22 Facts About Laonikos Chalkokondyles

Laonikos Chalkokondyles, latinized as Laonicus Chalcocondyles, was a Byzantine Greek historian from Athens.

Laonikos Chalkokondyles is known for his Demonstrations of Histories in ten books, which record the last 150 years of the Byzantine Empire.

Laonikos' birth name was Nikolaos but he adopted the classical sounding anagram Laonikos to emphasize his classical Greek learning and interests.

In Mystras, Laonikos Chalkokondyles became the student of Pletho, a Platonist philosopher and Judge General of the Byzantine Empire.

Laonikos Chalkokondyles' detailed presentation of Italian city-states and western polities, intricate knowledge of current and past events in the west, admiration for the Greek Cardinals Bessarion and Isidore who had migrated to Italy, and capacity for salacious gossip from western urban centers reveal that he was a member of the Franko-Greek society of late medieval Greece.

Laonikos Chalkokondyles was proud to draw the readers' attention to this, referring to himself as "Laonikos Chalkokondyles the Athenian" in the opening words of the Apodeixis.

Laonikos Chalkokondyles inserted an epigraph concerning the ancient historian on the last folio of this manuscript, writing that Herodotus' History was composed with "divine guidance".

Laonikos Chalkokondyles wrote that he was amazed that the Hellenes "displayed a virtue that was greater than human".

Laonikos Chalkokondyles adopted the organizational scheme of the ancient historian as well as Herodotus' approach to source material.

Similarly, Laonikos Chalkokondyles constructed his narrative around the wars between the Ottomans and the Byzantines and in the process relied on Ottoman Turkish informants for political events, ethnographic details, origin stories and much else.

Laonikos Chalkokondyles incorporated extensive material on the kinship groups, language, religious beliefs, and customs of the Ottoman Turks in line with Herodotus.

Laonikos Chalkokondyles relied on Ottoman informants who maintained a critical distance to the Ottoman court and the narrative contains echoes of the kind of Ottoman social criticism of Mehmed II's reign, only included in the Ottoman historiographical tradition in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The Laonikos Chalkokondyles were one of the oldest native families in Athens and had gained great prominence.

At the time of Laonikos Chalkokondyles it was ruled by the Florentine Acciaioli family.

Laonikos Chalkokondyles's father George was a kinsman of Maria Melissene, the wife of Duke Antonio I Acciaioli.

Meanwhile, George Laonikos Chalkokondyles had his proposal rejected, despite offering the Sultan 30,000 gold pieces, and was cast into prison.

George Laonikos Chalkokondyles managed to escape to Constantinople, according to William Miller "leaving his retinue, tents and beasts of burden behind him", but after leaving Constantinople by ship, he was captured by an Athenian ship and taken back to the Sultan, who pardoned him.

The one glimpse we have of Laonikos Chalkokondyles himself is in the summer of 1447, when Cyriacus of Ancona met him in the summer of 1447 at the court of Constantine Palaiologos at Mistra.

Laonikos Chalkokondyles's account of the circumcision of Sultan Mehmed II's sons in 1457 suggest he was an eye-witness to the event, and his account of Ottoman finances indicate he interviewed the Sultan's accountants.

Internal evidence has led Byzantinist Anthony Kaldellis to put the date Laonikos Chalkokondyles stopped writing his Histories as 1464.

Laonikos Chalkokondyles's model is Thucydides, his language is tolerably pure and correct, and his style is simple and clear.

The extended use of the name "Hellenes", which Laonikos Chalkokondyles used to describe the Byzantines contributed to the connection made between the ancient Greek civilization and the modern one.