Maximus the Greek

MAXIMUS THE GREEK. - Born around 1470 in Arta in Epirus, into the "Orthodox" Trivolis family; died near Moscow in 1556. He lived in the circles of the Florentine and Po Valley Renaissance, in Florence, Venice and Mirandola. Influenced by Savonarola, he became a Latin Catholic and entered the monastery of St. Mark in Florence, where he lived from 1502 to 1504. Having left the convent, he departed from Italy for Greece and entered again, as a non-Catholic, under the name Maximus, into the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos. Then, as a missionary, he preached in Greece, in Egypt and in Wallachia.

At the request of the Muscovite grand duke Vasili III Ivanovich, he was sent in 1516 to Moscow. There he devoted himself to translating the Psalter from Greek into Latin; a Russian retranslated it from Latin into Church Slavonic. Maximus published many other writings. Soon, on account of this translation and also because he was involved in Russian internal political quarrels, he found himself several times brought before the tribunal of the metropolitan Daniel and in the end was condemned to severe confinement in a monastery (1531). After many intercessions, under the tsar Ivan the Terrible (v.), he received permission to live in the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra, not too far from Moscow, where he died.