of the tongues. Alas! How could I recall the memory of these things without tears? B Where He who Himself lives, who became for our sake what we are, was beheld, there a choir of angels stood trembling to see the works of lawlessness dared by the adversaries. And do the lightning bolts from heaven not fall? O places consecrated to God! You who abounded in grace are spoiled of divine grace, and are treated by the rash as nothing. Alas! How has the time of our prosperity become a time of aggression and incursion, and we who remain have become a reproach and infamy! Gone are the public assemblies and celebrations, gone are the splendors of the divine icons. Liberty has perished; the company of monks has been cast out; the gray hair of presbyters and the dignity of deacons are injured by the mockery of all. Is not our life unpleasant and bitter, and is it not better for us to die than to live, oppressed daily by so many dire sorrows? Truly, those who are accustomed to feel compassion in similar circumstances will feel the same as I do. Therefore, I have often doubted within myself for what cause these things have happened to us and by what reason we have fallen into such great evils; and I found that my doubt is sufficiently resolved by the divine utterance, saying: "Your land shall be desolate, and your cities shall be desolate, because you have walked toward me crookedly, and I will walk toward you in crooked wrath." Hence, making an end to saying more, I prefer silence. For it is not appropriate for those who have committed unpardonable sins to weave long prayers for the sake of showing off to make God propitious to them. For we have been the cause of the things that have happened, as he said, who sowed similar seeds. Wherefore, whatever there is of piety and true dogmas, let us, who have neglected the works originating from virtue, again embrace with all zeal, and let us strive by all means to render God propitious to us by the actions in which He delights, so that hereafter we may sing a palinode with the greatest joy of soul.
GEORGIUS PHRANTZES
NOTITIA
(Fabric. Biblioth. Gr. ed. Harles. t. VIII.)Georgius Phrantzes, of illustrious lineage, and related to the Emperor himself (a) by affinity, was born at Constantinople in August, A.D. 1401 (b). Having lost his parents to the plague, he lived among the Emperor’s...
(a) The sister of Phrantzes married Gregory Palæologus Mamonas, son of the great duke Mamonas, as he himself testifies in book I, ch. 38. Du Cange in *Familiæ Byzantinæ*, p. 254, reckons that Gregory among the August family of the Palæologi. Phrantzes also took a wife in the year 1438, Helena, daughter of Alexius Palæologus Examplacon, by whom he fathered three sons and one daughter. See him II, 17. (b) Phrantzes himself, book I, ch. 21.
C Manuel’s chamberlain (c), and two years later, having been accepted among the secretaries, he became dear both to Manuel himself and to his sons, John (to whom, as his father lay dying, he had been specially commended) (d), and Constantine. He carried out various embassies for them; he served both with counsel and support; he recovered Glarentza in the Peloponnese; in 1429, shielding Constantine with his own body at Patras, he saved him from the enemy and suffered himself to be taken captive for his sake (e). Restored after an interval of time to the office of *protovestiarios* (f), and later promoted to the Spartan prefecture in 1446 (g); and having supported Constantine in securing the imperial succession against his brother Demetrius (h) after the death of his brother John in 1448, and having been elevated by him to the dignity of Great Logothete (i), not long after, when Constantinople was captured by the Turks in 1453, he too came under the power of the Turks with all his household (j). Having been sold and subsequently restored to freedom, he first lived in the Peloponnese with the Despot Thomas Palæologus, brother of Constantine, rescued his wife from slavery, and, after the Peloponnese was also captured by the Turks, he retreated to Italy. Having traveled through Rome and Venice, he returned to Corfu, and having embraced the monastic habit, he wished to be called Gregory instead of the name George (k), just as his wife wished to be called Eupraxia instead of Helena, in the year 1468. D In this monastery, at the request of certain noble men of Corfu, he wrote the *Chronicle of Byzantine Affairs* in four books, from the year of our Lord 1401 to 1477 (l), in which very year, on March 29, the author himself testifies at the end of the final book that he finished it, being broken by poverty, disease, and old age. It begins similarly to Acropolita: *The usefulness of history, and the many who have written before us*. This work has not yet seen the light in Greek (m). But Jacob Pontanus, S. J., having chanced upon the Greek manuscript in the Bavarian library at Munich (n), omitted what appeared to him to be irrelevant or alien (o), translated the rest into Latin, distinguished it into three books and subdivided it into chapters, and highlighted it with notes and an explanation of dignities. He edited it thus contracted in Latin at the end of the *Histories* of Theophylactus Simocatta, published in Greek and Latin at Ingolstadt, 1604, 4to (p). But let us hear Pontanus himself speaking of the work of Phrantzes and his own edition:
