Interpretation
Because De Administrando Imperio is one of the rare primary sources describing the medieval history of the Balkans, its text has been extensively analyzed by historians, sometimes concentrating on just a few sentences.
Historians J. B. Bury in 1906, Gavro Manojlović in 1910, and Ljudmil Hauptmann in 1931 through 1942 published comprehensive analyses of the entirety of De Administrando Imperio which showed that it was written as a set of files each concentrating on different topics, dating from various time periods, that were subsequently redacted several times, causing the interpretation of the resulting text to vary significantly.
The book's three similar but different accounts of the arrival of the Croats have confounded numerous historians since the 19th century.
Historian Barbara M. Kreutz described the report found in the De Administrando Imperio that the Byzantines played a major role in the 871 fall of the Emirate of Bari as a probable concoction.
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