Apocauco, Giovanni

APOCAUCO, GIOVANNI. - Metropolitan of Naupactus (12th-13th centuries). Educated in Constantinople, he was a deacon (ca. 1175-87) in the household of his uncle Manasses, metropolitan of Naupactus. At the rise (ca. 1204) of the Despotate of Epirus (v. ALBANIA), we find him having succeeded his uncle in that dignity, which had special importance in the region, since all the episcopal sees of the Byzantine rite in the Epirote and southern Albanian zone of the despotate depended on it. Thus, together with the archbishop of Achrida (v.) and the metropolitan of Durazzo, he formed the triad of the great hierarchs of this kind of autocephalous church; indeed, although Achrida took precedence, A. was charged with presiding over (1216-17) the Synod that elected Demetrios Chomatenos to that see, the one that elected (1219) the bishop of Corcyra, and the one of Arta in which (between 1225 and 1230) the Church of the empire of Thessalonica, founded by the former despot of Epirus Theodore Angelos, defended its own autocephaly against the Constantinopolitan patriarchate of Nicaea. A., in fact, although sometimes persecuted by dynasts of the Angelos family, always showed toward the civil power the characteristic deference of the Eastern hierarchy, wavering between Rome, Nicaea and autocephaly according to the directions that politics suggested to the Angeloi. Having withdrawn to monastic life ca. 1230, he died before 1233. His numerous acts have a certain importance among the sources of Eastern canon law, and even greater importance for the history of Albanian legal customs, and, in various cases, decisive for the history of the despotate. He was also a poet, and some of his epigrams are preserved.

Giuseppe Valentini