The author of this history was a member of the Byzantine Doukas family, a grandson of Michael Doukas, who had come to prominence in the civil wars of the fourteenth century, and possibly a remote descendant of the eleventh-century emperor Michael VII. His own first name and dates of birth and death are not known, but he seemed to have worked for a Genoese family or business, and after the fall of Constantinople took refuge on the island of Lesbos, then controlled by the Genoese Gattilusi dynasty. His history of the period 1341–1462, including the Ottoman conquest, survived in one manuscript: this 1834 edition by Immanuel Bekker provides, as well as a Latin translation of the original Greek text, a near-contemporary Italian version of unknown authorship discovered in a Venetian library by the historian Leopold Ranke, who supplied it to Bekker.