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John Cananus
John Cananus or John Kananos ( el, Ἰωάννης Κανανός) was a Byzantine Greek historian who lived during the first half of the 15th century. Cananus wrote a "a vivid eyewitness account" of the failed siege of Constantinople by the Ottomans under Sultan Murad II in 1422. He attributes the survival of the Byzantine capital to the miraculous intervention of the Mother of God on 24 August, when he says even the Ottomans saw her on the ramparts. Cananus account is precise in its chronology and useful to military historians for his descriptions of Ottoman siegecraft and Byzantine defences. The account differs from the contemporary history of John Anagnostes, who described Murad's sack of Thessalonica in 1430, chiefly in Cananus' frequent religious polemic and in his willingness to write in the vernacular Greek, as opposed to the Atticism of Anagnostes and Critobulus. Their use of Greek, while "artificial in the extreme," is intended as an "imitation of the classics", a ...
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Byzantine Greeks
The Byzantine Greeks were the Greek-speaking Eastern Romans of Orthodox Christianity throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. They were the main inhabitants of the lands of the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire), of Constantinople and Asia Minor (modern Turkey), the Greek islands, Cyprus, and portions of the southern Balkans, and formed large minorities, or pluralities, in the coastal urban centres of the Levant and northern Egypt. Throughout their history, the Byzantine Greeks self-identified as ''Romans'' ( gr, Ῥωμαῖοι, Rhōmaîoi), but are referred to as "Byzantine Greeks" in modern historiography. Latin speakers identified them simply as Greeks or with the term Romei. The social structure of the Byzantine Greeks was primarily supported by a rural, agrarian base that consisted of the peasantry, and a small fraction of the poor. These peasants lived within three kinds of settlements: the ''chorion'' or village, the ''agridion'' or hamlet, and the ''proast ...
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George Sphrantzes
George Sphrantzes, also Phrantzes or Phrantza ( el, Γεώργιος Σφραντζής or Φραντζής; 1401 – c. 1478), was a late Roman (Byzantine) historian and Imperial courtier. He was an attendant to Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, ''protovestiarites'' ("Lord of the Imperial Wardrobe") under John VIII Palaiologos, and a close confidant to Constantine XI Palaiologos. He was an eyewitness of the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, made a slave by the victorious Ottomans, but ransomed shortly afterwards. Sphrantzes served the surviving members of the Palaiologian family for the next several years until taking monastic vows in 1472. It was while a monk he wrote his history, which ends with the notice of Sultan Mehmed II's attempt to capture Naupaktos, which he dates to the summer of 1477; Sphrantzes is assumed to have died not long after that event. Life He was born in Constantinople, during the Ottoman blockade of that city; his godmother was the nun Thomais. In 1418 he w ...
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Alexander Vasiliev (historian)
Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev (russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Васи́льев; 4 October 1867 ( N.S.) – 30 May 1953) was considered the foremost authority on Byzantine history and culture in the mid-20th century. His ''History of the Byzantine Empire'' (vol. 1–2, 1928) remains one of a few comprehensive accounts of the entire Byzantine history, on the par with those authored by Edward Gibbon and Fyodor Uspensky. Vasiliev was born in Saint Petersburg. He studied under one of the earliest professional Byzantinists, Vasily Vasilievsky, at the University of St Petersburg and later taught Arabic language there. Between 1897 and 1900, he furthered his education in Paris. In 1902, he accompanied Nicholas Marr in his trip to Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai. During his stay at the Tartu University (1904–12), Vasiliev prepared and published a highly influential monograph, ''Byzantium and the Arabs'' (1907). He also worked in the Russian Arch ...
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Dictionary Of Greek And Roman Biography And Mythology
The ''Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology'' (1849, originally published 1844 under a slightly different title) is an encyclopedia/biographical dictionary. Edited by William Smith, the dictionary spans three volumes and 3,700 pages. It is a classic work of 19th-century lexicography. The work is a companion to Smith's ''Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities'' and '' Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography''. Authors and scope The work lists thirty-five authors in addition to the editor, who was also the author of the unsigned articles. The other authors were classical scholars, primarily from Oxford, Cambridge, Rugby School, and the University of Bonn, but some were from other institutions. Many of the mythological entries were the work of the German expatriate Leonhard Schmitz, who helped to popularise German classical scholarship in Britain. With respect to biographies, Smith intended to be comprehensive. In the preface, he writes: Much of the value ...
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William Smith (lexicographer)
Sir William Smith (20 May 1813 – 7 October 1893) was an English lexicographer. He became known for his advances in the teaching of Greek and Latin in schools. Early life Smith was born in Enfield in 1813 to Nonconformist parents. He attended the Madras House school of John Allen in Hackney. Originally destined for a theological career, he instead became articled to a solicitor. Meanwhile, he taught himself classics in his spare time, and when he entered University College London carried off both the Greek and Latin prizes. He was entered at Gray's Inn in 1830, but gave up his legal studies for a post at University College School and began to write on classical subjects. Lexicography Smith next turned his attention to lexicography. His first attempt was ''A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities'', which appeared in 1842, the greater part being written by him. Then followed the ''Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology'' in 1849. A parallel '' Dictionary of ...
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Jacques Paul Migne
Jacques Paul Migne (; 25 October 1800 – 24 October 1875) was a French priest who published inexpensive and widely distributed editions of theological works, encyclopedias, and the texts of the Church Fathers, with the goal of providing a universal library for the Catholic priesthood. The '' Patrologia Latina'' and the ''Patrologia Graeca'' (along with the '' Monumenta Germaniae Historica'') are among the great 19th century contributions to the scholarship of patristics and the Middle Ages. Within the Roman Catholic Church, Migne's editions put many original texts for the first time into the hands of the priesthood. Biography Migne was born in Saint-Flour, Cantal and studied theology at the University of Orléans. He was ordained in 1824 and placed in charge of the parish of Puiseaux, in the diocese of Orléans, where his uncompromisingly Catholic and royalist sympathies did not coincide with local patriotism and the new regime of the Citizen-King. In 1833, after falli ...
