John Kaminiates ( el, Ιωάννης Καμινιάτης, fl. tenth century) was a

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

resident of

Thessalonica Thessaloniki (; el, Θεσσαλονίκη, , also known as Thessalonica (), Saloniki, or Salonica (), is the second-largest city in Greece, with over one million inhabitants in its metropolitan area, and the capital of the geographic region of ...

when the city, then one of the largest in the

Byzantine Empire The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...

, was besieged and sacked by a

Saracen upright 1.5, Late 15th-century German woodcut depicting Saracens Saracen ( ) was a term used in the early centuries, both in Greek and Latin writings, to refer to the people who lived in and near what was designated by the Romans as Arabia Pe ...

force led by

Leo of Tripoli Leo of Tripoli ( el, Λέων ὸ Τριπολίτης), known in Arabic as Rashīq al-Wardāmī (), and Ghulām Zurāfa (), was a Greek renegade and fleet commander for the Abbasid Caliphate in the early tenth century. He is most notable for h ...

in 904. His account of the city's plunder, ''On the capture of Thessalonica'', (Εις την άλωσιν της Θεσσαλονίκης, ''Eis tēn alōsin tēs Thessalonikēs'') survives in four manuscripts; though of these, none were written before the fourteenth century, causing some concern over the text's authenticity.Kazhdan 1978

Name

John Kaminiates has alternatively been

transliterated Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or ...

John Kaminatos, Ioannis Kaminiatis, and sometimes appears in the Latinized forms Ioannis Caminiatae, Joannes Cameniata and John Cameniates.

Notes

References

''English'' *Kaminiates, John ''The capture of Thessaloniki'' (D. Frendo, A. Fotiou, and G.Böhlig, trans.) Byzantina Australiensia, 12. Perth: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 2000. . *Kazhdan, Alexander ''Some Questions Addressed to the Scholars, who Believe in the Authenticity of Kaminiates’ Capture of Thessalonika'' Byzantinische Zeitschrift 71. 1978. p. 301–314.

ISSN An International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) is an eight-digit serial number used to uniquely identify a serial publication, such as a magazine. The ISSN is especially helpful in distinguishing between serials with the same title. ISSNs ...

br>0007-7704
* ''Foreign'' *Kaminiates, John ''Eis ten alosin tes Thessalonikes / De Expugnatione Thessalonicae'' (Böhlig, Gertrude, ed.)

Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae {{Italic title The ''Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae'' (Latin: "Corpus of Byzantine history sources") or CFHB is an international project aiming to collect, edit and provide textual criticism on the historical sources from the time of the Byzant ...

. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973.

External links

A portion of the translated text online
- An interesting look at how the four surviving manuscripts are used to create a modern scholarly Greek edition. 10th-century Byzantine historians Byzantine Thessalonian writers Byzantine people of the Arab–Byzantine wars {{Byzantine-bio-stub