Leone Allacci

Leo Allatius Λέων Αλλάτιος
Leo Allatius, portrait in the Collegio Greco of Rome, Italy
Born	Leo Allatius (Λέων Αλλάτιος) 1586 Chios (Sanjak of Sakız), Ottoman Empire
Died	January 19, 1669 Rome, Papal States
Occupation	Greek literature, Theology, Philosophy and Medicine
Literary movement	Italian Renaissance

Leo Allatius (c. 1586 – January 19, 1669) (Greek: Λέων Αλλάτιος, Leon Allatios, Λιωνής Αλάτζης, Lionis Allatzis; Italian: Leone Allacci, Allacio; Latin: Leo Allatius, Allacius) was a Greekscholar, theologian, and keeper of the Vatican library.

Leo Allatius was a Greek, born on the island of Chios (then part of the Ottoman Empire and known as Sakız) in 1586. His father was Niccolas Allatzes (from Orthodox religion) and his mother was Sebaste Neurides, both of Greek extraction (Allatius soon converted himself to Catholicism from Greek Orthodoxy). He was taken by his maternal uncle Michael Nauridis to Italy to be educated at the age of nine, first in Calabria and then in Rome where he was admitted into the Greek college. A graduate of the Pontifical Greek College of Saint Athanasius in Rome, he spent his career in Rome as teacher of Greek at the Greek college, devoting himself to the study of classics and theology. He found a patron in Pope Gregory XV.

In 1622, after the capture of Heidelberg by Tilly, when the Protestant Elector of Bavaria Frederick V was supplanted by a Catholic one, the victorious elector Maximilian of Bavaria presented the Palatinate library composed of 196 cases containing about 3500 manuscripts to Pope Gregory. Allatius supervised its transport by a caravan of 200 mules across the Alps to Rome, where it was incorporated in the Vatican library. All but 39 of the Heidelberg manuscripts, which had been sent to Paris in 1797 and were returned to Heidelberg at the Peace of Paris in 1815, and a gift from Pope Pius VII of 852 others in 1816, remain in the Vatican Library to this day.