Description

This manuscript preserves works by two major Byzantine historians. Ioannes Zonaras (12th century) wrote a chronicle, the Epitome Historiarum, which recounts world history from the Creation until 1118, drawing mostly on earlier sources. A century later, George Akropolites (1217-1282) wrote his Annales (Chronike Syngraphe in Greek), the major source in Greek for the history of the first half of the 13th century. Both men were civil servants as well as historians.

The present manuscript was written on paper in the 14th century. It is bound in a Byzantine binding which has been recovered. The covers contain a full set of petal-shaped corner bosses and round central ones.

The volume was acquired in the Eastern Mediterranean by the Welsh industrialist Ivor Bertie Guest, 1st Baron Wimborne (1835-1914). The British Museum purchased it from Guest along with 16 other Greek manuscripts in 1871.