Byzantine History Beyond Byzantium: Niketas Choniates Travels to the West

The manuscript Austrian National Library, Hist. gr. 53, dating to the early 14th century, contains the shorter version of Niketas Choniates’ History and is best known for the author’s portrait on the frontispiece (folio Iv). Its margins and blank folios are filled with annotations by the main scribe and later hands, which help reconstruct the manuscript’s subsequent whereabouts. Remarkably, the last folio (323r) was annotated by three Greek witnesses who record the manuscript’s sale in Constantinople, June 1571, to Hannibal, secretary to emperor Maximilian II Habsburg. The notary George Apoteras, the rhetor of Hagia Sophia John Zygomalas, and the scribe John Malaxos attest and certify that the manuscript is Niketas Choniates’ autograph, “as it has been transmitted by oral tradition”. A line in Latin above the Greek testimonies summarizes: “The Greeks declare and testify that this is Niketas Choniates’ autograph”. A marginal note in f. 85r sheds light on another episode in the manuscript’s history. This folio was stained and rewritten with black ink by the same hand that left the marginal note: “An accident happened from the pouring of ink by mistake. And forgive me, readers, because no one is perfect”. This is the same scribe who copied a manuscript of Niketas Choniates’ History now preserved in the Fugger family archive (159a). Conceivably, the ink accident occurred while copying Fugger 159a, which was completed on Wednesday, 6 March 1555, by Alexander, chartophylax of Hagia Sophia, as we learn from the colophon. The same Alexander, named Apotyras in another colophon, is responsible for several manuscripts that served as models for editiones principes of Byzantine historians, including John Zonaras and George Kedrenos. This paper explores questions of authenticity and forgery, the reception and uses of Byzantine history in the 16th-century German-speaking world, and the activity of Greek copyists in Ottoman Constantinople.