Diether Roderich Reinsch
The main historical interest of the great movement in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which we subsume under the general term “Renaissance” was directed towards the Roman past, but very early on the rediscovery of Greek antiquity, too, gained importance. The study of Roman literature, especially, soon led back to the Greek models and sources. The opportunity of becoming acquainted with the Greek language, works written in that language and translating them into Latin was provided or at least facilitated by contemporary foreign politics. Under pressure from the expanding Ottoman empire on the remnants of the Byzantine empire, many leading figures of Byzantine intellectual life found their way into Italy, first as ambassadors and later on as refugees. These were the first teachers and translators, later also editors of Greek literature in Italy.
The first Byzantine who worked as a teacher and translator in Italy was Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1350–1415).1 He originally came to Venice as the ambassador of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1391–1425) to ask for help against the Ottoman Turks, but then remained for most of his life in Italy. Chrysoloras taught Greek in Florence for five years before he accompanied his emperor on his long precatory journey around Europe (December 1399–spring 1403). Between 1400 and 1403 he taught in Pavia and Milan, and from 1410 in Bologna and Rome, until he died in Constance (Germany) when he was preparing the council for the Union of the Churches, which was subsequently held in Ferrara and Florence in 1436–8. Aside from his main works, a Greek grammar and a Latin translation of Plato’s Politeia, his oral teaching was very important and increased the interest in Greek that was burgeoning in Italy. The pupils Chrysoloras had gathered around him in the great intellectual centres of Italy formed the nucleus from which the study of Greek in Italy then proceeded. The most famous of these pupils, Guarino da Verona, even went to Constantinople to continue and extend his studies.
Chrysoloras was only the first of many Byzantines who flocked to the great Italian Renaissance centres: Rome, Florence, Milan, Naples and Venice. This movement even gained momentum after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, because Byzantine intellectuals now fled in considerable numbers, for example via Crete, to Italy. These refugees brought manuscripts containing the works of Greek authors with them; they then sold either the books themselves or the copies they had made from them to earn their living. The most important collection of manuscripts that came to Italy this way was the library of Cardinal Bessarion, which formed the nucleus of today’s Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. On the other hand, the demand for manuscripts containing Greek literary works resulted in expeditions to Byzantium or, later, to the former Byzantine territories now under Ottoman control. As early as 1425, Giovanni Aurispa returned from the East to Italy with a collection of 238 manuscripts. To mention just one other great enterprise: in 1491–2 Ianos Laskaris undertook two extended journeys to the former Byzantine territories and brought back over 200 manuscripts, most of them extremely precious, for the Medici library in Florence.
Greeks from Byzantium were also the leading figures in transferring Greek literary works from handwritten codices to the new medium of the printed book.2 The first printed folio with Greek letters dates from 1469, the first book completely set in Greek font from 1476. And from that time on, editing Greek texts began to flourish in Milan, Florence, Rome, Venice and elsewhere in Italy. Greek editors like Markos Musuros (for the Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius) and Greek publishing companies, for instance the house of Zacharias Kalliergis, also in Venice, played a prominent role in this process.
In this first phase, Byzantine literature did not yet play any role. Apart from Greek grammars, the main interest was concentrated on classical literature in the narrower sense (epic, tragedy, comedy) and on the technical literature of antiquity (rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, botany, zoology). If Byzantine works were considered at all, then only as containers of antique remains, for example dictionaries like the Suda, Hesychios, Etymologicum magnum or the Anthologia planudea. If there was any interest at all in genuine Byzantine literary works, it was directed to satire like the Katomyomachia of Theodoros Prodromos or to ethicaldidactic productions like the “mirror of princes” of Agapetos Diakonos.
Historiography did not attract interest until relatively late, and then once again the classical authors were the first to be printed: Thucydides, Herodotos and Xenophon were printed by Aldus’ publishing house at Venice from 1502 onwards; and later on, when interest in Greek antiquity had crossed the Alps, Polybius, Diodorus and Josephus Flavius were printed in the German-speaking area (mainly in Basle). For the German humanists the great Church Fathers of the fourth century, too, were of great interest, because they provided arguments and support for the debate between Reformers and Counter-Reformers. An edition of sixteen orations of Gregory of Nazianzus (prepared by Marcus Musurus) was published by Aldus’ publishing house in Venice while translations of several works of Gregory by John Cuno, Beatus Rhenanus and Willibald Pirckheimer as well as translations and editions of John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa and others were published north of the Alps.
