KARTANOS, kdr'ta-nee, JOANNIKIOS: Greek theologian of the sixteenth century; b. in Corfu at the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century; place and date of death unknown. He was originally a monk and protosyncellus at Corfu, and in the first third of the sixteenth century was sent to Venice, where he incurred the hostility of Arsenios Apostolis and was imprisoned. He was later released and returned to Greece, but no further details of his life are known. Kartanos was one of the first to revive a knowledge of the Bible and the teachings of the Church among the

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common people by writing in Romaic, since they were no longer familiar with classic Greek. His chief work was his "Flower," written during his imprisonment and first published at Venice in 1536. It enjoyed immense popularity, but the admixture of apocryphal elements roused the hostility of the Orthodox Greek party. His heresies were successfully assailed and the movement which he had inaugurated was stopped. The ethical treatises of Kartanos were incorporated in the Thesaurus of Damascenus the Studite and thus gained a certain degree of currency in the Greek Church.

(PHILIPP MEYER.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY: E. Legrand, Biblioyraphie Hellénique, i. 226, Paris, 1885; P. Meyer, in TSK, 1898, pp. 315 sqq.; idem, Die theologische Litteratur der griechischen Kirche im 16. Jahrhunderte, pp. 120 sqq., Leipsic, 1899.

KASSHITES. See BABYLONIA, VI., 5.

KASSIA (KASIA): Byzantine poetess of the ninth century. Krumbacher (ut inf.) suggests that the form "Icasia" (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, v. 199) is possibly a corruption of **J Kaaia**. She lived at Constantinople under the Emperors Theophilus (829-842) and Michael III. (842-867) in a cloister of her own founding. Both ecclesiastical and secular poems are extant under her name; but, excepting such as were adopted in liturgical books, they occur rarely in manuscript. Her three best known sacred hymns are the "Idiomela" on the birth of Christ, the birth of John the Baptist, and on Ash Wednesday. The last-named is identical with the song Eis ten pornen. W. Christ and N. Paranikas edited the three songs in their Anthologia Grœca (pp. 10-104, Leipsic, 1871). Four short poems were published by Papadopulos-Kerameus (Byzantinische Zeitschrift, x. 60-61, 1901), and an acrostic dirge and some epigrams were issued by Krumbacher (ut inf.).

G. KRÜGER.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: K. Krumbacher, Kasia, Munich, 1897; idem, Geschichte, pp. 715-716; P. Maas, in Byzantinische Zeitschrift, x (1901), 54-59; S. Petrides, in Revue de l'orient chrétien, vii (1902), 218-244.