Chronicle of 754 - The Work

The Work

The Chronicle of 754 covers the years 610 to 754, during which it has few contemporary sources against which to check its veracity; some consider it one of the best sources for post- Visigothic history and for the story of the Moorish conquest of Spain and southern France; it provided the basis for Roger Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 711-797 (Blackwell, 1989), the first modern historian to utilise it so thoroughly. It contains the most detailed account of the Battle of Poitiers-Tours.

The Chronicle is a continuation of an earlier history. It survives in three manuscripts, of which the earliest, of the ninth century, is divided between the British Library and the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid. The other manuscripts are of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The Chronicle was first published in its entirety in Pamplona, 1615; it was printed in Migne’s Patr. Lat., vol. 96, p. 1253 sqq. and given a modern critical edition and translated into Spanish by José Eduardo Lopez Pereira. An English translation by Kenneth Baxter Wolf can be found in his volume Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain (Liverpool, 1990).