Imaginary World of Post-Byzantine Chronicle-Writing (The Case of the Ekthesis Chronica from the First Half of the Sixteenth Century)

Abstract

This paper addresses the Ekthesis Chronica (Ἔκθεσις χρονική), a Greek chronicle compiled by an anonymous cleric of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the first half of the sixteenthcentury, which encompassed the events of the Late Byzantine and Early Ottoman history. Its distinctive feature is a recurrent alternation of seemingly mutually excluding points of view. Its neighboring chapters comply with the demands of different genres, accepting the set of values associated with them. The imaginary world of the chapters dealing with the events prior to 1453 reminds the reader of the heroic world of chivalric romances. The chapters describing the fall of Constantinople are may be read as a prosaic lamentation of the loss of the city which embodied the Byzantine civilization as a whole. In the post-Byzantine section, there appeared three approaches to the Ottoman rule over the Greeks. Whenever the chronicle-writer switches to the apocalyptic mode, the sultan becomes an infidel murderer of Christians. If, by contrast, he adopts the aretalogic (hagiographic) mode, the same sultan transforms into a philosopher on the throne. Finally, the pragmatic mode makes him a self-serving albeit sympathetic moderator in the conflicts inside the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The closer is the author to contemporary history, the more unfitting he feels the generic forms inherited from the age of the fall of Constantinople. Eventually, the chronicle-writer makes an attempt to create a new type of narrative with the characters on the foreground, which will allow his reader to feel empathy for them notwithstanding their language and faith.