This article discusses the authorship of the ‘Short mournful story concerning the unjust death of the most honorable Constantine Cantacuzenus’, a poem that describes the execution of the grand postelnic on the orders of Gregory Ghika, the Prince of Wallachia. On the basis of a marginal comment in a manuscript authored by Nicholas Karatzas (Princeton gr. 112), this article argues that the questionable authorship of the poem may be attributed to the Ottoman grand dragoman Panagiotis Nikousios, who may have written the original Greek version published in Venice in 1666.