All these enterprises were obviously focused on the content of the works as now available and disseminated as printed copies, because in many cases Latin translations of these Greek works were published as a first step while the Greek originals did not yet matter. The same applies to the reception of Byzantine historians, which started with the church historians in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. Often, the works of the historians, including the church historian Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, were first published in Latin translation and only later, often with a delay of many years, the Greek original followed.3 The most striking example for this practice is, for good reasons, Prokopios. His Wars (Bella) were, of course, of greatest interest for the Italian humanists, because they deal with the history of Italy and focus on Justinian, whose juridical compilations served as the basis for the study of law at the university of Bologna from the thirteenth century onwards. As early as 1441, Leonardo Bruni Aretino translated books V–VIII of Prokopios’ Bella into Latin, that is, the books which deal with the wars Justinian’s armies fought against the Goths in Italy.4 The same books were translated again by Cristoforo Persona between 1481 and 1483 (printed in Rome in 1506); books I–IV, which deal with the wars against the Persians and the Vandals, were later translated by Raffaello Maffei Volaterranus (printed in Rome in 1509). The strength of the Italian humanists’ factual interest in Prokopios is illustrated by the fact that as early as the fifteenth century the books containing the Gothic wars were also translated into Italian (by Nicolò di Lonigo, preserved in codex Ambrosianus A 272 inf.), and once again in the sixteenth century (by Benedetto Egio, printed in Venice in 1547). The Greek original, however, was only published in 1607, by the German humanist David Hoeschel at Augsburg.
The same holds true for a whole series of other Byzantine historians:5 Agathias (Latin translation in 1516: edition of the original text in 1594), Zosimos (1576: 1581/90), Konstantinos Manasses (1573: 1616), Michael Glykas (1572: 1618/60), Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos (1535. 1551: 1630), Ioannes Kantakuzenos (1603: 1645), Laonikos Chalkokondyles (1556: 1615), Georgios Sphrantzes (1604: 1796).
The Italian humanists devoted themselves to the study of Prokopios because they were interested in Justinian’s wars against the Goths: they saw them as part of their own history. Another driving force behind the interest in Byzantine historiographical texts was the dispute between the Catholic and the Protestant Churches which emerged north of the Alps at that time. This is the background to the editions pre pared by the printer of the king of France Robert Estienne (Robertus Stephanus).6 In 1544 he edited the church historians Sokrates, Sozomenos, Theodoretos of Kyrrhos and Evagrios as parts of a corpus of the early church history. Estienne was well disposed towards Protestantism; after his great critical edition of the Bible, he was in permanent conflict with the conservative theologians of the Sorbonne and in 1550 he eventually fled to Geneva, where he embraced Calvinism. His critical interest in the historical development of Christendom is well documented by his editions of fifth-century church historians. Theodoretos had been edited for the first time in 1535, a few years before Estienne, by Hieronymus Frobenius (Froben) and his brother-in-law Nicolaus Episcopius (Niklaus Bischoff), typically enough in Basle. It was in the same year, and in Basle, too, that excerpts of an anonymous Latin translation of parts of Nikephoros Kallistos’ work were used by Beatus Rhenanus; a translation of his complete work was produced by Joannes Langus (Johannes Lange) in Basle in 1553. Zosimos, the pagan counterpart of these works which were written from the Christian point of view, was edited by Robert Estienne’s son Henri (books I–II, Basle in 1581, the complete work by Friedrich Sylburg, Frankfurt am Main in 1590).
Interest in the secular Byzantine historians was provoked above all by the threat then posed by the Turks to Central Europe. In 1529 they laid siege to Vienna for the first time.7 Byzantium had already succumbed to the Turkish threat, and therefore it was of great interest to learn more about the rise and fall of the Byzantine empire. In addition, some Byzantine historians contained very concrete information about these Teucri-Turks, who, it was held, could be traced back etymologically to Greek antiquity. And the Byzantines themselves were considered twins of the Ottomans. An essayist recently has called the Ottoman empire a “Muslim Byzantium.”8 This Muslim Byzantium was, however, not only a military threat but also a trading partner for the West. The centre of the commercial relations with the Ottoman empire was located in southern Germany, in Augsburg, where the powerful business houses of the Fugger and the Welser families resided. They controlled economic relations between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires.
