George Hamartolos

George Hamartolos or Hamartolus (Greek: Γεώργιος Ἁμαρτωλός) was a monk at Constantinople under Michael III (842–867) and the author of a chronicle of some importance.

Nothing is known about him except from the internal evidence of his work, which establishes his period (in the preface he speaks of Michael III as the reigning emperor) and his calling (he refers to himself several times as a monk).

The first book treats of an astonishingly miscellaneous collection of persons — Adam, Nimrod, the Persians, Chaldees, Brahmins, Amazons, etc.

In spite of his crude ideas and the violent hatred of iconoclasts that makes him always unjust towards them, his work has considerable value for the history of the last years before the schism of Photius.

As a very popular and widely consulted book of large circulation it has been constantly re-edited, corrected, and rearranged by anonymous scribes, so that the reconstruction of the original work is "one of the most difficult problems of Byzantine philology" (Krumbacher, 355).