On the Administration of the Empire (De Administrando Imperio)

Critical Introduction

begins only at folioA leaf of a manuscript. 3ʳ; and b) that the beginning of On the Administration of the Empire, that is to say, the first page (folio 3ʳ) of the original codexA manuscript in book format., is so much worn, and the handwriting so indistinct, as to require its mending in brown ink by a later hand. In any case, the "Letter of Pythagoras" is copied in a different, and in all probability a later, hand. The subsequent history of the codex gives us, as we shall see, some clue as to when the "Letter" became attached to the manuscript of On the Administration of the Empire.

The text of On the Administration of the Empire ends in the middle of folio 211ʳ. The rest of this page and its versoThe back side of a leaf., which, as it was the last page of the original codex, is very much the worse for wear, contain a number of notes in different and, in some cases, later hands. Of especial interest as casting light on the origin of the codex is that written on the then blank folio 211ᵛ by the actual copyist of On the Administration of the Empire, in the same red ink which he employed for the initial letters and headings of the chapters. Some of the letters in this note are so much worn and so dim as to render them now almost illegible. The text of this metrical epilogue A short poem or speech at the end of a book. is as follows:

^1 The book of Caesar
^2 John Doukas,
^3 written by the hands
^4 of a household servant
^5 named Michael
^6 the
^7 Roïzaïtes † Original Greek: ^1Βίβλος καίσ[αρ]ος ^2Ἰωάννου τοῦ Δούκα ^3γραφῆ(σα) χερσὶν ^4οἰκογενοῦς οἰκέτου ^5Μιχα(ὴ)λ ὀνόματι ^6τοῦ ^7Ροϊζαΐτου †

which makes it quite clear that the manuscript at one time belonged to the library of the Caesar John Ducas, and that the copyist was his own confidential secretary, Michael.^6 Unfortunately there is no date, but the name of the Caesar John Ducas, references to whom in Byzantine sources occur between the years 1059—1081, proves that the manuscript was copied towards the end of the 11th century. This is confirmed by a dated note in a later hand on the same page, which contains a reference to the year 1098/9.^7

Concerning the adventures of the codex during the Byzantine age we have no other information, apart from the evidence of marginal notes to be described lower down; it emerges again only towards the beginning of the 16th century, when it was copied in 1509 by Antony Eparchus, very probably in the island of Corfu (see manuscript V below). By the middle of the century our manuscript was in Italy, whither it had been brought perhaps through the agency of Janus Lascaris.^8 The first mention of it in Italy is in the catalogue of the library of Cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi.^9 On the death of Ridolfi in 1550, it passed,

^6 See G. Kolias, ‘The Caesar John Ducas as copyist of codex Parisinus Graecus 2009 of the De administrando imperio’, Yearbook of the Society of Byzantine Studies, 14 (1938), pp. 300—305; Gy. Moravcsik, ‘The provenance of the Byzantine manuscript of the "De administrando imperio"’, Bulletin of the Bulgarian Historical Society, 16—18 (1940), pp. 333—337; B. Leib, ‘John Doukas, Caesar and Monk’, Analecta Bollandiana 68 (1950), pp. 163—180. —- In the deciphering of the text I was given valuable assistance by Prof. F. Dölger (Munich) and Dir. V. Laurent (Paris), to whom I express my sincere gratitude.
^7 See Gy. Moravcsik, ‘Yearbook of the Society of Byzantine Studies’, 7 (1930), p. 141, but cf. V. Laurent, Erasmus, 3 (1950) p. 766.
^8 See B. Knös, An ambassador of Hellenism — Janus Lascaris — and the Greek-Byzantine tradition in French humanism, (Uppsala-Paris, 1945), pp. 213, 216.
^9 "Number 21. Description of peoples and places by Constantine, Emperor of the Romans, for his son Romanus, and various histories tending toward right administration." Original Latin: «Num. 21. Constantini Romanorum Imperatoris ad Romanum filium descriptio gentium et locorum, ac varia historia ad rectam administrationem tendens.» See B. Montfaucon, New library of manuscript libraries II (Paris, 1739), p. 777.