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.

For Historical Bookshelf, this entry is best treated as a historical or literary figure rather than a fictional character. It can support pages where novels refer to writers, playwrights, philosophers or scholars as part of a period’s intellectual background.

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.