International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Matthew Kinloch
University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; 
[e-mail]
Narratives, Significance, and Nodal-Points: The Many Battles of Pelagonia (1259)
In 1259 a series of skirmishes occurred, somewhere in the region of Pelagonia and Kastoria, 
between, on the one side, Epirot, Moreot, and Hohenstaufen forces and, on the other, Nikaian forces. 
Modern historians of the thirteenth-century Byzantine world have almost universally singled out 
the so-called battle as a singularly decisive and significant event in their narratives. It functions as a 
nodal- or turning-point within these narratives, after which the dominance of the Nikaian polity and 
the so-called ‘reconquest’ of Constantinople by Nikaian forces became ‘inevitable’. The significance 
of the so-called battle of Pelagonia in modern scholarship thus relies, in large part, on the causal 
link postulated between the events of 1259 and 1261. In this communication I demonstrate that 
the allocation of significance in this way and the postulation of this causal link says more about the 
narrative goals of modern historians than the source material they claim to represent.
When interpreting the battle of Pelagonia, historians have always implicitly started from the 
positivist premise that it is possible to reconstruct, at least in part, the ‘true’ event. Historians have 
argued extensively over the exact date that the confrontation occurred, the ‘true’ number, ethnicity, 
and disposition of the combatants, the location of the battle, the exact routes of the armies to the 
battlefield, the diplomatic relations of the rulers of the polities involved, and the correct titles and 
offices of the Nikaian generals. To this end the narratives of Akropolites, Pachymeres, Gregoras, 

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the various versions of the 
Chronicle of Morea
, and a number of other sources have been mined for 
‘facts’ and mixed together to get as close as possible to some kind of ‘ur-battle’. This approach usefully 
demonstrates contradictions in the source material. However, it constructs a conglomerated ‘faux-
true‘ event that is not attested in any individual text and can never be verified.
More can be learnt about the thirteenth century Byzantine world, by rejecting this attempt to 
reconstruct the ‘true’ battle, and, instead, setting each representation of the confrontation within 
the context of each text’s narrative trajectory. This approach reveals a multiplicity of battles of 
Pelagonia, each of which has been constructed to serve a different purpose in a different narrative 
context. For example, Akropolites’ account of the battle is the culmination of two narratives within 
his text, about the consolidation of Michael Palaiologos’ power and Akropolites’ own incarceration 
in Epiros. Akropolites fails to postulate a causative link between 1259 and 1261, instead dwelling on 
the Nikaian reversals of 1260. Similarly, in the often overlooked accounts of the 
Chronicle of Morea
, 
the battle of Pelagonia constitutes a turning-point, but not in a narrative of Nikaian ‘reconquest’, but 
in the history of the principality of Achaia, with which the author is more concerned. Indeed the 
authors believed that Constantinople had already been occupied by Michael Palaiologos before the 
battle. This ‘mistake’ demonstrates a complete disinterest in the fundamentally modern narrative 
that seeks to link 1259 to 1261.