Michael Apostolius

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Michael Apostolius, also known as Apostolius Paroemiographus, was a Greek teacher, writer and copyist in the 15th century. He was born about 1420 in Constantinople and died sometime after 1474 or 1486, possibly in Venetian Crete.

A student of John Argyropoulos, he taught for a short time at the Monastery of St. John of Petra in Constantinople. During the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, he was taken prisoner but was later released and fled to Crete, then a Venetian colony. There he supported himself by teaching and by copying manuscripts for Italian humanists, including Cardinal Bessarion.

Apostolius often complained of poverty. One of his manuscripts, a copy of the Eikones of Philostratus now in Bologna, bears the inscription: "The king of the poor of this world has written this book for his living." He died about 1480, leaving a son, Arsenius Apostolius, who became bishop of Malvasia (Monemvasia) in the Morea.