It was while a monk he wrote his history, which ends with the notice of Sultan Mehmed II's attempt to capture Naupaktos, which he dates to the summer of 1477; Sphrantzes is assumed to have died not long after that event.
[9] During these duties he married Helena, the daughter of the imperial secretary Alexios Palaiologos Tzamplakon, and the Emperor Constantine was his best man.
[11] Despite being involved in the defense of the city, George Sphrantzes' account of the siege and capture of Constantinople in 1453 lacks much detail.
[17] Following the capture of Constantinople both children had become slaves of some elderly Turks, along with his wife Helena, and then were sold to the Sultan's Mir Ahor, or Master of Horse.
[18] Sphrantzes records he learned of his son's death, at the age of 14 years and a day short of eight months, on December 1453.
[19] Much later did Sphrantzes learn of his daughter Thamar's death in the Ottoman Imperial Harem in September 1455, aged 14 years and five months.
[16] The distinctive traits of his work are loyalty to the Palaiologoi -- Sphrantzes often exaggerated their merits and suppressed their defects -- hatred of the Turks, and devotion to Eastern Orthodoxy.
[21] Steven Runciman described his work as "honest, vivid and convincing" and that Sphrantzes "wrote good Greek in an easy unpretentious style.
But, beginning in 1934, the research of such scholars as J.B. Falier-Papadopoulos, Franz Dölger, and Raymond-Joseph Loenertz demonstrated that the Major Chronicle was written decades later by Makarios Melissenos ("Pseudo-Sphrantzes"), a priest who fled to Naples from a Greek-Venetian island conquered by the Ottomans.