CHONIATES, MICHAEL

born c. 1140, , Chonae, Byzantine Empire [now in Turkey] died c. 1220, , Ceos, Cyclades Islands [now Ka, Greece] also called Michael Acominatus Byzantine humanist scholar and archbishop of Athens whose extensive classical literary works provide the principal documentary witness to the political turbulence and academic decline of 13th-century Greece after its devastation by the Western crusaders. Having studied at Constantinople (Istanbul) under the classicist Eustathius of Thessalonica, Michael Choniates became metropolitan (senior archbishop) of Athens about 1175 and laboured for almost 30 years to reverse the material and moral deterioration of that tax-laden city. Amassing a collection of original and copied manuscripts, he advanced classical learning by his own scholarship. At the fall of Athens to the Franks under Duke Boniface of Montferrat in 1204, he refused to submit to the papacy and fled to the island of Ceos. Michael Choniates' writings comprise a variety of forms, including doctrinal conferences, eulogies, poetry, and letters. In iambic verse he mourned the intellectual destitution of 13th-century Athenian society and, by various rhetorical pieces, castigated the avarice and tyranny characterizing the local landlords and Byzantine bureaucracy. He also wrote laudatory odes to his brother Nicetas and to Emperor Isaac II Angelus (reigned 1185-95), the defender of Constantinople against Frederick I Barbarossa.