Talk:Michael Kantakouzenos (died 1316)

Citation needed for the name of this person
According to Donald M. Nicol's The Byzantine family of Kantakouzenos (Cantacuzenus) ca. 1100-1460: a genealogical and prosopographical study (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1968), no contemporary source provides a name for this man, who is the father of Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos. Nicol remarks, "It is a curious fact that John Kantakouzenos himself displays a remarkable reticence about his antecedents." (p. 27) Contemporary literati praise his family & lineage "but are couched in such highly rhetorical terms as to be of no factual value". The footnotes to his article on the man (whom he calls "N. Kantakouzenos (ca. 1265-1294)") provide no documentation of suggested names by earlier writers, although in other articles he does provide this information. Although this monograph was published in 1968, his The Last Centuries of Byzantium 1261-1453 had a second edition in 1995, & the man still has no name. (When alluded to on p. 155, Nicols writes, "His father had been governor of the Byzantine province in the Morea" -- yet provides the name of John Kantakouzenos' mother, Theodora!)

So where did this man's name come from? And if we cannot find a reliable source for his name, should we delete this article? (All that can be said about John's father is that he was governor of Byzantine Morea, & based on Kantakouzenos' lack of interest in the man, that he died either when John was an infant or before he was born.) -- llywrch (talk) 04:54, 20 October 2013 (UTC)


 * That is indeed a good question. I just checked the Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit, and it has no name for John VI's father, nor an entry for a Michael Kantakouzenos apart from the megas konostaulos of the 1260s and a member of the family who died of the plague in 1522. So the name is clearly wrong, and possibly derives from a confusion of John VI's father being governor of the Morea with the Kantakouzenos who was the same before the battle of Makryplagi (I don't have access to Ostrogorsky right now to see where he got his information from). Since so little is known of John VI's father, I propose deleting this article and simply mentioning what info there is on him in John VI's article, where it will also be in proper context. Constantine  ✍  15:40, 27 October 2013 (UTC)