Nikomedeia 1255 - Constantinople 1305. Byzantine scholar with impressive range of interests, grammarian, productive ‘‘editor’’ of Greek texts and translator of Latin works, monk, representative of the intellectual movement in the Early Palaiologan Renaissance (mid-thirteenth - mid fourteenth-century), and the most outstanding Latin scholar in the East. Manuel Planoudes was born in Asia Minor and settled in Constantinople where he completed his higher education and learned Latin.
Quite young (c. 1280) Manuel entered the Imperial Court as a state official and began to teach, perhaps in the imperial Chora Monastery. He abandoned a promising career in the civil service, became a monk (1283/1292) and changed his name to Maximos. He devoted himself to the monastic life of a scholar. Through his teaching activity, within the monasteries of the capital, he became famous and attracted many scions of noble families. Among his pupils were scholars like Manuel Moschopoulos, Georgios Lekapenos, Demetrios Triklinios, the Zarides brothers, and loannes Zacharias. Except philosophy, he taught grammar, poetry, and rhetoric (trivium) but from late 1280s he started to teach astronomy, mathematics, and geography (quadrivium). His teaching was based on the best ancient sources available to each field: Plato and Aristotle, Strabo, Pausanias, Diophantus, Cleomedes, Euclid, Nicomachus, Ptolemy, and many others. Planoudes was an outstanding member of a wide circle of well-educated Byzantines like George of Cyprus, Nikephoros Choumnos, Manuel Bryennios, and many other future Patriarchs and state officials. As many Byzantine thinkers and scholars, Planoudes had close relations to the imperial court and even to the emperor himself, Andronikos II.
At first Planoudes supported the pro-union policy of the emperor Michael VIII and within the West-friendly atmosphere that followed the unionist Council of Lyon (1274) he showed his enthusiasm for the Latin culture and started to translate works of Latin theology and literature. Later on he supported the anti-union policy of Andronikos II and, finally, he decided not to participate into state and ecclesiastical missions and to avoid his involvement into theological questions. So he preferred to confine himself to activities such as the teaching and the editing of ancient Greek texts. He entered the Monastery of Akataleptos where he taught from 1299 until his early death in 1305.
Planoudes was really a man of books, a devoted reader of the entire corpus of Greek literary and scientific texts, an owner of many codices, and a systematic copyist of numerous works with a constant concern to provide appropriate texts for himself and for his students. His scholarly achievements cannot be underestimated though he was not an editor exactly in the modern sense. The main bulk of his writings were done for didactic purposes. He wrote grammar and syntax manuals and translated a Latin grammar. He edited and/or commented on Greek poetry, tragedy and comedy, and historiography. He reintroduced nine plays of Euripides, started an edition of Moralia of his favorite writer Plutarch (that was completed after his death), accomplished the voluminous Anthologia Planudea (1299, a version of the Greek Anthology), and compiled collections of various Greek texts. Planoudes’ extensive work contains also a corpus on rhetoric, encomia, canons, hymns, scientific writings, and translations of Latin texts. His extensive letter-writing (1292-1300) is a valuable source for the political and intellectual events of this period as well as for Planoudes’ life and personality.
World History
