John Cananus orJohn Kananos (Greek:Ἰωάννης Κανανός) was aByzantine Greek historian who lived during the first half of the 15th century.
Cananus wrote a "a vivid eyewitness account"[1] of thefailed siege ofConstantinople by theOttomans under SultanMurad II in 1422. He attributes the survival of the Byzantine capital to the miraculous intervention of theMother of God on 24 August, when he says even the Ottomans saw her on the ramparts. Cananus account is precise in its chronology and useful to military historians for his descriptions of Ottoman siegecraft and Byzantine defences.[1]
The account differs from the contemporary history ofJohn Anagnostes, who described Murad'ssack of Thessalonica in 1430, chiefly in Cananus' frequent religious polemic and in his willingness to write in thevernacular Greek, as opposed to theAtticism of Anagnostes andCritobulus. Their use of Greek, while "artificial in the extreme," is intended as an "imitation of the classics", an ideal which had been "the governing principle for all writers who aimed at a good style not merely under the Roman empire but right to the end of the Byzantine period."[2] With conventional humility, Cananus apologizes for his deficient education and poor style. He states that he writes for ordinary people, not scholars. His lexicon is colloquial and includes quite a few Western military terms.[1]
John Cananus is sometimes identified withLascaris Cananus, who travelled to Scandinavia and Iceland around 1439, but this is only a guess.
Lascaris Cananus: Lundström, Vilhelm (ed.) (1902) Laskaris Kananos. Reseanteckningar från de nordiska länderna. Utgifna och kommenterade av Vilh. Lundström. Upsala; Leipzig: Lundequist (Smärre Byzantinska skrifter; 1). (With Swedish Translation)https://archive.org/details/LaskarisKananosReseanteckningarFrnDeNordiskaLnderna
^Reynolds, L. D., & Wilson, N. G. (1991). Scribes and scholars: a guide to the transmission of Greek and Latin literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.ISBN0-19-872145-5. p. 46, 47
