With the hope that his homeland, Constantinople, would soon be liberated by a new crusade of Western Christian forces, the scholar Michael Apostolis (1420/22-1478) settled in Venetian-ruled Crete.

However, he realized that his expectation was not going to be fulfilled and that survival in the place of his exile was his only path. He tried to come to terms with reality and lived until the end of his life in Crete. He worked as a teacher and scribe and succeeded, under extremely adverse conditions of poverty, in establishing himself in the place of his forced exile.

This is the only one among the scholars of the end of the Byzantine Empire whose significant actions were not realized within the confines of the shrinking Byzantine state or in Italy, but in the area of Latin-occupied East.

In the fourteen chapters of this monograph, an attempt is made to present a parallel synthetic and critical account of his life and (writing and coding) work, with the aim of reassessing the contribution of this overlooked scholar to the education of his time, particularly in Venetian-ruled Crete after the Fall.