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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
In the early years of the tenth century a.d. the Emperor Leo VI, surnamed the Philosopher, gave much scandal to the ecclesiastics of Constantinople by his fourth marriage with the beautiful Zoe; a fourth being naturally a degree worse than a third marriage, and this the Eastern Church had lately “censured as a state of legal fornication,” for reasons which Gibbon discusses in chapter xlviii of the “Decline and Fall” However, “the Emperor required a female companion, and the Empire a legitimate heir,” and so, since he had found himself again a childless widower, Leo the Philosopher promptly celebrated his fourth nuptials, the patriarch Nicholas notwithstanding, who, having refused his blessing, was exiled. The fruit of this marriage was Constantine, surnamed Porphyrogenitus, that is, Born-in-the-Purple, from the porphyry chamber in the palace at Constantinople, where he had first seen the light; and in the year 911 a.d., when of the age of six, Constantine VII succeeded his father on the throne.
page 37 note 1 Of the three MSS. of this work possessed by the British Museum (Or. 1,507, 1,508, and Ad. 23,319), the first is by far the best, but unfortunately lacks several pages in the very part describing the reception of the Greek Embassy; the second MS. is a modern transcript of the first, and hence gives no aid at this point; while the third MS., though it supplies the text of these pages, is so carelessly written as to be almost illegible. I have collated this last throughout with the MS. of the Sibliotheque Nationale of Paris (numbered in the new Catalogue Arabe, 2,128), without the aid of which the following translation could hardly have been made.
page 37 note 2 In the text, the singular, dual, and plural forms are used alternately in reference to the ambassador or ambassadors; but at the close two ambassadors are mentioned, which agrees with Ibn-al-Athlr and the Byzantine chronicler. I have adopted the plural throughout, for convenience, in my translation.
page 38 note 1 The position of one of his palaces is described by Ibn Serapion, a contemporary: see J.R.A.S. for 1895, p. 283.
page 40 note 1 The word in the original is “kalābāt,” which I can find in no dictionary; I translate it as equivalent to “ḳālab” in the plural.
page 42 note 1 MSS. corrupt; added from Yāḳūt, II, 251.
page 43 note 1 See Ibn Serapion, J.R.A.S. 1895, p. 284.