Nicolo Barbaro, George Sphrantzes, Doukas, and others

About Nicolo Barbaro, George Sphrantzes, Doukas, and others

The record gathers the principal witnesses to the siege. Nicolò Barbaro was a Venetian nobleman serving as a physician with the Venetian galleys in the harbor, and kept a day-by-day diary. George Sphrantzes (1401-c. 1478) was a lifelong servant and friend of Emperor Constantine XI, captured when the city fell, who later became a monk on Corfu and wrote a short chronicle of his times. Doukas, a Greek in the service of the Genoese lords of Lesbos, was not in the city but wrote a full history of the Ottoman rise in the 1460s from informants. Leonard of Chios, archbishop of Mytilene, wrote a long letter to Pope Nicholas V in August 1453. Kritovoulos of Imbros, a Greek who entered Mehmed II's service, and Tursun Beg, an Ottoman official who marched with the sultan's army, wrote histories of the conqueror's reign.