Augsburg was therefore the first centre of editorial activity in the field of secular Byzantine historiographical texts. But first we note the edition of the Greek text of a work by Prokopios which is not a historiographical work in the narrower sense: in 1531 Beatus Rhenanus edited Prokopios’ De aedificiis (On the Buildings, sc. of Justinian) from a rather deficient manuscript. This edition, too, originated in his deep interest in a writer who had contributed so much information about the assumed national (Germanic) past of the editor. Also in 1531, Rhenanus’ principal work Rerum Germanicarum libri tres (Three Books on German Matters) came out in Basle, and he re-edited the already existing earlier Latin translations of Prokopios’ Bella, together with an introductory essay on the origins of the Goths. Here he unmistakably identifies his contemporaries with the Teutons: “Nostri enim sunt Gotthorum, Vandalorum, Francorum triumphi. Nobis gloriae sunt illorum imperia in clarissimis Romanorum provinciis.” (“Ours are the triumphs of the Goths, the Vandals and the Francs. We are covered with the glory of their empires located within the most famous Roman provinces.”)
In 1553 Hans Dernschwam, a retired manager of the Augsburgian commercial firm Fugger, joined an embassy sent by the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand to Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople, led by his new ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq.9 When Dernschwam came back two years later, he brought his patrons, among other things, Greek manuscripts containing John Zonaras’ world chronicle and Niketas Choniates’ Historia. Thanks to Dernschwam, Anton Fugger, the proprietor of the banking and commercial house, ordered the private secretary and librarian of his nephew Johann Jakob to translate Zonaras into Latin and to prepare an edition of the original text, and to continue with Choniates, because Choniates’ report started where Zonaras broke off.10 This librarian, Hieronymus Wolf, whom Hans-Georg Beck once called “the father of German Byzantine studies,”11 thus became a Byzantinist against his will.12
For the constitution of the text of Zonaras, five manuscripts were available to Wolf. Of course, one cannot expect that he could have done a real recensio on this basis. As generally is the case for these early editions, he based his edition on one leading manuscript, correcting the text here and there “ope aliorum codicum” (“with the aid of other manuscripts”). Wolf had three manuscripts at his disposal for the continuation of the corpus with Niketas Choniates. He followed the same method as with Zonaras: he even took the same manuscript which contains both works as his basis.13 Curiously enough, Wolf thought that he was editing not the original text of Choniates, but a later paraphrase. He did not regard this as problematic, however, because it was the content that mattered. Wolf could also have used the supposed original text of Choniates (in reality a metaphrase with strong elements of the late Byzantine colloquial language) contained in a manuscript bought in 1544 by the senate of Augsburg from Antonios Eparchos.14 As Wolf stated, he would have been compelled to give up editing this text, because he was not able to manage its linguistic form. Therefore he preferred to edit the supposed later paraphrase, which is in reality the genuine text of Choniates. An artful trick of reason as it were. Wolf’s performance as an editor is not judged very favourably by van Dieten, Choniates’ modern editor: “The apparatus criticus is so unclear that in most cases one does not know what is taken from which codex. The “laboriosa collatio” (“toilsome collation”) of three manuscripts he obviously took credit for has done to his edition more damage than benefit.”15 Of course, this judgement presupposes modern standards and possibilities beyond those available to Wolf.
