GREGORAS, a Greek historian, was born about the close of the thirteenth century, and flourished in the fourteenth, under the Emperors Andronicus, John Palaeologus, and John Cantacuzenus. He was a great favourite of the elder Andronicus, who made him librarian of the church of Constantinople, and sent him as ambassador to the Prince of Servia. He accompanied this emperor in his misfortunes, and assisted at his death, after which he repaired to the court of the younger Andronicus, where he seems to have been well received; and it is certain that, by his influence over the Greeks, that church was prevailed on to refuse entering into any conference with the legates of Pope John XXII. But in the dispute which arose between Barlaam and Palamos, he took part with the former, and maintained his cause zealously in the council held at Constantinople in 1351. For this he was cast into prison, and continued there till the return of John Palaeologus, who released him; after which he held a disputation with Palamos, in the presence of that emperor. He compiled the Byzantine history from 1204, when Constantinople was taken by the French, to the death of Andronicus the younger, in 1341; a work which is not only barbarous in style, but inaccurate in facts. This history, with a Latin translation by Jerome Wolf, was printed at Basil in 1562, and again at Geneva in 1618; but a more correct edition than either of the preceding is that which was printed at the Louvre in 1702, by Boivin, in two vols. folio. Nicephorus was the author of several other works, all of which remain inedited, excepting his Scholia upon the treatise of Synesius de Insomniis, which were published by Turnebus in 1553.

COLUMBUS, a learned monk of Constantinople, who flourished in the fourteenth century, under the Emperor Andronicus Palaeologus the elder. He wrote in Greek an ecclesiastical history in twenty-three books, eighteen of which are still extant, and contain the transactions of the church from the birth of Christ till the death of the Emperor Phocas in the year 610. Of the other five books we have nothing but the arguments, which show that they embraced the portion extending from the commencement of the reign of the Emperor Heraclius to the end of that of Leo the Philosopher, who died in the year 911. This history was dedicated to Andronicus Palaeologus the elder; it was translated into Latin by John Langius, and has gone through several editions, the best of which is that of Paris, published in 1630.