Alicia Simpson. Niketas Choniates

Alicia Simpson’s unusually accomplished first book is also the first book-length study of the history of Nicetas Choniates. Simpson describes Nicetas as “the very best of Byzantine historians” (298), which may be a slight exaggeration; I would rank him second, after Procopius of Caesarea, though ahead of Michael Psellus and Anna Comnena. Nicetas’s history is a vivid and incisive description of the decline of Byzantium during the years from 1118 to 1206, including its collapse under attack by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Highly intelligent and well educated, Nicetas wrote as one of the empire’s top officials in the years leading up to the Crusade, and as an eyewitness to the Crusade itself and to the beginnings of the Byzantine successor state at Nicaea. He had a momentous and tragic story to tell, and told it in one of the world’s great histories. In theory, the appearance of Simpson’s monograph and my own The Middle Byzantine Historians within a month of each other in 2013 was unfortunate, since neither of us could consult the other’s book; in practice, readers may be interested in comparing our mostly independent accounts. In any event, her treatment of Nicetas’s history is about eight times as long as mine, which drew on a preliminary article of hers that explained her most important insight: that Nicetas wrote his history in successive versions, like his predecessors Eusebius of Caesarea, Ammianus Marcellinus, Procopius, John Malalas, Psellus, and Michael Attaleiates. In the case of the other historians, we have just the final version, and we usually suppose (perhaps wrongly) that they continued their earlier work and otherwise left it unaltered; but in Nicetas’s case, we have evidence of different versions in different manuscripts, including one version completed before 1204, and can see that Nicetas not only continued what he had already written, but revised and expanded it. Between his original and final versions, Nicetas lived through the Fourth Crusade and lost the high offices he had held until 1204, so that he no longer needed to please those he had served. His final revision, like Procopius’s Secret History, is a reminder that, at least in an autocracy, we ought never to assume that authors write candidly about their rulers. This should be obvious for panegyrics of emperors, of which Nicetas wrote his share, but a surprising number of today’s Byzantinists are far too ready to take both panegyrics and contemporary histories at face value. Simpson keeps her critical sense about both genres.

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