This chapter describes how the timeline of Byzantine historical writing can be divided into three 140-year periods: first, from AD 500–640, the end of late antiquity, when historiography flourished in many genres; second, from 640–780, when Byzantium struggled to resist Arab conquest and few surviving texts were produced; and finally, from 780–920, an age of recovery for the state and literature, when older traditions were resynthesized and the foundations for new developments were laid. Primarily, the society of the Eastern Empire was mostly Greek speaking, Christian, and specifically Roman in its political or national consciousness. The ‘usable past’ available to historians was therefore complex, consisting of incommensurate components that defined different sites of the culture.
