Theodore Spandounes

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Theodore Spandounes (

Crusade
against the Ottomans. His chief legacy is his Italian-language history on the origins of the Ottoman state and its history up to that time, whose first version was published in 1509 in Italian and was soon translated into French. Spandounes continued working on it, with the final version appearing in 1538. The work is disorganized and contains errors, but is extremely valuable as a historical source for its wealth of information.

Family and origin

Theodore Spandounes was most probably born in

emperors as well as rulers of the Despotate of the Morea in the Peloponnese.[3] Apart from Theodore, the couple had at least two more children: a daughter, who married the Venetian citizen Michael Trevisan, and a son, Alexander, who became a merchant.[1]

Through his mother, Theodore had relatives among the powerful Christian families of the late Byzantine/early Ottoman era. His mother was the grand-daughter of

Thessalonica, who on his death in 1481 was buried in a splendid, Italianate (and probably built in and transported all the way from Venice) tomb in Hagios Demetrios. Although Theodore too had dealings with Thessalonica, however, he does not mention Loukas.[6]

Life and work

Theodore's mother died sometime before 1490, and his father sent Theodore, then still a child, to live with his great-aunt, Mara Branković. Mara was the daughter of Đurađ and Irene, who had been taken as one of the wives of the Ottoman Sultan Murad II. After Murad's death in 1451, Mara was allowed by her stepson Sultan Mehmed II, to retire to her estate at Ježevo, where she "maintained a privileged and protected enclave of Christian faith" (Nicol).[7] It was in this "exalted and privileged" environment that Theodore was brought up, and it was there that he learned to speak some Turkish and acquired first-hand knowledge of Turkish customs and history.[8] In 1503, he visited the Ottoman capital of Constantinople to aid his brother Alexander, who had been brought to financial ruin by the recently concluded Ottoman–Venetian war and the Ottomans' confiscation of Venetian goods. Upon his arrival, he found that his brother had died in the meantime.[7] From 1509, he was forced to leave Venice and live in exile in France. It was during this exile that he composed the first draft of his history, which he dedicated to King Louis XII. This first version was translated into French by Balarin de Raconis in 1519, and was published in a modern edition in 1896 by C. H. A. Schéfer.[9]

A devout but not dogmatic Christian, Spandounes was more attuned to Italian

Konstantinos Sathas in 1890.[13]

Spandounes seems to have based his work on oral or documentary material available to him and his family, as well as unspecified "Turkish annals", but it is impossible to say which. There is notably almost no reference to the other post-1453 Greek historians, which as Nicol notes is possibly due to the fact that their works were not disseminated in printed form until much later. Likewise there is little to suggest that he knew and made use of the handful of Italian treatises on the Turks that were written at about the same time, except for the works of Marin Barleti, whom Spandounes mentions by name.[14]

References

  1. ^ a b c Nicol 1997, p. ix.
  2. ^ Nicol 1997, p. xiv.
  3. ^ Nicol 1997, pp. vii, ix.
  4. ^ PLP, 10959. Καντακουζηνός, Γεώργιος Παλαιολόγος.
  5. ^ Nicol 1997, pp. xiv–xvi.
  6. ^ Nicol 1997, pp. xii–xiii.
  7. ^ a b Nicol 1997, pp. ix–x.
  8. ^ Nicol 1997, p. x.
  9. ^ Nicol 1997, pp. xvii–xviii.
  10. ^ Nicol 1997, pp. vii–viii, xii.
  11. ^ Nicol 1997, p. xi.
  12. ^ Nicol 1997, pp. viii, xi–xii.
  13. ^ Nicol 1997, pp. xviii.
  14. ^ Nicol 1997, pp. xix–xxii.

Sources

  • ISBN 0-521-58510-4
    .
  • Trapp, Erich; Walther, Rainer; Beyer, Hans-Veit; Sturm-Schnabl, Katja (1981).
    ISBN 3-7001-3003-1
    .
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