Abstract

The Byzantine historical writing underwent a significant transformation in the 11th century. It emphasized the people-oriented narrative concept，establishing the writing style by taking the ruler as the core of the narrative，and began to adopt a large amount of narration interposed and flashback skills. Accordingly，this broke through the limitations of the narrative value of traditional chronicles and the chronological narrative standard of the traditional chronicles following the event development sequence strictly. What’s more，it created a three-level writing pattern，including a figure’s appearance，characters，and psychological activities. This pattern formed the systematic writing features combining the visual effects of external and internal and the abstract emotional thinking activities. Therefore，the historical writing can deeply depict the life-like and complex image with complete character，making up for the defects of previous historical writing. During this process，the portraits of ‘Women in purple’: Zoe and Theodora who were two excellent examples created by historians，had all the main features of the above transformation．In general，after absorbing and integrating the Hellenistic culture creatively，the Christian culture obtained the absolute dominance. This produced the new writing paradigm which was the essence of the historical writing transformation at this stage. The organic combination of the classical and Christian elements，together with the sublimation of the people in the ideological realm，promoted the Byzantine culture to the highest level of mature form.

Published on World History, Issue 6, 2018.