Laonikos Chalkokondyles (; – ), also latinized as Laonicus Chalcocondyles, was a late medieval Greek historian from Athens. He is known for his Demonstrations of Histories in ten books, which record the last 150 years of the Byzantine Empire. According to historian Angeliki Laiou, Chalkokondyles was the first to use Byzantine to refer to the state as he advocated a neo-Hellenic identity of the Romans.
Laonikos Chalkokondyles was born to an aristocratic family in Florentine-run Duchy of Athens circa 1430–32. Laonikos' birth name was Nikolaos but he adopted the classical sounding anagram Laonikos to emphasize his classical Greek learning and interests. This was an intellectual trend that Laonikos shared with other members of his intellectual circle in Byzantine Mystras, such as Georgios Gemistos Plethon and Bessarion. In the first half of the fifteenth century, Athens was under the rule of the Florentine family of the Acciajuoli to whom the Chalkokondyli were connected by marriage ties.
Early life The Chalkokondyles were one of the oldest native families in Athens and had gained great prominence. At the time of Laonikos, it was ruled by the Florentine Acciaioli family. His father George was a kinsman of Maria Melissene, the wife of Duke Antonio I Acciaioli. In his seminal work (), Laonikos claims that his father George Chalkokondyles visited the Ottoman Sultan Murad II (r. 1421–1444, 1446–1451) twice on diplomatic missions.
When Duke Antonio died in 1435, Maria attempted to secure control of the Duchy of Athens, and sent George on a mission to the Ottoman Sultan Murad II to ask that the government of Athens be entrusted to herself and George Chalkokondyles. During his absence however, a young scion of the Acciaiuoli family, Nerio II, was proclaimed Duke of Athens. Meanwhile, George's proposal was rejected, despite offering the Sultan 30,000 gold pieces, and he was instead cast into prison. George Chalkokondyles managed to escape to Constantinople, according to William Miller "leaving his retinue, tents and beasts of burden behind him", but after leaving Constantinople by ship, he was captured by an Athenian ship and taken back to the Sultan, who pardoned him. George with Laonikos and the rest of the family relocated to the Peloponnese, which was under Byzantine rule as the Despotate of the Morea.
In 1446 Constantine Palaiologos, then Despot of the Morea, sent George on a new diplomatic mission to Murad II to obtain the independence of the Greek states south of Thermopylae; enraged at the offered terms, the Sultan once again put George Chalkokondyles into prison, then marched on Constantine's forces holding the Hexamilion wall on the Isthmus of Corinth. Murad bombarded it for three days, destroying the fortifications, and subsequently massacred the defenders and pillaged the countryside, ending all hopes of its independence. The relevant passage in the Apodeixis which describes the siege presents the event from the viewpoint of a witness. It has thus been proposed by Miller that Laonikos was "evidently" an eye-witness to this battle, although the historian Theodore Spandounes claims Laonikos was the secretary of Murad II and present at the Battle of Varna in 1444.
The one glimpse we have of Laonikos himself is in the summer of 1447, when Cyriacus of Ancona met him in the summer of 1447 at the court of Constantine Palaiologos at Mystra. Cyriacus describes him as a youth (). It was at Mystra where Laonikos was in the circle of George Gemistos Plethon (Pletho). Although Laonikos does not openly reference Pletho in the Apodeixis, his conceptualization of Hellenic identity, religious iconoclasm, approach to Islam, and philosophy of history bear the mark of the Platonist philosopher. Pletho and Laonikos also owned the same fourteenth-century manuscript of Herodotus by Demetrius Triclines which bears a bi-folio in Pletho's handwriting and an epigraph on the last folio. The manuscript also includes alternating alternating symbols of the sun and moon. Laur. Plut. 70.6, copied in 1318 by Demetrius Triclines, with corrections by Plethon, and later used by Bessarion in 1436 to make another copy, contains an epigraph written by Laonikos. http://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/cote/id/16571
Laonikos' movements and actions after 1447 are not known with certainty. His account of the circumcision of Sultan Mehmed II's sons in 1457 suggest he was an eye-witness to the event, and his account of Ottoman finances indicate he interviewed the Sultan's accountants. Internal evidence has led Byzantinist Anthony Kaldellis to put the date Laonikos stopped writing his Histories as 1464. While Laonikos Chalkokondyles greatly relied on Ottoman sources for the sections on the Ottomans, his narrative on the rule of Mehmed II is generally antagonistic. Thus, it has been argued that Laonikos Chalkokondyles was writing for the contemporary western audience in the Turcica genre rather than for the post-Byzantine intellectuals associated with the Ottoman court. Other speculations about Laonikos Chalkokondyles' life are not as widely accepted.
