No precise information exists as to the place or date of his birth, but he speaks of himself as a native Byzantine, so one may assume that he was born either in Constantinople or in the Empire of Nicaea on the Asian side of the Bosporus.
The purpose of the embassy was to induce Louis to persuade his brother, Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, to call off a planned assault upon Constantinople, which Michael VIII had recently recaptured from the Latins (1261).
In 1277, along with George Metochites and the Metropolitan of Cyzicus, Theodore Skoutariotes, he was sent on an embassy to Rome, where proofs were being sought of the Byzantine Church's adherence to the terms of the Union; Bekkos entrusted his own synodal letter to Pope John XXI to Meliteniotes, to be delivered by him personally.
[5] When Michael VIII Palaiologos died in December 1282, his son and successor, Andronikos II Palaiologos (r. 1282–1328), renounced the ecclesiastical union; during the early part of the year 1283, at a series of impromptu synods presided over, first, by monks and the unconscious Joseph I, then later by the new patriarch, Gregory II, unionist clergy — in particular the patriarch Bekkos and his two archdeacons Meliteniotes and George Metochites, but others as well — were deprived of their ecclesiastical dignities and publicly humiliated.
[6] At this synod, Meliteniotes and the other unionists defended their accommodation with the West; they argued that it was in keeping with patristic ideas, which view the Son as an active mediator of the Holy Spirit's eternal procession.