John Kaminiates was a Greek

Byzantine Greeks

Byzantine Greeks or Byzantines is a conventional term used by modern historians to refer to the medieval Greek or Hellenised citizens of the Byzantine Empire, centered mainly in Constantinople, the southern Balkans, the Greek islands, Asia Minor , Cyprus and the large urban centres of the Near East...

 resident of Thessalonica when the city, then one of the largest in the Byzantine Empire

Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...

, was besieged and sacked

Sack of Thessalonica (904)

The Sack of Thessalonica in 904 by Saracen pirates was one of the worst disasters to befall the Byzantine Empire in the 10th century. A Muslim fleet, led by the renegade Leo of Tripoli, and with the imperial capital of Constantinople as its initial target, sailed from Syria...

 by a Saracen

Saracen

Saracen was a term used by the ancient Romans to refer to a people who lived in desert areas in and around the Roman province of Arabia, and who were distinguished from Arabs. In Europe during the Middle Ages the term was expanded to include Arabs, and then all who professed the religion of Islam...

 force led by Leo of Tripoli

Leo of Tripoli

Leo of Tripoli was a Greek renegade and pirate serving Arab interests in the early tenth century. Born in the Byzantine Empire to Christian parents, he later converted to Islam and took employment with his former captors as an admiral....

 in 904. His account of the city's plunder, On the capture of Thessalonica, (Εις την άλωσιν της Θεσσαλονίκης, Eis tēn alōsin tēs Thessalonikēs) survives in four manuscripts; though of these, none were written before the fourteenth century, causing some concern over the text's authenticity.

Name

John Kaminiates has alternatively been transliterated John Kaminatos, Ioannis Kaminiatis, and sometimes appears in the Latinized

Romanization

In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...

forms Ioannis Caminiatae, Joannes Cameniata and John Cameniates.

External links

• A portion of the translated text online
• The Manuscript Editing Process - An interesting look at how the four surviving manuscripts are used to create a modern scholarly Greek edition.