been
re-evaluated. Readers have become less prone to accept everything at face
value and are more sensitive to hidden meanings and allusions. e work-
shop sought to take stock of these developments and explore the ways
forward.
e workshop brought together specialists working on narrative sources
written in all these languages from a multiplicity of innovative approaches.
It has turned out that ‘borderline history’ in the multiple meanings of this
polyvalent expression, is the order of the day and tends to subvert old
convictions. All in all, the combination of all the methods, approaches
and competencies displayed in this volume might lead to a unified and
novel history, created through collective effort.
ere follows a short introduction to each article. Although some of
them are thematically connected, we have arranged them according to
alphabetical order.
In ‘e Past, the Present and at Time in Between: Some oughts
on Early Medieval Historical inking in Caucasia’, Nikoloz Aleksidze
writes about the historiography of the so-called Caucasian Church Schism.
In the early seventh century an active exchange of letters was initiated
between the Armenian and Georgian Church hierarchs over doctrinal
and ecclesiastical matters, which eventually led to the Schism. As a result
of the work of the Armenian historian Uxtanes of Sebastia in the tenth
century, one oen reads in contemporary scholarship about a pre- and
post-schismal historical writing. Aleksidze argues that this is a miscon-
ception. Rather than being a ‘tangible’ historical event, the Schism is itself
a rhetorical construct ‘invented’ by Uxtanes and re-invented throughout
the Middle Ages and even in contemporary historiography. rough the
process of re-invention, the Schism became a kind of an interpretive tool
or a narrative prism, through which medieval Armenian narratives read
