The Medieval Church · c. 800–815
The Short History
Breviarium
Nicephorus of Constantinople · c. 758 – 828
What it is
A deliberately plain history of the years 602 to 769 — the Persian war, the Arab conquests, the two sieges of Constantinople, and the iconoclast emperors — written without the moralising and the chronological apparatus that fill Theophanes.
Why it lasted
The other main Byzantine source for the darkest stretch of the empire's history, and a useful control on Theophanes because the two used overlapping sources and made different choices about what to leave out.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
This work is in the public domain and can be read in full, free, at the archives below.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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