Chronicle of 754

The Chronicle of 754 (or Continuatio Hispana) was a Latin-language^[1] history in ninety-five chapters with the narrative theme "the ruin of Spain", which was composed in the year 754, in Toledo or Córdoba. Its compiler was an anonymous Christian Mozarab^[2] chronicler, living under Arab rule in Iberia; the author was called a phantom Isidorus Pacensis (Isidore of Beja) through compounded errors (see below). The Chronicle of 754 covers the years 610^[3] to 754, during which it has few contemporary sources^[4] against which to check its veracity; some consider it one of the best sources for post- Visigothic history and for the story of the Moorish conquest of Spain and southern France; it provided the basis for Roger Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 711-797 (Blackwell) 1989), the first modern historian to utilise it so thoroughly.^[5] It contains the most detailed account of the Battle of Poitiers-Tours.

The Chronicle is a continuation of an earlier history. It survives in three manuscripts, of which the earliest, of the ninth century, is divided between the British Library and the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid. The other manuscripts are of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.^[6]

The Chronicle was first published in its entirety in Pamplona, 1615; it was printed in Migne’s Patr. Lat., vol. 96, p. 1253 sqq. and given a modern critical edition and translated into Spanish by José Eduardo Lopez Pereira, Cronica mozarabe de 754 (Zaragoza, 1980). An English translation by Kenneth Baxter Wolf can be found in his volume Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain (Liverpool, 1990).

The phantom "Isidorus Pacensis"

Henry Wace^[7] explained the origin and the phantom history of an "Isidorus Pacensis", an otherwise unattested bishop of Pax Julia (modern Beja, Portugal),^[8] credited with the authorship of this Chronicle, which some modern scholars consider anonymous and others reference without hesitation, continues a career in popular history. Cautious recent writers, like Bernhard and Ellen M. Whishaw, Arabic Spain: Sidelights on Her History and Art (2002:36 note 1) refer to "The anonymous writer known as Isidorus Pacensis", or the "autor del Pseudo-Isidoro (Isidorus Pacensis)", as noted by Nachman Falbel, "Sobre el mesianismo judío medieval", in Lectura Judía y Relectura Cristiana de la Biblia (Consejo Latinoamericano de Iglesias).^[9]

Notes

1. ^ It was the last chronicle written in Latin in al-Andalus, as Ann Christys remarks, in Christians in Al-Andalus, 711–1000 (Routledge, 2002:2).
2. ^ The debatable degree to which the writer was assimilated to Islamic culture may render the anachronistic term misleading.
3. ^ It opens with the accession of Heraclius in the East and gives, at several removes, a thread of Byzantine history and the islamic conquest of Syria.
4. ^ There is a Chronicle of 741, which has material relating to Hispania in the seventh century, but only an interpolation copied from the Chronicle of 754 for the eighth century; see Ann Christys, Christians in Al-Andalus, 711-1000 (Routledge, 2002), "News from the East in eighth-century chronicles".
5. ^ H.V. Livermore dismissed it as largely mythological, in The Origins of Spain and Portugal (London: Allen & Unwin) 1971; Collins, conversely, eschewed the later, mythologised Arabic accounts, for which he has been criticised.
6. ^ C.C. de Hartmann , "The textual transmission of the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754" Early Medieval Europe 8.1, (March 1999:13-29). Two of the manuscripts, though they bear no author's name, were asserted by seventeenth-century scholars to bear the name of "Isidorus Pacensis (Wace 1880).
7. ^ William Smith and Henry Wace, A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines (1880: vol. III, s.v. "Isidorus Pacensis" pp 313f
8. ^ "Isidorus Pacensis" appears in error as bishop of Badajos in Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) vol. II, s.v. Isidorus, p. 627. Beja plays no role in the Chronicle, as might be expected in a work issued from that city, as R.P.A. Dozy pointed out (Dozy, Recherches sur l'histoire et la littérature d'Espagne, 2nd ed. 1860, quoted in Wace 1880.) Neither does Badajoz, because it did not exist at the time of the chronicle; Bishop Prudencio Sandoval of Pamplona, who first published the chronicle in its entirety in 1615, evidently thought Pax Julia was Badajoz, since he refers to "Isidore, bishop of Badajoz" in his title to the work, see Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctorum Antiquissimorum t. XI, Chronicorum Minorum saec. IV, V, VI, VII vol. II, p. 333.
9. ^ on-line text (in Spanish).