Bücher von Ducas

The author of this history was a member of the Byzantine Doukas family, a grandson of Michael Doukas, who had come to prominence in the civil wars of the fourteenth century, and possibly a remote descendant of the eleventh-century emperor Michael VII. His own first name and dates of birth and death are not known, but he seemed to have worked for a Genoese family or business, and after the fall of Constantinople took refuge on the island of Lesbos, then controlled by the Genoese Gattilusi dynasty. His history of the period 1341-1462, including the Ottoman conquest, survived in one manuscript: this 1834 edition by Immanuel Bekker provides, as well as a Latin translation of the original Greek text, a near-contemporary Italian version of unknown authorship discovered in a Venetian library by the historian Leopold Ranke, who supplied it to Bekker.