The Historiographical Position of John Malalas

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chronicle sources, particularly in its contemporary sections. Still more problematically,
Theophanes is the last true Byzantine chronicle about which we have any knowledge.
To the best of our knowledge chronicles died out as a literary genre in the early se-
venth century.34 Theophanes is therefore a unique throwback to a dead genre: it has
been plausibly hypothesized that its chronicle structure, very different from the chro-
nograph of Syncellus from which Theophanes drew his title, was inspired by transla-
tions of Syriac chronicles, not Greek ones, which no longer existed.35
The only other evidence we have for chronicles during the Byzantine period comes
from the so-called Kleinchroniken, as edited by Schreiner. These are for the most part
extremely late texts of the eleventh to sixteenth centuries that preserve evidence of
contemporary and earlier chronicling. The major interpretative difficulty here is that
almost none of the surviving manuscripts preserves anything that we could regard as
a discrete work of history; most are just collections of chronicle entries culled from
the margins of different manuscripts, some deriving from eye-witness testimony and
many more simply excerpting older, and now unrecoverable sources, some of which
were chronicles, some of which were not.36 Some texts in the collection are lengthier
than most and do have the appearance of independent chronicles rather than mere
collections of notes. Schreiner’s Chronicle 8, for instance, covers the years from 1317 to
1352 in fifty-seven entries (nb-56), which look like the work of one or two chroniclers,
though the whole texts begins in 1204 and only twelve entries cover its first one hun-
dred and thirteen years (ι-na). Chronicle 9 covers the years 1315 to 1453 in fifty-four
entries. Chronicle 14 appears to be a single, hybrid work, presenting an emperor list
from Constantine I (306-337) to Theophilus (829-842), which is followed by a chronicle
that covers the years 856 to 1204 in forty-eight entries, which is itself continued by an
emperor list that continues down to Constantine XI (1448-1453). Chronicle 34 covers
the years 1423 to 1520, almost a century, in fifty-six entries, thus averaging an impres-
sive entry every two years. Chronicle 45 covers the years from 827 to 1031 in sixty-five
entries, and while obviously not the work of one or two writers, it is somewhat detailed
in its coverage and does have some internal coherence at least. Chronicle 53 covers the
years from 1355 to 1574 in fifty-four entries. But unlike these few “almost-chronicles”
most of the rest of the Kleinchroniken are collections only a few entries or pages long,
sometimes covering a century or more in such sparse jottings. Many entries resemble
those of consularia, with their emphasis on exact year, indiction, day and month, and
even day of the week details. As such, they are similar to the sorts of disconnected
chronicling notes that one finds in the margins of Latin chronological texts in the
West. This suggests that the impulse to record matters as briefly as possible but with
detailed chronological information survived Late Antiquity-infrequently in the sixth,
seventh, and eighth centuries but picking up considerably from the ninth-but that it
34 See the comments of Mango/Scott, Theophanes, pp. lii-liv, who present a very clear synopsis of non-
classicizing Byzantine historiography.
35 Mango/Scott, Theophanes, pp. liv-lv.
36 See ODB, “Chronicles, short”, p. 447 and Schreiner, Kleinchroniken.