A New Herodotos: Laonikos Chalkokondyles on the Ottoman Empire, the Fall of Byzantium, and the Emergence of the West

by Anthony Kaldellis

This companion to the two-volume Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library edition and translation of the Histories by Laonikos Chalkokondyles is the first book-length investigation of an author who has been poorly studied. Providing biographical and intellectual context for Laonikos, Anthony Kaldellis shows how the author synthesized his classical models to fashion his own distinctive voice and persona as a historian.

Indebted to his teacher Plethon for his global outlook, Laonikos was one of the first historians to write with a pluralist’s sympathy for non-Greek ethnic groups, including Islamic ones. His was the first secular and neutral account of Islam written in Greek. Kaldellis deeply explores the ethnic dynamics that explicitly and implicitly undergird the Histories , which recount the rise of the Ottoman empire and the decline of the Byzantine empire, all in the context of expanding western power. Writing at once in antique and contemporary modes, Laonikos transformed “barbarian” oral traditions into a classicizing historiography that was both Greek and Ottoman in outlook.

Showing that he was instrumental in shifting the self-definition of his people from Roman to the Western category of “Greek,” Kaldellis provides a stimulating account of the momentous transformations of the mid-fifteenth century.

324 pages, Hardcover

First published December 8, 2014

About the author

Ph.D. University of Michigan, Department of History (2001)
Anthony Kaldellis’ research explores the history, culture, and literature of the east Roman empire from antiquity to the fifteenth century. An earlier phase of it focused on the reception of ancient Hellenic culture, for example on how authors conceived their projects in relation to classical models (Procopius of Caesarea, 2004), as well as the history of identities (Hellenism in Byzantium, 2007), monuments (The Christian Parthenon, 2009), and genres (Ethnography after Antiquity, 2013). A second phase brought to light the enduring Roman matrices of Byzantine life and thought, focusing on its political sphere (The Byzantine Republic, 2015) and ethnic identities (Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium, 2019). He has translated into English the works of many medieval Greek writers, such as Prokopios, Genesios, Psellos, Attaleiates, and Laonikos Chalkokondyles. His own monographs have been translated into other modern languages, including Turkish, French, Romanian, Russian, and Greek. In 2019, he created the first academic podcast for his field, Byzantium & Friends. He has just published a new, comprehensive history of Byzantium, The New Roman Empire (2023), which embeds social, economic, religious, and demographic developments within a lively narrative framework.

Reviews

[Ned · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important work on the life and times and methods of Laonikos Chalkokondyles, a fifteenth century Greek who wrote in the style of Herodotus for the purpose of telling the latest Greek war against 'the outsiders'. This time the Greeks fought the Ottomans and lost, and lost big in 1453. Here, Kaldellis accepts the case that this New Herodotus wrote in the decade following the huge disastrous victory of the Fall of Constantinople which put him in much closer proximity to his subject and thus makes him a far more important source.

Context for Chalkokondyles is offered and admittedly guessed at and explained. Then follows a very interesting discussion at length of the nature of that special Herodotean 'objectivity', and Kaldellis thinks his modern day author captures that quite well. Seemingly partial to neither Christian of west or east, or to proponents of Islam, necessarily, Chalkokondyles cleaves instead to more generic labelling of different articles of culture, rather than work out relative merits of them, and thus offending fewer of his possible readers. A New Herodotus indeed. More people, non-specialists, should read this while understanding it is a prime example of what meta-history looks like. And also why just such a thing can be necessarily useful for broader history since there is so much clean analysis in it. And thus why it is again important to more clearly understand the taking of Turkey by the Turks 565 years ago. It should be remembered the tactics of the Ottoman in Turkey were often the same as the tactics of the Spanish in Spain twenty, or thirty, or fifty years later. These sorts of 'details' are what gets lost in popular national narratives that spring up in generations after conflicts and people forget how and what for people fought to begin with. That forgetfulness leads to more conflict which breeds more misunderstanding. And people forget or don't learn how to read good books.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading a more recent history of the Byzantine Empire (so-called) (New Rome: The Empire in the East I believe), I was fascinated by references to the history written by Laonikos Chalkokondyles - a "Byzantine" history written around the Fall of Constantinople, by someone who traveled both West and East and was eyewitness to some of the events described, yet who had what was (at the time) a rather odd view of things, including his contention that the Eastern Roman Empire had never been really Roman at all, but Greek, nor truly an empire. He described struggles between Christianity and Islam fairly neutrally, and was one of the first European writers to write about Islam as its own religion with its own culture, rather than a series of doctrinal errors to be refuted. He wanted to imitate Herodotus and Thucydides, authors little known in the West in the 15th century, and writes ethnographically like Herodotus did, but archaically (for example, calling the French "Celts" or Slavic peoples "Illyrians"). I read this companion book from the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library as preparation for tackling the Histories themselves . . . this is the translator's own account of Laonikos, his work, and his importance . . .

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stellar book. Kaldellis (as always) presents an extremely well written and thought provoking work. Any enthusiast of byzantine, turkish, western, or modern greek history will find the ideas laid out inside integral to understandings of the shifting identities found in the late medieval balkans which still very much impact us to this day.