CHRYSORORAS, MANUEL or EMANUEL, a man who has claims on the eternal gratitude of all the lovers of learning. He was at the head of those learned Greeks who brought into Italy the language of Athens, and reopened the sources of erudition. Born at Constantinople, he was descended of an ancient and distinguished family, which had removed with Constantine from Rome to Byzantium; and he was sent by the emperor John Palæologus to implore of the Christian princes succours of men and money against the Turks. After an absence of some years, Chrysoloras returned to Constantinople; but he did not remain long there, as the magistrates of Florence had engaged him to accept of the office of professor of the Greek language in their city, where he opened his school about the year 1393 or 1394, and taught three years. From Florence Chrysoloras passed to Milan, and from Milan to the rising university of Pavia, to which he had been invited by John Galeas, duke of Milan. When the death of Galeas in 1402, and the troubles that broke out in Lombardy, forced him to quit Pavia, he retired to Venice, where he lived several years, and subsequently went to Rome, upon the invitation of Aretino, who had been his disciple, and who was then secretary to Gregory
XII. About this period Chrysoloras entered on the career of public affairs. In 1408 he was at Paris in capacity of envoy from Manuel Palæologus, having been charged with an important mission by the Greek emperor. In 1413 he accompanied cardinals Chalanco and Zabarella on a mission from Pope Martin V. to the emperor Sigismund, in order to choose, in concert with the latter, a place for the meeting of a general council, which had been demanded by this emperor. Constance was the town fixed upon, and thither Chrysoloras repaired, for the purpose of assisting at the council as the representative of the Greek emperor. But while he was preparing for the discharge of this duty, he was suddenly cut off, on the 15th April 1415, in the forty-seventh year of his age. The works of Chrysoloras are not numerous. The best known is his Greek grammar, published under the title of Erudimenta or questions, of which several editions, all now extremely rare, appeared in the fifteenth century. The editions of Gourmont in 1507, of Aldus in 1512 and 1517, and of Juntus in 1514, deserve to be particularly mentioned. Several letters and a tract on the pouring out of the Holy Spirit are the only other known productions of Chrysoloras, and the last still remains in manuscript.