With the editions of Zonaras and Choniates, Wolf had completed (in his own words) a “historiae quoddam quasi corpus” (“something like a corpus of history”).16 His patrons therefore decided to cover the remaining period from 1204 to the end of the Byzantine empire in 1453 in order to create a “corpus integrum totius Byzantinae historiae” (“a complete corpus of Byzantine history”). Anton Fugger offered a manuscript containing the first eleven books of Nikephoros Gregoras’ Roman History to cover the years 1204–1351, and Laonikos Chalkokondyles was considered a good option for the remaining century up to the fall of the empire. Chalkokondyles, however, was only available in Latin translation, not as a manuscript with the original Greek text.17 So the second part of the first corpus of Byzantine history comprising the Greek text of Gregoras and Conrad Clauser’s Latin translation of Chalkokondyles (which had been published separately in Basle in 1556), was brought out by Oporinus’ publishing house in Basle in 1562. The important element here as in the other early editions of Byzantine historians was the Latin translation, because it could be understood by a much wider readership than the Greek original. As the publisher Oporinus stated, he would have been happy to offer the reader the chance to check the Latin translation against the Greek original, but content was more important than language.18
The same applies to another first edition of a Byzantine historian based on a (now lost) manuscript of the Fuggers’ library: Georgios Kedrenos, edited by Wilhelm Holtzmann (Guilielmus Xylander) from Augsburg, published in Basle in 1566. Another formerly Augsburgian manuscript (today’s cod. Monacensis gr. 48) was the basis for the first edition of Theophylaktos Simokattes prepared by the Jesuit Jacobus Pontanus at the Catholic University of Ingolstadt in 1604.19
The Augsburgian tradition was continued by David Hoeschel (d. 1617), a pupil of Hieronymus Wolf.20 Hoeschel’s editions were financed by the other big banking and commercial house in Augsburg, the Welsers, and printed at the printery named “Ad insigne pinus” (“At the trademark of the pinecone”). Hoeschel edited the works of forty-four authors, among them four first editions of Byzantine historiographical works: Photios’ Bibliotheke, which summarizes among others the works of some Byzantine historians (1601), Konstantinos Porphyrogenitos’ Excerpta de legationibus (1603), Prokopios’ Bella (1607) and Anna Komnene’s Alexias (1610).21 In contrast to Wolf’s editions, the editions made by Hoeschel do not contain Latin translations of the Greek text, but philological and historical notes instead. And unlike Wolf, Hoeschel was a capable philologist and a historian who was able to pass sound and well-balanced judgements.
Beside Wolf and Hoeschel, a third German humanist who concerned himself with Byzantine historians should be mentioned: the famous legal historian and orientalist Hans Löwenklau (Johannes Leunclavius).22 He did not edit the Greek text of any Byzantine historian, but he translated three of them into Latin: Zosimos (Basle 1581), Michael Glykas (Basle 1572) and Konstantinos Manasses (Basle 1573).
Leiden in the Netherlands was another important centre for editing Byzantine historians from the end of the sixteenth century up to the year 1618. Bonaventura de Smed (Vulcanius) from Bruges (1538–1614) and Jan de Meurs (Johannes Meursius) from Loozduinen near The Hague (1579–1639) prepared the first editions of Agathias (1594), Konstantinos Porphyrogenitos (De thematibus 1588, De administrando imperio 1611), Michael Glykas (partial edition 1618), Konstantinos Manasses (1616) and Leo VI (the Wise) (Tactica 1612). Johannes Meursius’ Glossarium graecobarbarum (1610; second edn 1614) was also very important for understanding Byzantine historical texts. These Dutch editors were following the same principle as their predecessors in Augsburg: the basis for an edition was always a leading manuscript which had come into the editor’s possession more or less by chance23 or to which he had access in another way.24 This was, for example, also the case with the first edition of the abbreviated version of Georgios Akropolites by Theodorus Dousa (Leiden 1614).25 The first edition of Ioannes Kinnamos by Cornelius Tollius at Utrecht (Traiectum ad Rhenum) in the Netherlands (in 1652) was based on a copy made by Isaac Vossius in Rome from cod. Vaticanus gr. 163, which had been given to Tollius.26
