Michael Panaretos

Michael Panaretos (Greek: Μιχαήλ Πανάρετος) (c. 1320 – c. 1390) was an official of the Trapezuntine empire and a Greek historian. His sole surviving work is a chronicle of the Trapezuntine empire of Alexios I Komnenos and his successors. This chronicle not only provides a chronological framework for this medieval empire, it also contains much valuable material on the early history of the Ottoman Turks from a Byzantine perspective, however it was almost unknown until Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer discovered it in the nineteenth century among the manuscripts of the Biblioteca Marciana of Venice. "Owing to this drab but truthful chronicle," writes the Russian Byzantist Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev, "it has become possible to a certain extent to restore the chronological sequence of the most important events in the history of Trebizond. This Chronicle covers the period from 1204 to 1426 and gives several names of emperors formerly unknown."

All that is known about Panaretos is what little he tells us in his chronicle. He was a protosebastos and protonotarios in the service of Alexios III Komnenos. Panaretos makes his first appearance in an entry for 1351 when he records that he went with the mother of the emperor Alexios III, Irene of Trebizond, to Limnia against the rebel Constantine Doranites. What Panaretos' exact position was at this time is not certain, but his next appearance does not come until the Trapezuntine civil war was over when he records he went with the emperor Alexios III in a disastrous attack on Cheriana, which he himself barely escaped from with his life. Thereafter, he alludes to himself by using the first person plural when recording events in the annals. But he does not refer to himself by name until his entry dated to April 1363: he was part of an embassy, which included the megas logothetes, George Scholaris, sent to Constantinople to negotiate a marriage between one of the daughters of Alexios and one of the sons of the emperor John V Palaiologos. Besides the emperor, this embassy also met with the emperor-monk John VI Kantakuzenos, the Venetian podestà, and Leonardo Montaldo the capetan of Genoese Galata in that order.

...
Wikipedia