Laonicus Chalcondyles

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Laonicus (Laonikos) Chalcondyles (or Chalcocondylas) was an Byzantine Greek scholar from Athens. The name is probably an anagram of Nicolaos.

He was a Byzantine historian, son of Georgios and cousin of Demetrios Chalcocondylas. After a quarrel between his father and the Florentine dukes of Athens, he followed his family to the Peloponnese where, according to Kyriakos the Agonites, he lived in the court of Constantinos Palaiologos and was taught by George Gemistos Plethon.

After the destruction of Constantinople, he wrote his most important historical work, Proofs of Histories (Αποδείξεις Ιστοριών) (10 books). This historical work of Laonicos Chalcondyles comprises one of the most important sources for the students of the final 150 years of Byzantine history. It covers the period from 1298-1463, describing the fall of the Greek empire and the rise of the Ottoman Turks, which forms the centre of the narrative, down to the conquest of the Venetians and Mathias, king of Hungary, by Mehmed II. The capture of Constantinople he rightly regarded as an historical event of far-reaching importance and compared it to the fall of Troy. Like that of other Byzantine writers, his chronology is defective. The work also sketches other manners and civilization of England, France and Germany, whose assistance the Greeks sought to obtain against the Turks. For his account of earlier events he was able to obtain information from his father.

His model is Thucydides (according to Bekker, Herodotus); his language is tolerably pure and correct, his style simple and clear. The text, however, is in a very corrupt state. The archaic language he used made his texts hard to read in many parts, while the antiquarian names, with which he named people of his time, created confusion (Γεταί, Δάκες, Λίγυρες, Μυσοί, Παίονες etc). The extended use of the named 'Greeks' (Έλληνες), which Laonicos used to describe the Byzantines contributed to the connection made between the ancient Greek civilization and the modern one.

[edit] References

The Historical worki of Laonicus Chalcocondyles was first published in 1615 by J. B. Baumbach.
The two best editions are: Historiarum Libri Decem, ed. I. Bekker, Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (Bonn 1843) and Historiae Demonstrationes, 2 vols., ed. E. Darko, (Budapest 1922-7). The text can also be found in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, volume 159.
A French translation was published by Blaise de Vigenère in 1577 with a later edition by Artus Thomas, with valuable illustrations on Turkish matters.
An English translation of Books I-III can be found in Laonikos Chalkokondyles. A Translation and Commentary of the Demonstrations of Histories, trans. Nikolaos Nikoloudis (Athens 1996) and of Book VIII in J.R. Melville Jones, The Siege of Constantinople: Seven Contemporary Accounts (Amsterdam 1972), pp. 42-55.
There is a biographical sketch of Laonicus and his brother, Demetrius Chalcondyles in Greek by Antonius Calosynas, a physician of Toledo, who lived in the latter part of the sixteenth century: see in C. Hopf, Chroniques Gréco-romanes (Paris 1873), pp. 243-5.