International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Șerban V. Marin
National Archives of Romania, Bucharest, Romania; 
[e-mail]
Propagandistic Usefulness or Means to Reconstruct the Past? 
Few Aspects on the Importance of the Venetian Chronicles
This paper is rather an introduction to the present session, by focusing upon a preamble topic 
dealing with the Venetian chronicles.
As a matter of fact, the Venetian chronicles have often been regarded as mere propaganda, so 
that their importance is deemed to be actually null. By simply applying the propagandistic stigma, the 
Venetian chronicles are brutally thrown to the recycle bin bearing the uselessness brand. It is the case of 
those modern historians who have limited themselves to strictly pursuing the reconstruction of events.
On the whole, the issue of the importance proves to be once again a wrong lead and stating that 
a material is important or not is nothing but a relative judgment, liable of amendment at any time. 
Importance is an extremely relative matter that is modified according to the subject being researched.
Actually, this paper has in intention to present a number of examples of the modern historians 
that have expressed their opinions regarding various Venetian chronicles. For example, the 
anonymous chronicles from Marciana Library with the reference codes It. VII. 798 and It. VII. 1577, 
which were considered by Freddy Thiriet as “utterly uninteresting”, therefore “mediocre”, are highly 
valuable from our point of view. On the other side, the chronicle of Antonio Morosini, which is so 
important to the French scholar as to request its publication, does not seem to be of any particular 
utility in investigating the subject related to the origins of Venice, for example, from the simple 
reason that the pages covering a great part of the period under research were lost. And the examples 
of dissociation from the criteria advanced by Thiriet could continue.
A particular attention would be given to the viewpoint expressed in time by various Byzantinists 
related to the importance of the Venetian chronicles as sources of the history of Byzantium.

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