Among Greek histories of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the
work of Laonikos (ca. 1430 ca. 1465) has by far the broadest scope.
Born to a leading family of Athens under Florentine rule, he was
educated in the Classics at Mistra by the Neoplatonist philosopher
Plethon. In the 1450s, Laonikos set out to imitate Herodotos in
writing the history of his times, a version in which the armies of
Asia would prevail over the Greeks in Europe. The backbone of the
Histories," a text written in difficult Thucydidean Greek, is the
expansion of the Ottoman Empire from the early 1300s to 1464, but
Laonikos s digressions give sweeping accounts of world geography
and ethnography from Britain to Mongolia, with an emphasis on
Spain, Italy, and Arabia. Following the methodology of Herodotos
and rejecting theological polemic, Laonikos is the first Greek
writer to treat Islam as a legitimate cultural and religious
system. He followed Plethon in viewing the Byzantines as Greeks
rather than Romans, and so stands at the origins of Neo-Hellenic
identity.
This translation makes the entire text of The"Histories"
available in English for the first time."
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