[2] In his seminal work Apodeixis Historion (Display of Histories), Laonikos claims that his father George Chalkokondyles visited the Ottoman Sultan Murad II (r. 1421-1444, 1446-1451) twice on diplomatic missions.

Laonikos’ narrative on religious practices and beliefs, both Islam as well as Christianity, is conspicuous for its omission of metaphysics and for his definition of religion as a cultural and administrative system that regulates societies.

The Italian merchant and humanist who is sometimes also referred to as the father of modern archaeology, was visiting Pletho in Mystras when he met "the gifted young Athenian, Nikolaos Chalkokondyles.... remarkably learned in both Latin and Greek literature."

Laonikos’ detailed presentation of Italian city-states and western polities, intricate knowledge of current and past events in the west, admiration for the Greek Cardinals Bessarion and Isidore who had migrated to Italy, and capacity for salacious gossip from western urban centers reveal that he was a member of the Franko-Greek society of late medieval Greece.

However, Laonikos’ adoption of Herodotus as historiographical model, the explicit emphasis on Hellenic identity in the Apodeixis, the articulation of a long historical memory extending to mythical time, the sympathetic presentation of Islam and the prophet Mohammed, and interest in oracular knowledge are similar in tenor to Pletho’s teachings and writings.

Although Herodotus was taught in Byzantine schools as a linguistic model for Ionian Greek, he was denigrated as an unreliable historian with a penchant for the fabulous in late antiquity and the middle ages.

Kritoboulos dedicated and presented the Greek autograph manuscript of his History to the Ottoman Sultan himself, illustrating the competing claims on the Byzantine heritage in the latter part of the fifteenth century.

Laonikos must have studied the classical historian of the Persian Wars closely with Pletho in Mystras as a fourteenth-century Byzantine manuscript of Herodotus (Plut.

Laonikos inserted an epigraph concerning the ancient historian on the last folio of this manuscript, writing that Herodotus’ History was composed with "divine guidance".

Textual interventions - such as the insertion of alternating astronomical symbols of the sun and the moon in the margins and the marking of oracular statements in the manuscript - and the close links between Plut.

Herodotus, on the other hand, whose main narrative thread focused on the clash between the Persians and the Hellenes that occurred in an earlier generation than when the historian was composing his work, necessarily had to rely on oral reports from multiple sources.

Laonikos incorporated extensive material on the kinship groups, language, religious beliefs, and customs of the Ottoman Turks in line with Herodotus.

With a composition date after 1464, Laonikos was one of the earliest narrative sources on Ottoman history in any language and the only witness for many of the events and personalities he recorded.

While the criticism of Mehmed II’s social and political policies was not put down to paper in the east during the Sultan’s reign, they circulated widely in the west thanks to the Apodeixis.

Laonikos’ original vision of the Ottomans as oriental tyranny and his revival of Herodotus historiographical model would endure and mold subsequent western engagements with the east.

However, during his absence, the Duchess was enticed out of the Acropolis and a young scion of the Acciaiuoli family, Nerio II, was proclaimed Duke of Athens.

In 1446 Constantine Palaiologos, then Despot of the Morea, sent George on a diplomatic mission to Murad II to obtain the independence of the Greek states south of Thermopylae; enraged at the offered terms, the Sultan put George Chalkokondyles into prison, then marched on Constantine's forces holding the Hexamilion wall on the Isthmus of Corinth and after bombarding it for three days, destroyed the fortifications, massacred the defenders, then pillaged the countryside, ending all hopes of independence.

Cyriacus describes him as a youth egregie latinis atque grecis litteris eruditum ("surprisingly learned in Latin and Greek literature").

Thus, it has been argued that Laonikos Chalkokondyles was writing for the contemporary western audience in the Turcica genre rather than for the post-Byzantine intellectuals associated with the Ottoman court.

After Skanderbeg leaves the Ottoman army and becomes leader of Albania on his own right, Chalkokondyles is brought as a hostage to his court to witness the First Siege of Krujë.

It covers the period from 1298 to 1463, describing the fall of the Byzantine empire and the rise of the Ottoman Turks, which forms the centre of the narrative, down to the conquest of the Venetians and Mathias, king of Hungary, by Mehmed II.

The extended use of the name "Hellenes" (Ἕλληνες), which Laonikos used to describe the Byzantines contributed to the connection made between the ancient Greek civilization and the modern one.

A French translation was published by Blaise de Vigenère in 1577 with a later edition by Artus Thomas, with valuable illustrations on Turkish matters.

Nikolaos Nikoloudis (Athens 1996) and another of Book VIII in J. R. Melville Jones, The Siege of Constantinople: Seven Contemporary Accounts (Amsterdam 1972), pp.