Spandounes seems to have based his work on oral or documentary material available to him and his family, as well as unspecified "Turkish annals", but it is impossible to say which. There is notably almost no reference to the other post-1453 Greek historians, which as Nicol notes is possibly due to the fact that their works were not disseminated in printed form until much later. Likewise there is little to suggest that he knew and made use of the handful of Italian treatises on the Turks that were written at about the same time, except for the works of Marin Barleti, whom Spandounes mentions by name.
