John Cananus

1422 siege of Constantinople was not successful, the next sultan, Mehmed II, would return in 1453.] John Cananus ( _el. Ἰωάννης Κανανός) was a Greek historian who lived during the first half of the fifteenth century. He wrote an account of the Ottoman's failed siege of Constantinople in 1422 under the sultan Murad II. The account attributes the survival of the Byzantine capital to the miraculous intervention of Theotokos. 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. ISBN 0198721455. p. 46, 47]

Cananus is the Latinized form of the name. It is alternatively tranliterated John Kananos, Joannes Cananus, Ioannes Cananus.

Editions

* Greek ed., with Latin translation, published with Sphrantzes in "Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae", 1838, p. 457-479. (Immanuel Bekker, ed.) [http://books.google.com/books?id=y2MGAAAAQAAJ&printsec=titlepage View online.]
* Greek ed., with Latin translation by L. Allatius, published in "Patrologia Graeca", vol. 156. (Migne, J.P., ed.) [http://books.google.com/books?id=E8rI-c0u0SgC&dq=cypriani&jtp=1#PPA60,M1 View online] .

References

* Vasiliev, A.A. (1952). History of the Byzantine Empire, 324-1453. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 350 [http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ENG0832/__P2C.HTM View online] .
* Smith, William (1870) Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology [http://www.ancientlibrary.com/smith-bio/0602.html View online] .

Notes