MILESCU, NICOLAE. - Born in 1625, died in 1712, a learned Moldavian boyar, who studied at Constantinople in the Greek "great school" placed under Venetian and Paduan influence. He was secretary to several princes of Moldavia and Wallachia, spatharios (military commander) and their ambassador to Constantinople, Berlin, Stockholm and Paris. He spent the last part of his life in the service of the tsars and as their ambassador also made a journey to China (1675-78). M. had a notable literary activity.
He translated, it seems in 1664, the Bible into Romanian, a translation (now lost) that served as the basis for the so-called Bible of Serban Cantacuzino - the first complete Romanian Bible - printed in Bucharest in 1688. From Stockholm, at the request of the ambassador of Louis XIV, M. sent to Paris a treatise on the real presence of the Body and Blood of Our Lord in the Eucharist, in which he expressed the consent of the "Orthodox" Church to the Catholic Church in its struggle with Protestantism; that treatise is reproduced in the Perpétuité de la foy de l'Eglise catholique sur l'Eucharistie, by A. Arnauld and Nicole de Port Royal (Paris 1669). M. also wrote theological and historical works for the Russians, but what gave his name worldwide fame is the description, geographical and historical in character, of his journey to China, a work translated into many languages.
Bibliography
Petre Vălimăreanu