In another age, in another place, Nicetas Choniates would truly have been a man to be envied. Conspicuously successful in all walks of life, privileged by birth and education, gifted by nature, he was a distinguished orator and historian, and he attained the very highest offices of government. Yet in Byzantium, in the dying years of the twelfth century, success could be devastatingly hollow. Choniates, one of the most powerful men in Constantinople, was powerless to stop the empire lurching to its own destruction: he saw the signs of its fatal weakness, lived through (and only narrowly survived) the calamity of the fall of the city in 1204, and ended his days in impecunious obscurity. His life, no less than his works, is a mirror of the age.

Nicetas Choniates was born in the early 1150s, in the town of Chonae in Asia Minor, of a well-to-do family. He was baptized by the local metropolitan. At the age of nine Nicetas was sent to Constantinople for his education, following his older brother Michael. Michael made a career in the church, and in 1182 was appointed metropolitan of Athens. Nicetas was trained for government. On completing his studies in rhetoric and law, he was posted to the provinces as a tax official (as Michael wrote in a letter c. 1180). After this administrative apprenticeship he returned to the capital and to the court, where, under Alexius II, he served as an imperial secretary.