His family was Greek nobility that emigrated from Corfu to Naples after the fall of Constantinople.
After studies in Naples (where he married Maria Laskaris), in Padua and Ferrara, he held the office of fiscal in Pesaro from 1492 to 1507.
The wealth he obtained by a 1494 marriage to a trader's daughter allowed him to reduce his work as a jurisconsult and concentrate on scholarly pursuits.
In 1511 he finished the Tractatus de praestantia doctorum, a biographical treatise on the most influential jurists of Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Disappointed by their meager success, he moved back to Pesaro, where he spent his last years as an influential member of the city's senate.