NOTITIA
"The work, however, was distributed by its author in this manner. The first book contains four—for he makes that many—of the six Palæologan emperors, the first of whom is Michael, whom he names Comnenus (for the Palæologi were indeed Comneni on their mother’s side, as will appear from the beginning of the history), he who recovered Constantinople from the Latins for sixty years, more or less. The last of those six is Manuel, with whom the book ends. The second follows the affairs of John, the son of Manuel. He begot six sons: John, Andronicus, Theodore, Constantine, Demetrius, and Thomas. The third he gives to the brother and successor of John, Constantine: under whose reign, and indeed in very few years, Constantinople was conquered by force of arms and passed under the dominion of the impious Turks. The fourth and final part is devoted chiefly to describing the strife and civil wars of the two Palæologan brothers, Demetrius and Thomas, in the Peloponnese, and the frauds and pillaging of Mahomet II, who conquered Constantinople, bringing the whole narrative from a little above the year of Christ 1259, in which Michael Palæologus ascended the throne, down to the year 1477, and thus covering at least 218 years in such a small book, in three sheets: would that it were also as learned and industrious as that regarding which the Veronese poet affirmed with admiration."
But since this writer is over-fond of *parabasis*, or digressions, and many of them pertain nothing at all to the history itself, but rather detract from its gravity and dignity, and therefore can be omitted not only without loss but even conveniently and usefully, the plan was, having passed over these, to collect the whole corpus (though it is not very large in itself) into a certain compendium, and to join those things found in the fourth book that are more noteworthy and memorable to the third as an addition to a house, and in this way to make the third book itself a culmination. For whom, I ask, would the Mahometan sect, as described and rebuked in so many pages from the orations of John Cantacuzenus against this same sect, delight? The *protovestiarios* hates Mahometanism with a hatred more than Vatinian, and this because of the Turks. Therefore he could not restrain himself from attacking its founder repeatedly, and inveighing against his genealogy, customs, growth, and dogmas. But now was not the place for these, says Flaccus. When he deals with the appearance of a comet, why does he dwell there explaining—not very philosophically, I say—many meteors, such as lightning, thunderbolts, thunder, earthquakes, the generation of the comets themselves, and also the nature of the elements? He brings up his own affairs, and those often minute, which no one would care much to know, too frequently and ambitiously. Not the schism and defection of the Greeks from the Roman Church (which, however, is a matter of firm conviction for the entire West), but sins, like those of the Ninevites and other peoples, and the oracle concerning the Ishmaelites (from whom the Turks are propagated…
for the increase of the empire, concerning which matter it is written in Genesis)—these, I say, he argues at great length were the cause of their perishing, and that the Latins defected from the Greeks rather than the Greeks from the Latins. He discourses more fully concerning the four monarchies, also from the prophets Daniel and Zechariah. He likewise demonstrates that the Nicene Creed is composed and woven together according to every individual word from the Sacred Scripture of both the New and Old Testaments. Finally, he professes certain articles of faith, as was customary for those joining the monastic order, in which very articles certain things are perceived which are not Roman and Catholic. These and other things of this sort do nothing for history, and create more trouble for the reader; he who does not see, sees nothing. Furthermore, those things which are discussed in the first book concerning the origin, succession, and deeds of the Ottoman emperors, and concerning the island of Crete, and what was perpetrated against the Barbarians on that account, and besides these certain other passages, although less proper to history, I have nevertheless left as less alien to it, not useless, and serious. Nor do I fear that anyone might interpret this act of mine otherwise, who is not unaware that the most famous historians of both languages, and other eminent writers likewise, have been contracted into epitomes solely on account of their length, whom it is not necessary to name at present. Regarding what book III reports—which is little credible—from the narration of a certain old man concerning Indian affairs, it should be known that similar things are found in Pliny and Diodorus Siculus. To these things, which are obscure and intricate (should this be attributed to the fault of the scribe or the author?), I have removed them without any notable detriment to the