An eyewitness narrative of the one-day coup of John Komnenos the Fat at Constantinople on 31 July 1200: the crowning of the usurper in Hagia Sophia, the mob's plunder of the Great Palace, the stand of the palace clergy and the guard at the church of the Virgin of the Pharos, where Mesarites was skeuophylax, and the recovery of the palace by Alexios III's men that night. It names the plotters and their families and shows how thin the emperor's hold on his own capital was. It is a rhetorical self-justification as much as a report, and the sequence of events inside the day is compressed.
About this source
- Title
- Logos on the revolt of John Komnenos
- Author
- Nicholas Mesarites
- Author's dates
- about 1163 or 1164 to after 1216
- Written
- 1200 or soon after
- Language
- Greek
- Covers
- 31 July 1200
- Kind
- History
Heisenberg's 1907 edition is the only Greek text. Angold's English (2017) is in copyright and not freely online. Mesarites' other works (the description of the Holy Apostles, the funeral oration for his brother John, the reports of 1206 to 1214) are later or not about 1200.
Where to read it
Editions
Translations
- M. Angold, Nicholas Mesarites: His Life and Works in Translation, Translated Texts for Byzantinists 4 (Liverpool, 2017), English (not freely online)