After the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), Paris became not only the new European centre of political power, but also its cultural and scientific centre. A large-scale Corpus Byzantinae Historiae, the so-called Byzantine du Louvre (or Corpus Parisiense) was edited under the auspices of Louis XIV and under the direction of Philippe Labbé between 1645 and 1688, with supplements issued up to 1819. The corpus consists of twenty-eight volumes, with supplements in another ten volumes, and includes ten first editions. The manuscripts needed for the editions were collected for the Royal Library of France primarily by the great ministers Mazarin, Colbert and Séguier. All the Greek texts of the corpus were accompanied by Latin translations which were either reprinted from an already existing earlier edition or were specially produced by the editors for the corpus. As always when a multitude of editors is involved, the quality of the results differs considerably. Their successors passed positive judgements on Leone Allacci (Leo Allatius), Johannes Boivin, Carolus Du Cange and Carl Benedikt Hase. So Heisenberg called Allatius, who prepared the first edition of the chronicle of Joel (1651) and the first edition of the complete text of Georgios Akropolites (1656), “vir … ille doctissimus atque doctrina … praeclarissima” (“this highly learned and utterly skilled man”).27 And Boivin, who re-edited books I–XI of Nikephoros Gregoras on the basis of the edition of Hieronymus Wolf and added the first edition of books XII–XXIV (1702), was called by Schopen “vir praestanti doctrina et egregia librorum copia instructus” (“a man of outstanding learning who has read a large number of books”).28 The revised editions by Du Cange (Ioannes Kinnamos 1670, Ioannes Zonaras 1686, Chronicon Paschale 1688) are excellent not so much because of the improvements on the texts but on account of the notes he added. Hase’s achievements in his first edition of Leon Diakonos (1819) were outstanding in both editing and annotating. Other editors of the Corpus Parisiense, however, were harshly criticized by their successors; for instance Dindorf gave the following verdict on Jacobus Goar and François Combefis, the editors of Theophanes the Confessor (1655): “mediocri doctrina, artis criticae facultate nulla, neglegentia incredibili” (“men of mediocre learning, of no competence in applying textual criticism at all, of incredible carelessness”).29
Between 1729 and 1733, the twenty-eight sumptuously produced volumes of the Corpus Parisiense were reprinted in a more modest presentation in Venice,30 the Corpus Venetum. The texts, however, did not profit from this new edition, gathering rather more new typographical errors than corrections. Nor can the only first edition of this corpus, the Regum libri quattuor of the so-called Iosephos Genesios by Johannes B. Mencken, published posthumously in 1733, be termed a glorious deed of editorial skill.31
The next and most ambitious attempt to publish a complete corpus of Byzantine historiography, the so-called Corpus Bonnense, saw a shift in focus from history itself to the historians, which is also reflected in the corpus’ official title: Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (CSHB). With fifty volumes published between 1828 and 1897, the Corpus Bonnense was the greatest editorial enterprise in the field of Byzantine secular literature undertaken in the nineteenth century. It was initiated by Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831), the universal historian and founder of the modern critical science of history, and was continued under the auspices of the Preuβische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Prussian Academy of Sciences) and led by the classical philologist Immanuel Bekker (1785–1871).32 Bekker himself was the editor responsible for twenty-five volumes of the corpus. In principle the Corpus Bonnense was to be a revised edition of the Corpus Parisiense or the Corpus Venetum,33 but only few editions, for instance those made by the philologists Schopen, Reifferscheid or Büttner-Wobst, were able to meet this standard. In particular the volumes Immanuel Bekker was in charge of rather damaged the editor’s scientific reputation, despite the fact that he was an acknowledged classical scholar.34 August Heisenberg once said, according to Franz Dölger, that Immanuel Bekker must have revised the texts “lying on the sofa with the cigar in his mouth.”35 If Bekker thought the authors he was ‘editing’ worth a praefatio (which never exceeded one page, though), this is where he utters his displeasure at the job he had taken on and his contempt for the authors and the works he had to edit.36
Therefore the Corpus Bonnense in its entirety was criticized very harshly for its philological performance, and rightly so.37 The corpus was, however, very important for the dissemination of the texts of Byzantine historiography. If we look at the lists of the subscribers, we come across addresses from St Petersburg to Rome, many bookshops and secondary school teachers among them. Outside the Corpus Bonnense, texts by Byzantine historians were published in several isolated separate editions,38 or more particularly as part of the Collection Byzantine of the Association Guillaume Budé in Paris,39 or by the publishing house Teubner in Leipzig.40 These editions, typically issued around the year 1900 or later in the twentieth century, were much better in quality than the average ones in the Corpus Bonnense.