facts, for it did not seem worth the effort for anyone to rack their brains over them for a long time. For Nicetas prudently states in the vestibule or preface of his work, by which he distinguished his history perhaps better than anyone else: "For history abhors whatever is not open and placed in plain view; whatever is simple and natural and obvious to the understanding, it willingly admits." The Prolovestiarius himself even compressed the eleven books of Nicephorus Gregoras into the first six chapters of the first book, as if into the narrowest prison, constricted by almost excessive brevity. We have divided these very chapters, because they were somewhat long, into many; and for the rest, we have attended to our own judgment in establishing and defining the number and length of the chapters throughout the books. And since we were compiling an epitome, we also omitted other things, especially when they were more involved, in their proper place. Three or four times in the first book, for the sake of a supplement, we sprinkled in a few words from Gregoras and Laonicus. And here, reader, I wish to warn you that to understand more fully the things that are handed down in the already mentioned book, the reading of Gregoras—and not just this one, but also that of Joannes Cantacuzenos, which we translated into Latin last year—who relates many things differently than he does, will be of great benefit. These are the words of Pontanus, who on page 304 in his notes inserted the diploma or bull of Emperor Andronicus the Younger for the Monembasiots, which was omitted in his version or epitome, and on page 309, the letter of Cardinal Bessarion which he sent to the tutor of the children of Thomas Palæologus at Ancona, and Meursius later joined it in Greek and Latin to the *Opuscula* of the illustrious Hesychius, published at Leiden, 1613, octavo. Finally, on pages 317 and 325, Pontanus added the letter of Georgius Trapezuntius to John Palæologus in Greek and Latin, in which he invites him to sail to Italy for the synod with the triremes sent by Eugenius IV.
Regarding the work of Phrantza, which was also a Greek manuscript in the Royal Library of the Escorial, and in the Ambrosian Library of Milan, just as it is kept today in the Barberini [Library] (q), the learned (r) determine that no one should doubt that the siege and capture of Constantinople were described by him most accurately, even though many have complained that many things—having little to do with the matter and being reported with little accuracy—were recorded by him. Allatius notes in his work on Acropolita, pages 220, 264, and 270, that Nicephorus Gregoras is transcribed by him even where he errs, and that he confuses and mutilates everything at will, page 250. The same person reproves his negligence in the book *De consensu utriusque Ecclesiæ*, page 776. From the preface of Acropolita, he relates what was told about the city being taken by the Latins and recovered by the Greeks, and notes on page 426 *De Georgiis* that he transcribed the summaries.
Allatius produces Greek passages from the historical commentaries of Phrantza in the same work *De consensu*, page 4, and elsewhere, and drew from nowhere else what Du Cange cites as the Greek of Phrantza in his *Glossarium Græcum*. It should be noted, however, that Allatius had a work different from that which Pontanus published in Latin, contracted into an epitome. For thus he says in his diatribe *De Georgiis*, in the cited place: "There is preserved with me the *Chronicon* of the same Phrantza, entirely different from the published one. It begins from the year 1402, and ends in the year 1477; I do not know if by the author himself, to not fatigue the reader with the prolixity of the work, fashioned into a compendium after the first *Chronicon*, or if it was prepared even before he published the prolix [version], as a fulcrum of memory and an argument of material." Whatever the case may be, although it is barbarous in eloquence and derived from common speech, it contains much that will not occur elsewhere, and pursues everything distinctly: in this, however, it is in no way to be praised, that it commemorates even the most minute things of no worth, being sufficiently curious and talkative in narrating domestic troubles. Thus it begins: «Οἰκτρὸς Γεώργιος ὁ Φραντζῆς, ὁ καὶ πρωτοβεστιάριος, Γρηγόριος τάχα μοναχὸς, ταῦτα ἔγραψεν ὑπὲρ τῶν καθ᾿ ἑαυτὸν καί τινων μερικῶν γεγονότων ἐν τῷ τῆς ἀθλίας ζωῆς αὐτοῦ χρόνῳ ἀπὸ τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ γεννήσεως ͵ανδ΄ ἔτει. » The beginning: «Καλὸν ἦν μοι ἢ οὐκ ἐγεννήθην, ἢ παιδίον ἀποθανεῖν.» I compared it with the Neapolitan manuscript codex, [which is] written defectively. Besides these, there still exist other codices of Phrantza in the Neapolitan Augustinian Library of St. John at Carbonari; and in the Royal Library of Turin in codex 102 and 246 of the catalog of Greek codices of Turin, pages 213 and 566; the latter of which agrees with the one that Allatius had, and that it is different from that *Chronicon* which Pontanus published in Latin, redacted into an epitome, is attested in the place later remembered by Fabricius. HARL.