Donald Nicol

Donald MacGillivray Nicol
Born	4 February 1923 Portsmouth, Hampshire
Died	23 September 2003 (aged 80) Cambridge
Nationality	British
Education	King Edward VII School, St Paul's School
Occupation	Byzantinist

Donald MacGillivray Nicol FBA, MRIA (4 February 1923 – 25 September 2003) was an English Byzantinist.

Nicol was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, to a Church of Scotland minister, and received a classical education at King Edward VII School in Sheffield and St Paul's School in London. Registering as a conscientious objector in 1941, he served in 1942–1946 in the Friends' Ambulance Unit, with which he first visited wartime Greece in 1944–1945, visiting Ioannina and the Meteora monasteries.

After earning his first Classics degree at Cambridge University, he returned to Greece in 1949–1950 as a member of the British School at Athens. During this time, he also visited Mount Athos, spending Easter 1949 at the Hilandar Monastery, and revisited Meteora. In 1950, Nicol married Joan Mary Campbell, with whom he had three sons. He completed his doctoral thesis for Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1952. The thesis, on the medieval Despotate of Epirus, led to his first book, The Despotate of Epiros. His thesis supervisor was Steven Runciman, with whom Nicol formed a lifelong friendship, nurtured in the Athenaeum Club.

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