Michael Panaretos

This chronicle not only provides a chronological framework for this medieval empire, it also contains much valuable material on the early history of the Ottoman Turks from a Byzantine perspective, however it was almost unknown until Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer discovered it in the nineteenth century among the manuscripts of the Biblioteca Marciana of Venice.

"Owing to this drab but truthful chronicle," writes the Russian Byzantist Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev, "it has become possible to a certain extent to restore the chronological sequence of the most important events in the history of Trebizond.

Panaretos makes his first appearance in an entry for 1351 when he records that he went with the mother of the emperor Alexios III, Irene of Trebizond, to Limnia against the rebel Constantine Doranites.

[2] What Panaretos' exact position was at this time is not certain, but his next appearance does not come until the Trapezuntine civil war was over when he records he went with the emperor Alexios III in a disastrous attack on Cheriana, which he himself barely escaped from with his life.

But he does not refer to himself by name until his entry dated to April 1363: he was part of an embassy, which included the megas logothetes, George Scholaris, sent to Constantinople to negotiate a marriage between one of the daughters of Alexios and one of the sons of the emperor John V Palaiologos.

Fallmerayer pointed to a passage in Bessarion's Encomium on Trebizond which states there was a frescoed hall in the imperial palace displaying portraits of all of the Grand Komnenoi with their families in chronological order with brief accounts of their reign.

[11] Although Panaretos' Chronicle was discovered by Fallmerayer, the editio princeps was the work of his colleague Gottlieb Tafel who published the Greek text in 1832 in an appendix to his edition of Eustathius of Thessalonica but without translation or commentary.