Preface

Emeritus Fellow The gestation of the various essays which make up the chapters of this book has lasted an inordinate amount of time. Two originated in the late 1960s, when I began teaching Oxford undergraduates a Special Subject on Byzantium in the Age of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 913–959. Given that the prerequisite for writing history is close scrutiny and evaluation of primary sources, both tutorials and classes began with historiographical topics. Pupils were asked to write essays on the De administrando imperio of Constantine himself, analysing the text with the help of two excellent published analyses, and I held forth on the Logothete in the first class. Two more began to be sketched out over the next fifteen years. Procopius was a key text in a Further Subject designed by Peter Brown and Dimitri Obolensky, Byzantium and its Eastern and Northern Neighbours, 527–700. I began to teach it in the early 1970s. Naturally, those tutorials started with an essay on Procopius, the classes with a session on early Islamic sources. While the early discussions of the fraught issue of veracity in the sira, the biography of Muhammad, grew and matured with the passage of time, eventually filling a whole volume, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford, 2010), the tutor’s response to Procopius essays appears here. The germ of the fourth chapter, on Anna Komnene’s contribution to the biography of her father, Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118), was sown as I prepared a lecture course on Byzantine historical writing in the early 1980s. That essay has in turn propagated two more, the last two chapters in this book.