MILESCU, NICOLAE. - Born in 1625, died in 1712, a learned Moldavian boyar who studied in Constantinople at the "Great Greek School" under Venetian and Paduan influence. He served as secretary to several princes of Moldavia and Wallachia, as spatharios (military commander) and ambassador for the same to Constantinople, and later to Berlin, Stockholm, and Paris. The latter part of his life was spent in the service of the tsars, and as their ambassador he also undertook a journey to China (1675–78). M. was also notably active as a writer.
He translated, it seems in 1664, the Bible into Romanian; this translation (now lost) served as the basis for the so-called Serban Cantacuzino Bible—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 against Protestantism; this treatise is reproduced in *Perpétuité de la foy de l'Eglise catholique sur l'Eucharistie* by A. Arnaud and Nicole de Port Royal (Paris 1669). M. also wrote theological and historical works for the Russians, but what brought him world fame was his geographical and historical account of his journey to China, a work translated into many languages.