CHALCONDYLES I (or CHALCOCONDYLAS), LAONICUS

This article appears in Volume V05, Page 804 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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CHALCONDYLES I (or CHALCOCONDYLAS), LAONICUS , the only Athenian Byzantine writer. Hardly anything is known of his life. He wrote a history, in ten books, of the period from 12981463, 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

HUNGARY
HUNGARY (Hungarian Magyarorszdg)

, by Mahommed II. The capture of

Constantinople

CONSTANTINOPLE
CONSTANTINOPLE, COUNCILS OF

he rightly regarded as an historical event of far-reaching importance, although the comparison of it to the fall of Troy is hardly appropriate. The

work

WORK

incidentally gives a quaint and interesting sketch of the manners and civilization of England, France and Germany, whose assistance the Greeks sought to obtain against the Turks. Like that of other Byzantine writers, Chalcondyles' chronology is defective, and his adherence to the old Greek geographical nomenclature is a source of confusion. For his account of earlier events he was able to obtain information from his father, who was one of the most prominent
1 A shortened form of Chalcocondyles, from XaX+cbs, copper, and KiAvXos, knuckle.men in Athens during the struggles between the Greek and Frankish nobles. 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.
Editio princeps, ed. J. B. Baumbach (1615) ; in

Bonn

BONN

Corpus Scriptorum Hist. Byz. ed. I.

Bekker

(1843) ; Migne, Patrologia Graeca, clix. There is a French

translation

TRANSLATION

by Blaise de Vigenere (1577, later. ed. by Artus

Thomas

with valuable illustrations on Turkish matters) ; see also F. Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter, ii. (1889); Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. 66; C. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897). There is a biographical sketch of Laonicus and his brother in Greek by Antomus Calosynas, a physician of Toledo, who lived in the latter part of the 16th century (see C. Hopf, Chroniques greco-romanes, 1873).
His brother, DEMETRIUS CHALCONDYLES (1424-1511), was born in Athens. In 1447 he migrated to Italy, where Cardinal Bessarion gave him his patronage. He became famous as a teacher of Greek letters and the Platonic philosophy; in 1463 he was made professor at Padua, and in 1479 he was summoned by Lorenzo de' Medici to Florence to fill the professorship vacated by John Argyropoulos. In 1492 he removed to

Milan

MILAN
MILAN (Ital. Milano, Ger. Mailand, anc. Mediolanum, q.v.)

, where he died in 1511. He was associated with Marsilius Ficinus, Angelus Politianus, and

Theodorus

THEODORUS, FLAVIUS MALLIUS

Gaza, in the revival of letters in the western world. One of his pupils at Florence was the famous John Reuchlin. Demetrius Chalcondyles published the editio princeps of

Homer

HOMER, WINSLOW (1836-191o)

, Isocrates, and Suidas, and a Greek grammar (Erotemata) in the form of question and answer.
See H. Hody, De Graecis illustribus (1742); C. Hopf, Chroniques greco-romanes (1873); E. Legrand, Bibliographie hellenique, i. (1885).

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