wanted to adopt; he wrote an answer to "The Prince of Little Venice" (Nicholas Daponte)[1] who had proposed as a general principle that Catholics and Orthodox should keep the same feasts, protested against the leave given by the Porte to the Jesuits to come to Constantinople, and generally showed himself to be, as Manuel Malaxos in his History calls him, "a Pontiff just, irreproachable, true, godly, merciful, holy, notbad, and pure." The Bishop of Kythera (the large island close to the south of the Peloponnesus), Maximos Margunios (Μαργούνιος, 1602), who lived chiefly at Venice, was really anxious to restore the union. But the only way that seemed possible to him was by converting the Latins from their heresy about the procession of the Holy Ghost. So nearly all his writings ("Three books concerning the Procession of the Holy Ghost," "Handbook of the Procession of the Holy Ghost," "Arguments against the Latins," "Dialogue between a Greek and a Latin"[2]) are defences of their view on this question. He was a very zealous and pious person, and wrote so moderately and charitably against us that he got into trouble with his own friends as a disguised Latinizer. Really he was nothing of the kind, and he never wavered for a moment from the Orthodox position. So great was his zeal that he, like other good people, went all the way to Rome on the rather hopeless errand of trying to convert the Pope (Clement VIII, 1592–1605). Clement appears to have received him quite kindly,[3] and he argued and argued. Then he went back to Venice. Manuel Malaxos († c. 1581), sometime notary of the Metropolitan of Thebes in Bœotia, and then a private tutor at Constantinople, wrote a "History of the Patriarchs of Constantinople."[4] A contemporary description of him is not flattering: "This is a very old man; he teaches boys in a small and wretched house by the Patriarch's palace. He hangs up dried fishes in it, and then eats them. He writes
- ↑ Πρίγκηω τῶν κλεινῶν Βενετίων. I do not know why he calls the Serenissima "Little Venice," unless it is just rudeness.
- ↑ Meyer, pp. 69–78. He doubts the authenticity of the Dialogue.
- ↑ Kyriakos's statement that the Inquisition threatened him, and that he had to flee for his life (iii. p. 137) is a mistake; the Serenissima gave him a safe-conduct, which was scrupulously observed (Meyer, p. 71).
- ↑ Printed in M. Crusius: Turcogræcia (Basel, 1584), pp. 107–184.
