Haunted pasts and the future of Byzantine historiography: George Sphrantzes’ <i>Chronicon Minus</i> as witness literature

In 1478 a Byzantine courtier-turned-monk named George Sphrantzes related in a work conventionally called the Chronicon Minus the story of his life and times in the decades before and after the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium. The work's English translator, Marios Philippides, notes in his introduction that ‘students of history, sociology, and literature will find passages of interest in Sphrantzes’ account. In addition to its immense value as a historical testimony, Sphrantzes’ narrative is a linguistic document of great significance to the study of the evolution of the modern Greek language.’ (This latter point refers to Sphrantzes’ fifteenth-century idiom, very different from the classicizing or Atticizing style of pre-conquest Greek historiography.) 1 Philippides’ approach reflects typical historiographical praxis in modern scholarship: a source text is strip-mined for those facts for which the empiricist historian is searching, and the rest is ignored or derided as superfluous.