John Cananus or John Kananos () was a

Byzantine Greek Medieval Greek (also known as Middle Greek, Byzantine Greek, or Romaic; Greek: ) is the stage of the Greek language between the end of classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries and the end of the Middle Ages, conventionally dated to the F ...

historian who lived during the first half of the 15th century. Cananus wrote a "a vivid eyewitness account" of the failed siege of

Constantinople Constantinople (#Names of Constantinople, see other names) was a historical city located on the Bosporus that served as the capital of the Roman Empire, Roman, Byzantine Empire, Byzantine, Latin Empire, Latin, and Ottoman Empire, Ottoman empire ...

by the

Ottomans Ottoman may refer to: * Osman I, historically known in English as "Ottoman I", founder of the Ottoman Empire * Osman II, historically known in English as "Ottoman II" * Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire (), also called the Turkish Empir ...

under Sultan

Murad II Murad II (, ; June 1404 – 3 February 1451) was twice the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, from 1421 to 1444 and from 1446 to 1451. Early life Murad was born in June 1404 to Mehmed I, while the identity of his mother is disputed according to v ...

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 or (approximately "parent (fem.) of God"). Familiar English translations are "Mother of God" or "God-bearer ...

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 Atticism (meaning "favouring Attica", the region of Athens in Greece) was a rhetorical movement that began in the first quarter of the 1st century BC. It may also refer to the wordings and phrasings typical of this movement, in contrast with vari ...

of Anagnostes and

Critobulus Crito of Alopece ( or ; , ''gen''.: Κρίτωνος, ''Kríton Alōpekēthen''; c. 469 – 4th century BC) was an ancient Athenian agriculturist depicted in the Socratic literature of Plato and Xenophon, where he appears as a faithful and l ...

. 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 (CSHB; ), also referred to as the Bonn Corpus, is a monumental fifty-volume series of primary sources for the study of Byzantine history (–1453), published in the German city of Bonn between 1828 and 1897. Each volume contains a critica ...

'', 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 promi ...

, ed.
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* Greek ed., with Latin translation by L. Allatius, published in ''

Patrologia Graeca The ''Patrologia Graeca'' (''PG'', or ''Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca'') is an edited collection of writings by the Church Fathers and various secular writers, in the Greek language. It consists of 161 volumes produced in 1857–18 ...

'', vol. 156. ( Migne, J.P., ed.
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* 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
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* Smith, William (1870)

Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology The ''Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology'' is a biographical dictionary of classical antiquity, edited by William Smith (lexicographer), William Smith and originally published in London by John Taylor (English publisher), Tayl ...

. * Vasiliev, A.A. (1952). History of the Byzantine Empire, 324–1453. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 35
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Notes

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