Niketas Choniates

Niketas Choniates was a Byzantine historian and official whose writings are crucial for the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. His account of the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople preserves one of the most important Byzantine perspectives on the disaster.

Niketas Choniates was born in Chonae and died in Nicaea. Choniates held senior offices under several emperors and witnessed the political collapse that culminated in the Fourth Crusade; after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 he fled to Nicaea, where he revised the history for which he is best known.

In Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, during the sack of the city, Baudolino rescues the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates and begins telling him the story of his life. A gifted liar from northern Italy, Baudolino was adopted by Frederick Barbarossa and educated within the political and intellectual world of the emperor’s court. His inventions repeatedly influence real events, including the legend of Prester John and the emperor’s ambitions in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean.