Vatican Manasses Chronicle

The translator did something the Greek original never asked for: he cut Bulgarian history into a Byzantine world chronicle, and the illuminator painted it. Nineteen miniatures depict episodes with no counterpart in Manasses' text — Krum, Simeon, the baptism, the fall of Preslav — and they are, for several of those events, the only medieval images that exist.

The interpolations also make an argument. By setting Ivan Alexander alongside the emperors of the chronicle's own narrative, the manuscript claims that Bulgaria's rulers belong in the same sequence as Rome's and Byzantium's.

A second Middle Bulgarian copy survives in Moscow (the Synodal copy). The Vatican manuscript is fully digitised at high resolution and is the one from which nearly all published reproductions are taken.