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Patrologia Graeca
The ''Patrologia Graeca'' (or ''Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca'') is an edited collection of writings by the Christian Church Fathers and various secular writers, in the Greek language. It consists of 161 volumes produced in 1857–1866 by J. P. Migne's Imprimerie Catholique, Paris. Description The ''Patrologia Graeca'' is an edited collection of writings by the Christian Church Fathers and various secular writers, in the Greek language. It consists of 161 volumes produced in 1857–1866 by J. P. Migne's Imprimerie Catholique, Paris. It includes both the Eastern Fathers and those Western authors who wrote before Latin became predominant in the Western Church in the 3rd century, e.g. the early writings collectively known as the Apostolic Fathers, such as the First and Second Epistle of Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, Eusebius, Origen, and the Cappadocian Fathers Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. The 161 volumes are bound as 166 (vols. 1 ...
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Leo Allatius
Leo Allatius (Greek: Λέων Αλλάτιος, ''Leon Allatios'', Λιωνής Αλάτζης, ''Lionis Allatzis''; Italian: ''Leone Allacci, Allacio''; Latin: ''Leo Allatius, Allacius''; c. 1586 – January 19, 1669) was a Greek scholar, theologian, and keeper of the Vatican library. Biography Leo Allatius was a Greek, born on the island of Chios (then part of the Ottoman Empire and known as ''Sakız'') in 1586. His father was Niccolas Allatzes (from Orthodox religion) and his mother was Sebaste Neurides, both of Greek extraction (Allatius soon converted himself to Catholicism from Greek Orthodoxy). He was taken by his maternal uncle Michael Nauridis to Italy to be educated at the age of nine, first in Calabria and then in Rome where he was admitted into the Greek college. A graduate of the Pontifical Greek College of Saint Athanasius in Rome, he spent his career in Rome as teacher of Greek at the Greek college, devoting himself to the study of classics and theology. He found a ...
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August Immanuel Bekker
August Immanuel Bekker (21 May 17857 June 1871) was a German philologist and critic. Biography Born in Berlin, Bekker completed his classical education at the University of Halle under Friedrich August Wolf, who considered him as his most promising pupil. In 1810 he was appointed professor of philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ... in the University of Berlin. For several years, between 1810 and 1821, he travelled in France, Italy, England and parts of Germany, examining classical manuscripts and gathering materials for his great editorial labours. Some of the fruits of his researches were published in the ''Anecdota Graeca'' (3 vols, 1814–1821), but the major results are to be found in the enormous array of classical authors edited by him. Anything like a ...
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Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae
The ''Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae'' (CSHB; en, Corpus of Byzantine history writers, italic=yes), also referred to as the Bonn Corpus, is a monumental fifty-volume series of primary sources for the study of Byzantine history (–1453), published in the German city of Bonn between 1828 and 1897. Each volume contains a critical edition of a Byzantine Greek historical text, accompanied by a parallel Latin translation. The project, conceived by the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, sought to revise and expand the original twenty-four volume ''Corpus Byzantinae Historiae'' (sometimes called the ''Byzantine du Louvre''), published in Paris between 1648 and 1711 under the initial direction of the Jesuit scholar Philippe Labbe. The series was first based at the University of Bonn; after Niebuhr's death in 1831, however, oversight of the project passed to his collaborator Immanuel Bekker at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. While the first volume of the series receive ...
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Lascaris Cananus
Laskaris Kananos (or Lascaris Cananus) was a 15th-century Greek traveler to northern Europe who left an account in Medieval Greek of his travels.Jerker Blomqvist, "The Geography of the Baltic as Seen by the Greeks: From Claudius Ptolemy to Laskaris Kananos", in Bettina Amden et al. (eds.), ''Noctes Atticae: 34 Articles on Graeco-Roman Antiquity and Its Nachleben'' (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), pp. 36–51. Kananos may have traveled in 1438–1439 (possibly in connection with the Council of Florence),Jerker Blomqvist, "The Geography of the Baltic as Seen by the Greeks: From Claudius Ptolemy to Laskaris Kananos", in Bettina Amden et al. (eds.), ''Noctes Atticae: 34 Articles on Graeco-Roman Antiquity and Its Nachleben'' (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), pp. 36–51. or he may have been traveling in 1468 collecting alms for the release of prisoners from the Ottoman Empire.Jonathan Harris, "When Did Laskaris Kananos Travel in the Baltic Lands?", ''Byzantion'' 80 (2010), pp. 173–187. ...
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Siege Of Constantinople (1422)
The first full-scale Ottoman siege of Constantinople took place in 1422 as a result of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II's attempts to interfere in the succession of Ottoman Sultans, after the death of Mehmed I in 1421. This policy of the Byzantines was often used successfully in weakening their neighbours. When Murad II emerged as the winning successor to his father, he marched into Byzantine territory. The Turks had acquired their own cannon for the first time by the siege of 1422, "falcons", which were short but wide cannons.Stephen Turnbull''The Walls of Constantinople, AD 324–1453'' , Osprey Publishing, . The two sides were evenly matched technologically, and the Turks had to build barricades "in order to receive ... the stones of the bombards". Siege According to a Byzantine short chronicle compiled in , "on 10 June, Wednesday, at the fourth hour after midday, Mihaloğlu attacked Constantinople", thus beginning the siege of the city. The eyewitness John Kananos d ...
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