Striking a Match on Byzantium’s “Dark Age”

Abstract

The seventh and eighth centuries have been called the “Dark Age” of Byzantium because of the paucity of historical sources that illuminate them. This lack is commonly ascribed more to scant production than to failed transmission. Traditional historiographical genres in Greek did actually fall silent for two centuries, but historiography in the wide sense of “memory-keeping” (as well as “memory-building”) found other ways of expression. Theophanes’ Chronographia, Agapius of Mabbug’s and Michael the Syrian’s chronicles and The Chronicle of the Year 1234 share a significant amount of historical information, undoubtedly drawn from the same sources, via different paths. Close examination of this material leads to a better understanding of how forms of Greek historiography survived outside the capital of the empire and the ways in which information and texts flowed across geographic, linguistic and ethnic boundaries in a period that has otherwise been considered as culturally stagnant.