Historians under Leo the Wise

Abstract

In the last quarter of the ninth century, during a period when both education and literature in general were recovering, Byzantine historiography seems to have been briefly interrupted.¹ The long, unedifying, and inconclusive controversy over the patriarchates of Ignatius and Photius would have made an intractable topic for any writer who wanted not to offend powerful people. Because Basil I had murdered Michael III but had been adopted by him, and Leo VI thought Michael was his father but had to pretend he was Basil’s son, historians under Leo were unsure how to treat either Basil or Michael.² While almost everyone agreed that the restoration of icons in 843 had been a splendid triumph, subsequent events took a less favorable turn. The empire did win some victories over the Arabs and Paulicians in Anatolia, but these were overshadowed by the Arab conquest of Syracuse in 878, losses to the Bulgarians between 894 and 896, and the Arab sack of Thessalonica in 904. Although Leo VI (886-912) later acquired the epithet “the Wise,” his reign seemed particularly contentious and unsuccessful. Although none of the reverses that the empire suffered was truly devastating, they were too important to ignore completely in any full-scale history. Historians therefore had to choose between recording both the good and the bad, giving prominence to the bad, or writing on restricted subjects. Thus nobody wrote a history of the twenty-six years of Leo’s reign as such, but several historians wrote about parts of it or included it as part of a more comprehensive history.