Laonicus Chalcondyles (or Chalcocondylas) was the only Athenian Byzantine writer.

Hardly anything is known of his life. He wrote a history, in ten books, of the period from 1298-1463, describing the fall of the Greek empire and the rise of the Ottoman Turks, which forms the centre of the narrative, down to the conquest of the Venetians and Mathias, king of Hungary, by Mahommed II. The capture of Constantinople he rightly regarded as an historical event of far-reaching importance, although the comparison of it to the fall of Troy is hardly appropriate.

The work incidentally gives a quaint and interesting sketch of the manners and civilization of England, France and Germany, whose assistance the Greeks sought to obtain against the Turks. Like that of other Byzantine writers, Chalcondyles' chronology is defective, and his adherence to the old Greek geographical nomenclature is a source of confusion.

For his account of earlier events he was able to obtain information from his father, who was one of the most prominent men in Athens during the struggles between the Greek and Frankish nobles. His model is Thucydides (according to Bekker, Herodotus); his language is tolerably pure and correct, his style simple and clear. The text, however, is in a very corrupt state.

Editio princeps, ad. JB Baumbach (1615); in Bonn Corpus Scriptorum Hist. Byz. ed. I. Bekker (1843); Migne, Patrologia Graeca, clix. There is a French translation by Blaise de Vigenre (1577, later. ed. by Artus Thomas with valuable illustrations on Turkish matters); see also Ferdinand Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter, ii. (1889); Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. 66; Karl Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897). There is a biographical sketch of Laonicus and his brother in Greek by Antonius Calosynas, a physician of Toledo, who lived in the latter part of the 16th century (see C Hopf, Chroniques greco-romanes, 1873).

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