Sources

Abstract One of the central problems with John’s reign is that there is no overarching, dominant historical narrative that, however flawed, gives us at least a skeletal account of what occurred and why; instead, John’s reign must be pieces together from sources not specifically focused on him and his era. Historians have traditionally looked to the broad histories of Niketas Choniates and John Kinnamos, who both open their works with a summary of John’s reign, and so this chapter first highlights the problems with this approach, while also noting what is still to be gained from these texts. But, having freed ourselves from dependence on these two accounts, it turns out that there are actually a lot of other sources on John: notably contemporary court texts, such as occasional poetry not dissimilar from modern press releases, and letters by key figures at court. There are also underused documentary archival texts, as well as legal and administrative manuals. Beyond Byzantium, we have many significant non-Greek voices from neighbouring regions (in Syriac, Turkish, Armenian, and Arabic, in addition to Latin texts from both Western Europe and the Crusader East), in addition to more exotic texts that still provide individual crucial details, such as Norse Sagas or Rus and Georgian chronicles. Finally, of crucial importance is the growing corpus of archaeological evidence, which demonstrates the effect the events in these texts had upon the landscape. Overall, this chapter introduces the reader to all the sources on John and his reign.