| Item Description: | "Four important Byzantine historians have left narrative texts about the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, the gradual disintegration of the Byzantine Empire and the capture of Constantinople by Sultan Mehemmed II Fatih (1444-1481) in 1453: Critoboulos from Imbros, Laonicos Chalcocondyles, Georgios Phrantzes and Dukas. This new "Thesaurus", the twenty-fourth of the collection, is devoted to the analysis of the lexicon of the latter. The "Historia Turcobyzantina" by Dukas, described by B. Flusin as "a parallel history of the Palaiologoi and the Ottomans, until the disappearance, already accomplished, of the former and the announced end of the latter" is a text often used by modern historians, but it is not yet studied enough for itself. Dukas uses a mixed Greek language: the author is a scholar, but not a purist, and his lexicon contains many loanwords from languages spoken by peoples living in the Mediterranean world during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries." |
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