John Argyropoulos was born c. 1415 in
Constantinople where he studied theology and philosophy. As a teacher in Constantinople, Argyropoulos had amongst his pupils the scholar
Constantine Lascaris. He was an official in the service of one of the rulers of the Byzantine
Morea and in 1439 was a member of the Byzantine delegation to the
Council of Florence, when they accepted Catholicism and abjured Greek Orthodoxy. In 1443/4, he received a
Doctor of Theology degree from the
University of Padua before returning to Constantinople. When the city fell in 1453, he left for the still autonomous
Despotate of the Morea in the
Peloponnese. In 1456, he escaped as a fugitive from Ottoman justice in Italy, where he worked as a teacher in the revival of Greek philosophy as head of the Greek department at Florence's
Florentine Studium. In 1471, on the outbreak of the
plague, he moved to Rome, where he continued to act as a teacher of Greek until his death. His students included
Pietro de' Medici,
Lorenzo de' Medici,
Angelo Poliziano,
Johann Reuchlin,
Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and, allegedly,
Leonardo da Vinci, although no primary source verifies this claim. He also made efforts to transport
Greek philosophy to
Western Europe by leaving a number of Latin translations, including many of
Aristotle's works. His principal works were translations of the following portions of
Aristotle:
Categoriae,
De Interpretatione,
Analytica Posteriora,
Physica,
De Caelo,
De Anima,
Metaphysica,
Ethica Nicomachea,
Politica; and an
Expositio Ethicorum Aristotelis. Several of his writings still exist in manuscript. He died on 26 June 1487 in Florence, supposedly of consuming too much
watermelon. ==See also==