Abstract
Laonikos Chalkokondyles was a seminal Byzantine intellectual and historian. He belongs, together with George Sphrantzes (1401–77/8), Doukas (ca. 1400–70) and Michael Kritoboulos (ca. 1406–10), to the group of the four Byzantine historians who recorded the events of the Fall of Constantinople (1453). Laonikos is one of the few Byzantine historians who dealt extensively with the history of the Ottomans (Tōmadakēs 1993). Ηe composed a history in a way that he “seems to have taken oral … traditions and transformed them into Herodotean-Thucydidean narrative prose” (Kaldellis 2012a), relying at the same time upon various sources. He contributed to the cultivation of the study of Byzantine and Ottoman history and of ancient Greek historiography in the Renaissance, and was influenced by ideas about historical causation.
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References
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Kakkoura, C. (2019). Chalkokondyles, Laonikos. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_31-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_31-1
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