Michael Maleinos

Saint Michael Maleinos, known in secular life as Manuel, was born about 894 into the Maleinos family, a wealthy aristocratic house of Cappadocia in the Byzantine Empire. His father, Eudokimos Maleinos, held the dignity of patrician, and his mother was named Anastaso. The family’s estates lay in the Charsianon theme of Cappadocia. His brother Constantine Maleinos became a senior general and strategos of Cappadocia. A sister married Bardas Phokas the Elder, so that Michael was the maternal uncle of Nikephoros Phokas, later emperor as Nikephoros II (963–969), and of the general Leo Phokas the Younger. The family thus stood at the intersection of Cappadocian landholding aristocracy and the military elite of the tenth-century empire.

As a youth Manuel was brought to Constantinople, where Emperor Leo VI the Wise took notice of him and wished to attach him to imperial service. Around the age of eighteen he left the court, withdrew to Bithynia, and placed himself under an elder named John on Mount Kyminas, a monastic mountain in the region of the Bithynian Olympus. There he received the monastic tonsure and the name Michael. He adopted a life of strict asceticism, fasting, vigil, and prayer. In time he gathered disciples and established his own monastery on Mount Kyminas, which became a respected house of Byzantine monasticism in Asia Minor.

Michael was sought as a spiritual father by both monks and laymen of high rank. His nephew Nikephoros Phokas visited the monastery and held him in reverence. The most consequential of his disciples was Athanasius, later known as Athanasius the Athonite, who lived under Michael’s direction before going to Mount Athos, where he founded the Great Lavra and gave organized coenobitic shape to Athonite monasticism. Through that relationship Michael Maleinos forms an important link between the older Bithynian monastic tradition and the tenth-century revival on Athos. A Life of the saint was composed by his disciple Theophanes and remains the principal narrative source for his career.

Michael Maleinos died on 12 July 961 at his monastery on Mount Kyminas. He was commemorated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and his feast is observed on 12 July. Later synaxaria remember him as a Cappadocian noble who chose the monastic life and as the spiritual father of the founder of the Great Lavra. He held no episcopal, patriarchal, or papal office, and he belonged to no Western-style religious order; his vocation was that of an independent Byzantine monk and abbot of the tenth century.