Laonikos Chalkokondyles and the rise of the Ottoman Turks

Abstract

While most Christian writers who described the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 regarded the disaster as divine retribution for the sins of its inhabitants, carried out through the agency of the barbaric and infidel Turks, the historical work of Laonikos Chalkokondyles takes a very different approach to the problem. It argues that nations rose or fell partly through luck, but also according the virtue they possessed, so that the Turks, rather than being mere agents, could in fact take the credit for their success. In this approach, Chalkokondyles reflects not classical Greek literature, but a western tradition to be found in Livy and Cicero, a strand of thought that he may have adopted as a result of contacts with Renaissance Italy.     

Autobiography and Hagiography in Byzantium

This article explores the interaction between hagiography and autobiography in Byzantine literature. As the most productive narrative genre, hagiography influenced the structure and content of autobiographical accounts. On the other hand, for some vitae the protagonist's autobiographical account constituted the primary written source. A hagiographical work, again, may have a highly autobiographical character insofar as the author refers to himself as the saint's associate who eye-witnessed the saint's exploits. In many cases the hagiograph's autobiographical remarks are sprinkled over the whole narrative. Other authors present the life, or part of it, in a separate section, located usually toward the end of the text. The present study also points to common features in hagiographical autobiography and other forms of autobiographical writing, that constitute the conventions of a standardized way of written self-representation in Byzantium.     

Metternich and the Ottoman reform movement

The goal of the paper is to illuminate Metternich's attitude towards possibilities of reform in the Ottoman Empire and the reasons for his interest and practical steps taken in this matter. The paper attempts to provide an accurate account of an important, but until now, entirely ignored, aspect of Metternich's diplomacy and offer further proof that Metternich was not the benighted reactionary depicted in the nineteenth-century historiography, but a conservative keenly aware that the conservative order could survive only if reformed so as to adapt it to the realities of a post-revolutionary age.     

Cases of stroke on the throne of Byzantium

The authors describe the fatal illnesses of three Byzantine emperors, Alexander, Michael IX Palaeologus and Manuel II Palaeologus, who may have died of a stroke. From the texts of Byzantine historians and the indications of chroniclers, it was found that Alexander died of a stroke (possibly cerebral hemorrhage); Michael IX Palaeologus died of what seems to have been the same disease and the the last of these emperors, Manuel II Palaeologus, of hemiplegia. This paper provides the opportunity to see how the non-medical texts of historians and chroniclers adopt and express the scientific Byzantine terminology of the medical writers of the period, which is used differently today.