Christophoros Angelos

Christophoros Angelos (Christopher Angel) (Gastune, 157? - Oxford 1 February 1638) was a Greek monk who, like several of his compatriots, availed himself of the welcome accorded by the Jacobean universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

After periods spent in Athens, where he was tortured by the Ottoman authorities, and briefly in Flanders, he arrived in Yarmouth and claimed to have received a gold coin from the Bishop of Norwich and an introduction to Cambridge Hellenists. He appears to have settled in Oxford in 1617, where he had matriculated (via Balliol) in 1610. He spent most of the remainder of his life there (with periods in Cambridge) until his death in 1638, where he was buried at St. Ebbe's church on Candlemas Day.

Angelos wrote several successful works in Greek, the most well known of which, describing the contemporary state of the Greek church, was originally published in Cambridge as an Encheiridion in 1619 but received wider European circulation due to its Latin translation of the 1655 'Status et Ritus Ecclesiae Graecae' by George Fehlau (Fhelavius). In his lifetime, Angelos was probably better known for his 'Ponesis' (suffering), graphically describing his treatment at the hands of the Turks. This contains a lithography of his torment and of a symbolic Britannia. This was published at Oxford in 1617, whereas his 'An Encomium of the famous Kingdome of Great Britaine and of the two flourishing Sister-Universities Cambridge and Oxford' (principal text in Greek) was not surprisingly printed by Cantrel Legge for the University of Cambridge in 1619.

A study of Apostasy (also in Greek) appeared in London in 1624.