Three extensively illustrated manuscripts of Byzantine historical works survive. One, made in Sicily in the second quarter of the twelfth century, contains the original Greek text of George Skylitzes's Historical Synopsis.Footnote 1 Another presents a Russian translation of George the Monk's Chronicle, copied in Tver ca. 1300.Footnote 2 A third, produced at Turnovo probably in 1349, has a Bulgarian prose rendering of Constantine Manasses's versified Chronological Synopsis,Footnote 3 supplemented here and there by short notes dealing mostly with Bulgarian history.Footnote 4
The first and last of these codices form the subject of Elena Boeck's recent monograph. It is uncertain just who ordered them to be copied and illustrated, but suspicions fall, respectively, on Roger II, king of Sicily from 1130 to 1154 and Ivan Alexander, tsar of Bulgaria from 1331 to 1371.Footnote 5 Neither monarch commissioned an original piece of historiography, preferring instead to make use of Byzantine texts.Footnote 6 Several scholars have assumed that the pictures in the Madrid and Vatican manuscripts may likewise have been based on (now lost) models produced in Constantinople, where Skylitzes and Manasses wrote.Footnote 7
Boeck has little patience with putative prototypes and resolutely sweeps aside the timeworn notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. ‘I argue throughout this book that message trumps materiality,’ she explains (50). ‘[T]he designer of each manuscript dissected, discarded, selectively reshaped, and amplified segments of the Byzantine past to suit the interests and preoccupations of a non-Byzantine audience’ (88). The two agents must have followed the wishes of their sovereigns (89); ‘artists were not expected to read the text and were probably not empowered to make decisions about what to represent’ (91). Roger II's approach is characterized as ‘perquisitive’ (a newly-coined word), that of Ivan Alexander, as ‘protective’ (69). Miniatures in the Madrid manuscript frequently stress the emperors’ personal weakness (fols. 63v, 70r-v, 80r-v, 84v-85r, 86v-87r, 102r, 157r-159r, 174r-178v, 206v, etc.) and thus highlight the political instability of King Roger's foreign rival, Byzantium. In the Vatican codex, on the other hand, Ivan Alexander – rather than the rulers of Constantinople – is cast as rightful successor to the Roman emperors of old (fols. 1v, 91v, 123v-124r, 204v-205r).
Written to the sound of nineteenth-century opera music (xvi), Boeck's prose is often melodious: ‘Consideration of narrative configurations also highlights how the two manuscripts opted for opposite strategies of dealing with an imperial decapitation’ (182). Her book is, in the author's own words, ‘the first comparative, cross-cultural study of medieval illustrated histories’ (1).