It was not before time when in the second half of the twentieth century a new attempt was made to create a great corpus of Byzantine narrative historical sources, this time as an international cooperation under the auspices of the Association Internationale des Études Byzantines (AIEB) employing modern standards for editing ancient and medieval texts. Such an edition is based on a careful recensio and includes a substantial apparatus criticus and a detailed apparatus fontium (et testimoniorum), indices (nominum, rerum ad res Byzantinas spectantium, Graecitatis, locorum) and in most cases also a translation (with notes) into a modern European language. This great enterprise of the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae (CFHB) has made good progress (altogether forty-four titles in fifty-eight volumes from 1967 to the end of 2007),41 but nevertheless continues. Some editorial problems have by no means been solved satisfactorily even in this corpus, and by way of a conclusion I offer the following observations:
1 We must revise the observance of historical orthography, not least with regard to accentuation. Whereas most editors have followed the standardization adopted by classic scholars for their texts, many words have changed their accent, for instance from circumflex to acute; so the Greek forms of Konstantinos or of the title caesar are always written with an acute in our manuscripts, not with a circumflex. Why should we adapt them to the rules for classical texts? Many words written separately in classical texts are represented as one word in our manuscripts. Why should we print them as two words? The rules for enclitics in our manuscripts are not those adapted by classical philologists for their texts either. Why then should we “correct” them?42
2 The observance of Byzantine rhetorical punctuation has until now been altered by all editors of the corpus in favour of systems of grammatical punctuation, which are common practice in their respective mother tongues, with the effect that we receive these, by their nature clearly rhetorical texts, in quite another way than the Byzantines did. The systems of punctuation used by Byzantine authors have been studied in a sufficient degree with the help of autographs, at least for the middle and late Byzantine periods. Today nobody who undertakes a critical historical edition of a western medieval text or, let us say, of Goethe, would dare to change an author’s orthography and punctuation so violently. In a great number of cases the sense of a sentence will be clearer with its author’s punctuation than with the modern grammatical punctuation. For the reader a short time of training in the author’s rhetorical punctuation will suffice to give a better understanding and a deeper insight into the rhetorical structure of the texts.43 Byzantine studies are deeply indebted to classical philology, but in this regard they have to step out of its shadow.
3 We must abandon the arbitrary treatment of quotations and similia in the apparatus fontium. There have to be clear distinctions drawn between: real quotations (whether their source is indicated or not by the author); other quotations (whether their source is indicated or not by the author), which have been changed in regard to their wording; and the so-called similia, which do not show a special familiarity of the author with a certain text, but only his general literary training in so far as he is using the vocabulary and expressions or phrases that are the common property of Byzantine litterati in general, or the litterati of the author’s time in particular.44
1 On Chrysoloras and other leading figures, see Geanakoplos 1962; Harlfinger 1989.
2 For detailed information, see Koumarianou et al. 1986.
3 The data concerning the editions of Byzantine historians are collected by Colonna 1956; and Moravcsik 1958.
4 Printed in Fuligno in 1470. In this translation Prokopios is not even mentioned as author.
5 I do not distinguish between the categories of “historians” and “chroniclers.” For this question, see Beck 1965; Beck 1972; Ljubarskij 1987; Ljubarskij 1993.
6 For more on Robert Estienne, see Armstrong 1986.
7 See Inalcik 1973: 35–40.
8 Brodsky 1987: 427–8, “the Ottoman Empire, alias Muslim Byzantium … In purely structural terms, the difference between the Second Rome and the Ottoman Empire is accessible only in units of time.”
9 Dernschwam’s and Busbecq’s travelogues contain detailed information about the conditions of life in the Ottoman empire around the middle of the sixteenth century: see Babinger 1986; Ghiselin de Busbecq 1986.
10 For details see Husner 1949.
11 Beck 1984. On his life see also Beck 1958; Beck 1966a.
12 Pinder in Zonaras 1841: I, XXXVIII: “in meae infelicitatis parte numeravi, quod in auctorem luculentiorem non incidissem.” (“I reckoned it to be my misfortune that I did not come across a more splendid author”).
13 Now cod. Monacensis gr. 93. See Choniates 1975: L–LI.
14 Now cod. Monacensis gr. 450.
15 Choniates 1975: CV (“Der kr. App. ist so unklar, daß man meistens nicht weiß, was er welchem Codex entnommen hat. Die “laboriosa collatio” von drei Hss., welche er sich offensichtlich zum Verdienst anrechnete, hat seiner Ausgabe mehr geschadet als genützt”).
16 It was financed by Anton Fugger and published by Johannes Herbst (Oporinus) in Basle in 1557.
17 The Greek original was edited in Geneva by Johannes B. Baumbach as late as 1615, together with the edition of Nikephoros Gregoras by Hieronymus Wolf (Basle 1562) and the edition of Georgios Akropolites by Theodorus Dousa (Leiden 1614) as part of a corpus titled Historiae Byzantinae scriptores tres Graecolatini uno tomo simul nunc editi (Three Greek-Latin authors of Byzantine History now published in one volume).
18 Characteristically, a pirated edition of this corpus was published without the expensive encumbrance of the Greek texts in Paris in 1566–7.
19 See Simokattes 1887, 1972: V. Pontanus had already published the Latin translation (without the Greek original text) of Ioannes Kantakuzenos’ Historiae the year before, also in Ingolstadt.
