Laonikos Chalkokondyles

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 χρησάμενοι display, 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.[11] Laonikos' adoption of Herodotus was systematic, thorough and methodical. He adopted the organizational scheme of the ancient historian as well as Herodotus' approach to source material. Arnaldo Momigliano has distinguished a Herodotean approach from the approach advocated by Thucydides, whose strict focus was on contemporary political events. Herodotus, on the other hand, whose main narrative thread focused on the clash between the Persians and the Hellenes that occurred in an earlier generation than when the historian was composing his work, necessarily had to rely on oral reports from multiple sources. Moreover, Herodotus' numerous excursuses into cultural geography necessitated his reliance on foreign informants. Similarly, Laonikos constructed his narrative around the wars between the Ottomans and the Byzantines and in the process relied on Ottoman Turkish informants for political events, ethnographic details, origin stories and much else. Laonikos incorporated extensive material on the kinship groups, language, religious beliefs, and customs of the Ottoman Turks in line with Herodotus. A short section on the Ottoman custom of lighting military camp fires during sieges is included in the excerpt below. In the very long tradition of Byzantine historiography, such primary focus on the "other" and the "barbarian" was unprecedented, with the exception of Kritoboulos. With a composition date after 1464, Laonikos was one of the earliest narrative sources on Ottoman history in any language and the only witness for many of the events and personalities he recorded. While Laonikos depicted Ottoman Sultan Murad II in a favorable light, his son Mehmed II the Conqueror was portrayed as an oriental tyrant par excellence, bringing to mind Herodotus' representations of Darius and Xerxes. Laonikos relied on Ottoman informants who maintained a critical distance to the Ottoman court and the narrative contains echoes of the kind of Ottoman social criticism of Mehmed II's reign, only included in the Ottoman historiographical tradition in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While the criticism of Mehmed II's social and political policies was not put down to paper in the east during the Sultan's reign, they circulated widely in the west thanks to the Apodeixis. There are more than 30 manuscripts of the book from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, demonstrating its popularity. It was first printed in 1556 in Latin translation alongside other tracts on the Ottomans, and was reprinted numerous times due to the European demand for Ottoman information. Translations into French appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with some including illustrations and supplementary material. The original Greek text of the Apodeixis was printed only after its Latin and French translations, first appearing in a bilingual edition printed in 1615 Geneva. Laonikos' original vision of the Ottomans as oriental tyranny and his revival of Herodotus historiographical model would endure, and mold subsequent western engagements with the east.

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 grc-latn (Laws) in Europe. The grc-latn 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 Apodeixis. 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 threskeia (religious practice) which has connotations of ritual and cult and never uses the term grc-latn faith. 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 Apodeixis. Laonikos does not openly reference Pletho in the Apodeixis. However, Laonikos' adoption of Herodotus as historiographical model, the explicit emphasis on Hellenic identity in the Apodeixis, 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.

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