Teaching by Pletho While in Mystras, Laonikos became the student of Pletho, a Platonist philosopher and Judge General of the Byzantine Empire. At the court of the Despots in Mystras, Pletho was an advisor to Byzantine rulers and taught a wide ranging group of students. Among Pletho's students, there were Bessarion and Isidore, the two future Cardinals of the Catholic Church, Mark Eugenikos, the leader of Orthodox factions who resisted Church Union with Rome. Michael Apostolis and the self-professed sun worshipper Demetrios Raoul Kabakes were also followers of Pletho although they may not have been formal students. Kabakes was instrumental in disseminating the remaining portions of Pletho's secret tract () in Europe. The had been burned by the Patriarch of Constantinople, Gennadius Scholarius, Pletho's Aristotelian arch-enemy and anti-Unionist theologian, following the Platonist philosopher's death when the Patriarch was sent the tract c. 1455. In connection with the auto-da-fé, Scholarios had commented that Pletho had become a Hellene (that is, a pagan) as a result of his education under a Hellenizing Jewish thinker at an unspecified barbarian city in his youth. Historians have argued that this city must have been either Ottoman Bursa or Edirne without conclusive evidence; it could have been any one of the Muslim courts in the eastern Mediterranean.
There are echoes of this religious controversy in the . In one passage, Laonikos defined Hellenic religion as polytheistic ritual belief in the gods Zeus, Hera, Apollo and Artemis and wrote that it was only recently that the Bohemians stopped worshiping fire and the sun, while the pagan religion was still practiced in various locations in the world in the fifteenth century. Laonikos' narrative on religious practices and beliefs, both Islam as well as Christianity, is conspicuous for its omission of metaphysics and for his definition of religion as a cultural and administrative system that regulates societies. A passage concerning Bessarion, Isidore, Mark Eugenikos, and Gennadius Scholarius details the deliberations at the Council of Florence in 1438–9. At the Council the Byzantines and the Latins aimed to mend the Schism between the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches. In these passages and elsewhere, Laonikos systematically employs the classical term (religious practice) which has connotations of ritual and cult and never uses the term . The latter term was more commonly used in connection with religion in Byzantium.
Laonikos' instruction with Pletho in Mystras is revealed in a diary entry of Cyriac of Ancona from late July–early August 1447. The Italian merchant and humanist who is sometimes also referred to as the father of modern archaeology, was visiting Pletho in Mystras when he met "the gifted young Athenian, Nikolaos Chalkokondyles.... remarkably learned in both Latin and Greek literature." Late medieval Greece was a hybrid society where bilingualism was a common feature and contacts with the west were frequent. Laonikos' detailed presentation of Italian city-states and western polities, intricate knowledge of current and past events in the west, admiration for the Greek Cardinals Bessarion and Isidore who had migrated to Italy, and capacity for salacious gossip from western urban centers reveal that he was a member of the Franko-Greek society of late medieval Greece. In fact, Laonikos was proud to draw the readers' attention to this, referring to himself as "Laonikos the Athenian" in the opening words of the .
Laonikos does not openly reference Pletho in the . However, Laonikos' adoption of Herodotus as historiographical model, the explicit emphasis on Hellenic identity in the , the articulation of a long historical memory extending to mythical time, the sympathetic presentation of Islam and the prophet Mohammed, and interest in oracular knowledge are similar in tenor to Pletho's teachings and writings.
Methodology
Laonikos' methodological contribution to Renaissance historiography was his adoption of Herodotus as model. Although Herodotus was taught in Byzantine schools as a linguistic model for Ionian Greek, he was denigrated as an unreliable historian with a penchant for the fabulous in late antiquity and the middle ages. Furthermore, the classical historian's formulation of the tyrannical Persian empire in opposition to the free Greek city-states was not in line with Byzantine political ideology with its claim to just universal Empire. In the aftermath of 1453 and the eventual incorporation of all Byzantine territories into the centralizing Ottoman state under Mehmed II, Herodotus emerged as a useful historiographical model to describe the Ottomans. Further, Laonikos' Herodotean model of Empire should be evaluated in tandem with Mehmed II's imperial claims. These claims were applauded in the History of Kritoboulos, the contemporary Greek historian and bureaucrat. Kritoboulos dedicated and presented the Greek autograph manuscript of his History to the Ottoman Sultan himself, illustrating the competing claims on the Byzantine heritage in the latter part of the fifteenth century.
Laonikos must have studied the classical historian of the Persian Wars closely with Pletho in Mystras, as a fourteenth-century Byzantine manuscript of Herodotus (Plut. Gr. 70.06 in the Laurentian Library in Florence) was owned by both teacher and student. Laonikos inserted an epigraph concerning the ancient historian on the last folio of this manuscript, writing that Herodotus' History was composed with "divine guidance". This particular manuscript was copied multiple times by Pletho's disciples, among them Bessarion and Kabakes. Textual interventions—such as the insertion of alternating astronomical symbols of the sun and the moon in the margins and the marking of oracular statements in the manuscript—and the close links between Plut. Gr. 70.06 and other manuscripts associated with the Mystra intellectuals, demonstrate that Herodotus was not merely prized as a classical historian. In the epigraph, Laonikos praised Herodotus as a "herald" who described in detail the deeds of the Hellenes. Laonikos also wrote that he was amazed that the Hellenes "displayed a virtue that was greater than human". Laonikos' word choice , to refer to the Hellenes, is also used to describe oracular statements. In fact, the ancient historian Herodotus had cosmic significance for the Mystras intellectuals at a time when eschatological beliefs were widespread.