George the Monk’s Chronicle: History of Byzantium as History of the World

For a long time, historians and other scholars used to focus mainly on the contemporary section of historical works to extract information. According to this point of view, George the Monk would only be interesting for the last book of his Chronicle, especially the part on the 9th century, when the author lived. All that precedes would therefore only be an obligatory passage, yet another repetition of what all the other chroniclers have already written for as long as this type of text has existed. However, this biblical and ancient part, which pre-dates the Byzantine period proper, is far from being free of Byzantine elements. Indeed, both as an Orthodox monk and as a Byzantine world chronicler, George the Monk had to accomplish the difficult task of bringing together universal history from Creation, or at least from the beginning of humanity, and Byzantine history, in a single whole: that of divine design. And so, the author considered the past through his peculiar vision of the world and discovered here and there what were for him clues and signs heralding what was to become Byzantium. It is not uncommon, in fact, for him to take the time to explain the origin of a Byzantine tradition in the portrait of a character, or to show a series of past events as a foreshadowing of later ones. It is a selection of these elements, scattered throughout the nine books of the Chronicle, that this paper proposes to examine in order to highlight their construction and their particularity, but also their resonance with other excerpts from the Chronicle or other texts.