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In the early 10th-century Life of Patriarch Ignatios, by Nicetas David Paphlagon, a narrative of a religious figure, the author recounts the story of a woman in labor with a breeched birth.

With Muslim armies advancing on Constantinople and Ottoman navies surging into the Mediterranean, commentators and writers such as Nicetas Byzantios and Dante Alighieri reserved the worst of their bile for “the bad and noxious” religion of Islam with Muhammad “the antichrist” at its head.

Zigabenus’s Panoply was continued and enlarged a century later by the historian Nicetas Acominatus, who published it under the title Treasure of Orthodoxy.

The history of the Eastern empire during the Crusades was written in four considerable works, by Nicephorus Bryennius, his learned consort Anna Comnena, the “honest Aetolian,” Johannes Cinnamus, and finally by Nicetas Acominatus in an exhaustive work which is authoritative for the history of the 4th Crusade.

This he despatched against Constantinople, while at the same time his nephew Nicetas led a large body of horse along the African shore to invade Egypt.