John Greaves
Through his predecessor, Peter Turner, he later met archbishop William Laud, the chancellor of Oxford University and Visitor (patron) of Merton College.
Laud was keen to make English editions of Greek and Arabic authors, and Greaves' later travels abroad involved collecting manuscripts and books for presentation to his new patron.
He enrolled at the University of Padua in 1635 along with George Ent, meeting the Dane Johan Rode (John Rhodius), an expert on ancient weights and measures, who also made a commentary on Celsus.
Though "now it is broken into 5 stones", he measured these and including a sketch of the obelisk as hypothetically repaired in his almanac-notebook (Bodleian Library Savile MS 49,1).
Though Arundel paid a 60 crown deposit for the obelisk, pope Urban VIII vetoed its export and it was erected by his successor Innocent X above Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona.
He sailed from England to Livorno in the company of Edward Pococke; after a brief visit to Rome, he arrived in Istanbul (Constantinople) around April 1638.
[8] He was an inveterate note-taker, making countless observations in notebooks and on blank pages of other books he bought; he also visited Cairo twice, and made a more accurate survey of the pyramids of Egypt than any traveller who had preceded him.
On the death of John Bainbridge in 1643, Greaves was appointed as Savilian professor of astronomy and senior reader of the Linacre lecture at Oxford,[9] but he was deprived of his Gresham professorship for having neglected its duties.
[2] In 1645 he essayed a reformation of the Julian calendar; but although his plan of omitting the bissextile day (29 February) for the next 40 years was approved by the king, the matter was dropped owing to the turbulent times.
[10] After Thomas Fairfax had captured Oxford for the Parliamentarians in 1648 and Brent had returned from London, Greaves was accused of sequestrating the college's plate and funds for king Charles.
[13] But Greaves' private fortune more than sufficed for all his wants until his death;[2] he retired to London, married and occupied his leisure writing and editing books and manuscripts.
[14] He left his cabinet containing his coin collection to Sir John Marsham, and his astronomical instruments to the university, for the use of the Savilian professors.
But by 1649 Greaves (who was staying at Sir John Marsham's house in Rochester, Kent) had become increasingly exasperated with the academic situation at Oxford since the civil war.
He wrote to Pococke asking to him to send the will to blot out his gift of his instruments to the university (which had cost him more than a hundred pounds), because he "so far despaired of any future encouragement to learning and ingenuity in Oxford."
However, when the Commonwealth ended with the resignation of Richard Cromwell in 1659, Nicholas Greaves (in accordance with his late brother's original intent) presented the instruments - suitably inscribed - for the use of the Savilian Professors of Astronomy.
[18] But in 1936 during the refurbishment of the University Radcliffe Observatory, he was alerted by the Savilian professor of Astronomy, H. H. Plaskett, to a chance discovery of "certain old metal bars and plates behind some cases."
These turned out to be part of the missing Savilian collection, including a 6 ft 9 in (2.06 m) mural quadrant, and an astrolabe of Queen Elizabeth I which Greaves took on his 1637-40 expedition to the Middle East.
