The Middle Byzantine Historians

the long version

The Middle Byzantine Historians, which continues the same author's Early Byzantine Historians, is the first book to analyze the lives and works of every significant Byzantine historian from the seventh to the thirteenth century. Written for general readers as well as professional scholars, it describes forty-three historians who usually knew their emperors personally. Besides obscure but intriguing figures like the exiled Sergius Confessor, father of the Patriarch Photius, and the embittered monk Nicetas the Paphlagonian, author of a Secret History that denounced Photius, the historians include the authors of three of the world's greatest histories: the courtier Michael Psellus, who depicts the flawed personalities of the fourteen emperors and empresses of his time, Princess Anna Comnena, who makes a spirited defense of her father Alexius I, and Nicetas Choniates, a provincial who rose to head the whole Byzantine bureaucracy and told the story of his empire's decline from great power to destruction by the Fourth Crusade.