[4] Michael Doukas narrowly avoided becoming one of the 200 prisoners murdered in retribution by hiding in the underground chamber of the New Church.
He remained there even after the end of the civil war, convinced that sooner or later all of the remnants of the Byzantine state would succumb to the Turkish onslaught.
His earliest autobiographical allusion is dated to 1421, when he lived in New Phocaea and served as the secretary of the local Genoese governor, Giovanni Adorno.
[8] In 1452, when Mehmed's army was beginning the siege of Constantinople, he was in Didymoteicho where he saw the corpses of the Venetian crew and their captain executed for failing to stop at the fortress of Rumeli Hisar.
[12] Doukas was the author of a history of the period 1341–1462; his work thus continues that of Nikephoros Gregoras and John Kantakouzenos, and supplements George Sphrantzes and Laonikos Chalkokondyles.
[13] Doukas considered the Ottoman conquests as a divine punishment, criticised Mehmed II's immorality and cruelty, and ardently supported the union of the Greek and Latin churches as a prerequisite for saving what was left of the Byzantine Empire.
I. Bekker (1834) produced an edition for the Bonn series, which includes a 15th-century Italian translation by an unknown author, found by Leopold Ranke in one of the libraries of Venice, and sent by him to August Bekker;[14] this translation continues where the Greek text ends in mid-sentence, completing the account of the Ottoman conquest of Lesbos.