This text is one of the most popular Byzantine historical works, covering Creation to the ninth century. It treats the whole story of history with lots of entertaining stories and digressions on theology. It is entitled Brief chronicle (chronikon syntomon) C ollected, Combined and I nterpreted from various chroniclers by George the Monk and Sinner. Nothing else is known of George, who is commonly called either George the Monk or George Hamartolos (from the Greek word for sinner).

There are two variants of the text. The earlier version is known from the tenth or early eleventh- century manuscript Coislinianus 305 and a onepage fragment in the tenth- century manuscript Vindobonensis Theologicus Graecus 121. This version appears to have been written in 846/ 847. A Slavonic translation of the first version was made in the fourteenth century, apparently based on a better Greek manuscript than our surviving Coislinianus 305. The Slavonic translation is known as the “Letovnik.” The later version of the Greek text, sometimes called the “Vulgate,” is a revision compiled in the last quarter of the ninth century. It is known from twenty- nine manuscripts and contains interpolations of material added after 871.

The text covers the period from Creation to 842. The work is notable for including numerous amusing and moralizing stories, many of which do not have much to do with specific historical events. In some cases, we can tell that the author highlighted moral lessons to be drawn from an episode, but disregarded the chronological placement of the episode within his source material. George has been characterized as a “short- story” writer. By one count, the text includes forty- four discrete stories about bishops, monks, the destiny of the soul, heroic chastity and martyrdom, and pagans, Jews, and iconoclasts. The sources of the narratives seem to have been hagiographies and collections of monks’ proverbs, along with a number of spiritually beneficial stories. Some of the stories from this text appear to have circulated separately from the rest of the history. The text also includes long polemics against Jews, various heretics, and iconoclast emperors. These theological digressions sometimes take the form of long strings of quotations.