John Cananus
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

John Cananus or John Kananos ( el, Ἰωάννης Κανανός) was a Byzantine Greek historian who lived during the first half of the 15th century. Cananus wrote a "a vivid eyewitness account" of the failed siege of
Constantinople la, Constantinopolis ota, قسطنطينيه , alternate_name = Byzantion (earlier Greek name), Nova Roma ("New Rome"), Miklagard/Miklagarth (Old Norse), Tsargrad ( Slavic), Qustantiniya ( Arabic), Basileuousa ("Queen of Cities"), Megalopolis ( ...
by the Ottomans under Sultan
Murad II Murad II ( ota, مراد ثانى, Murād-ı sānī, tr, II. Murad, 16 June 1404 – 3 February 1451) was the sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1421 to 1444 and again from 1446 to 1451. Murad II's reign was a period of important economic deve ...
in 1422. He attributes the survival of the Byzantine capital to the miraculous intervention of the
Mother of God ''Theotokos'' (Greek: ) is a title of Mary, mother of Jesus, used especially in Eastern Christianity. The usual Latin translations are ''Dei Genitrix'' or ''Deipara'' (approximately "parent (fem.) of God"). Familiar English translations ar ...
on 24 August, when he says even the Ottomans saw her on the ramparts. Cananus account is precise in its chronology and useful to military historians for his descriptions of Ottoman siegecraft and Byzantine defences. The account differs from the contemporary history of John Anagnostes, who described Murad's sack of Thessalonica in 1430, chiefly in Cananus' frequent religious polemic and in his willingness to write in the vernacular Greek, as opposed to the Atticism of Anagnostes and Critobulus. Their use of Greek, while "artificial in the extreme," is intended as an "imitation of the classics", an ideal which had been "the governing principle for all writers who aimed at a good style not merely under the Roman empire but right to the end of the Byzantine period."Reynolds, L. D., & Wilson, N. G. (1991). Scribes and scholars: a guide to the transmission of Greek and Latin literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. . p. 46, 47 With conventional humility, Cananus apologizes for his deficient education and poor style. He states that he writes for ordinary people, not scholars. His lexicon is colloquial and includes quite a few Western military terms. John Cananus is sometimes identified with Lascaris Cananus, who travelled to Scandinavia and Iceland around 1439, but this is only a guess.


Editions

* Greek ed., with Latin translation, published with Sphrantzes in ''
Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae The ''Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae'' (CSHB; en, Corpus of Byzantine history writers, italic=yes), also referred to as the Bonn Corpus, is a monumental fifty-volume series of primary sources for the study of Byzantine history (–1453 ...
'', 1838, p. 457-479. (
Immanuel Bekker August Immanuel Bekker (21 May 17857 June 1871) was a German philologist and critic. Biography Born in Berlin, Bekker completed his classical education at the University of Halle under Friedrich August Wolf, who considered him as his most promis ...
, ed.
View online.
* Greek ed., with Latin translation by L. Allatius, published in ''
Patrologia Graeca The ''Patrologia Graeca'' (or ''Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca'') is an edited collection of writings by the Christian Church Fathers and various secular writers, in the Greek language. It consists of 161 volumes produced in 1857– ...
'', vol. 156. ( Migne, J.P., ed.
View online
* Lascaris Cananus: Lundström, Vilhelm (ed.) (1902) Laskaris Kananos. Reseanteckningar från de nordiska länderna. Utgifna och kommenterade av Vilh. Lundström. Upsala; Leipzig: Lundequist (Smärre Byzantinska skrifter; 1). (With Swedish Translation) https://archive.org/details/LaskarisKananosReseanteckningarFrnDeNordiskaLnderna * Lascaris Cananus: Jerker Blomqvist 2002. The Geography of the Baltic in Greek Eyes. In ''Noctes Atticae: 34 articles on Graeco-Roman antiquity and its Nachleben''. 36–51. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. https://books.google.com/books?id=y37hozj-PeIC&dq=iceland+kananos&pg=PA38 * Online translation into Russian via German: Georg Jakob. Arabische Berichte von Gesandten an germanische Furstenhofe aus dem 9. und 10. Jahrhundert. Berlin 1927, pp. 46–47. http://vostlit.by.ru/Texts/rus8/Kananos/text.htm * Online translation into Russian: А. А. Васильев. Ласкарь Канан, византийский путешественник XV века по Северной Европе и в Исландию. Харьков, 1914. pp. 3–8. https://web.archive.org/web/20110727041740/http://miriobiblion.narod.ru/kananos/kananos.html * Online translation into English: http://hellenisteukontos.blogspot.com/2009/09/lascaris-cananus-updated.html


References

* Harris, Jonathan (2010), ‘When did Laskaris Kananos travel in the Baltic lands?’, ''Byzantion'' 80, pp. 173–8
View online
* Smith, William (1870)
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology The ''Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology'' (1849, originally published 1844 under a slightly different title) is an encyclopedia/biographical dictionary. Edited by William Smith, the dictionary spans three volumes and 3,700 ...
br>View online
* Vasiliev, A.A. (1952). History of the Byzantine Empire, 324–1453. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 35
View online


Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cananus, John 15th-century Byzantine historians 15th-century Greek people