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An Eyewitness to History: The Short History of Nikephoros Our Holy Father the Patriarch of Constantinople. Translated by NORMAN TOBIAS and ANTHONY R. SANTORO. Brookline, Mass.: Hellenic College Press. xxiv + 220 pp. $18.75.
The Breviarium, or Short History, of Patriarch Nikephoros is one of the two most important Greek sources for the history of the seventh and eighth centuries (the other is the chronicle of Theophanes). Nikephoros covers, in summary fashion, events in the Byzantine empire from 602 to 769. In a somewhat moralistic tone, he writes mostly about political events and the prominent persons involved in them. Still, there are items of interest to church historians: relations between emperor and patriarch, the monothelite controversy, the sixth ecumenical council, and the beginnings of iconoclasm. While clearly hostile to the iconoclast emperors, Nikephoros is not nearly as vitriolic or, for that matter, as scatological in castigating them as is Theophanes.
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