ABSTRACT

Universal chronicles held an important place among texts available to South Slavic readers during the Late Middle Ages and the Ottoman period. The chronology of the Church Slavic translations of Byzantine universal chronicles follows a sequence quite different to that of the original works. John Zonaras came with the most sophisticated and comprehensive of Byzantine universal chronicles, supplementing older authors with his own account of the century he lived in. John Zonaras shared a view of the four kingdoms different from those of Christian apologists like Hippolytus of Rome who identified them with the Assyrians, the Persians, the Macedonians, and the Romans. Universal history could perhaps be a genre more open to lay interest and lay perspective, particularly in the case of the Slavic Manasses, which reproduced a text originally meant for the entertainment of the Byzantine court. Slavic readers and scribes were conscious of the linguistic barrier separating them from the immediate understanding of the Greek original.