20 On him see Schmidbauer 1954.
21 Hoeschel edited, without being aware of it, only an excerpt of the first fourteen books of the Alexias. He mistook it for the first eight books of the genuine work, because in the manuscript it is subdivided into eight “books” and Hoeschel knew that the entire work consists of fifteen books. See the title of his edition: Alexiados libri VIII ab Anna Comnena de rebus a patre gestis scripta.
22 On him see Babinger 1944/5.
23 For instance, in the case of Agathias, now cod. Leidensis ex legato Vulcanii 54, see Keydell 1967: XIII. XXXVI–XXXVII.
24 In the case of Konstantinos Manasses (cod. Vaticanus Palatinus gr. 124), see Lampsidis 1996: vol. I, pp. XCII, CLV–CLVI.
25 For more on this edition and the manuscript it is based on, see Akropolites 1978: I, pp. III, XX–XXI.
26 See Meineke 1836: V, XI.
27 Akropolites 1978: III–IV.
28 Gregoras 1829: I, p. V.
29 I quote from Theophanes 1883: I, V.
30 In addition to the Corpus Parisiense also the chronicle of Ioannes Malalas edited by E. Chilmeadus in Oxford in 1691 based on cod. Bodleianus Baroccianus 182 found its way into the Corpus Venetum.
31 Lesmueller-Werner and Thurn 1978: XXVI.
32 See Irmscher 1953; Irmscher 1957.
33 Some editions are reprints from other sources, for instance the edition of Konstantinos Porphyrogenitos’ De cerimoniis aulae Byzantinae by Johann Jakob Reiske (Leipzig 1751–4), Bonn 1828–31 (on this occasion parts of Reiske’s commentary were published for the first time).
34 Unfortunately, the first edition of Michael Attaleiates prepared by Bekker himself in 1853, which was based on a copy of cod. Parisinus Coislin 136 procured for him by Wladimir Brunet de Presle, is no exception. See Pérez Martín 2002: LVIII, LXIII–IV.
35 Dölger 1955: 54.
36 See Bekker’s remarks in his edition of Theophylaktos Simokattes (Bonn 1834): “ipse quia et codicibus carebam manuscriptis et parum assueram generi illi dicendi, quo plane mirifico utitur scriptor ad exemplar antiquitatis ineptissime expressus, satis habui si universa scribendi et interpungandi ratione ad sanitatem propius revocata manifestos duntaxat scribarum typothetarumque errores corrigerem.” (“Because I did not have any manuscripts at my disposal and because I knew too little about this sort of language which the author uses in a quite embarrassing way expressing himself foolishly in trying to follow the model of antiquity, I was generally satisfied with returning spelling and punctuation closer to common sense and with correcting at least evident errors of scribes and typesetters”).
37 See for instance Boissevain 1899: 159: “Let us hope that this fiftieth volume of the collection will be its last. The corpus as a whole has been a mistake from the beginning. It has not even reached the standards that were current in the first half of our century, but now, when Byzantine studies have received such a boost, it is nearly useless for most of the authors edited in it. It is enough (sc. to perceive its inferiority) to compare the Theophanes by De Boor with the text of the Corpus Bonnense.” (Translated from the German).
38 For instance Michael Psellos’ Chronographia by Konstantinos Sathas, Athens and Paris 1874; Eustathios of Thessalonike’s Capture of Thessalonike by Theophilus L. F. Tafel, Frankfurt am Main 1832; Kritobulos of Imbros’ Historiae by Carolus Müller, Paris 1870.
39 For instance Michael Psellus’ Chronographia by É. Renauld 1926–8 and Anna Komnene’s Alexias by B. Leib 1937–45 (with an index by P. Gautier 1976).
40 For instance Prokopios by J. Haury 1905, Theophylaktos Simokattes by C. De Boor 1887, 1972, Theophanes Confessor by C. De Boor 1883–5, Georgios Monachos by C. De Boor 1904, Anna Komnene by Aug. Reifferscheid 1884, Georgios Akropolites by Aug. Heisenberg 1903, revised 1978.
41 Two other volumes are in print, twenty-eight are in preparation and one more is planned.
42 See the remarks of A. Kambylis in Reinsch and Kambylis (2001): 34*–52*.
43 See Reinsch forthcoming.
44 See Reinsch 2006.