Michael Trivolis (Russian religious name Maxim / Maximus) was born around 1475 at Arta in Epirus to a Greek noble family. Educated at the Renaissance humanist circles of Florence and Venice — including personal study under Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, and the Aldine Press circle of Aldus Manutius — Maximus received one of the most extensive late-Renaissance-humanist educations of any contemporary.
In 1502 he entered the Mount Athos Monastery of Vatopedi — undertaking the Athonite monastic vocation under the religious name Maximus.
In 1516, Grand Prince Vasily III of Moscow requested the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople to send a Greek scholar-monk to Moscow to undertake the systematic revision of the Slavonic biblical and liturgical texts. Maximus was sent — arriving in Moscow in 1518.
Maximus undertook the systematic revision of the Slavonic biblical translations (the Psalter, the Gospels, and multiple liturgical books) — producing the most comprehensive late-medieval revision of the Church Slavonic biblical corpus.
His reforming project provoked opposition from the conservative Russian monastic party — most notably Metropolitan Daniel, who objected to Maximus's textual corrections as corruption of the received Slavonic tradition.
In 1525 Maximus was condemned by a Muscovite ecclesiastical court on trumped-up heresy charges and imprisoned at the Volokolamsk Monastery for the six years. Further condemned in 1531, Maximus spent the 25+ years in monastic imprisonment across multiple Russian monasteries.
In 1553 he was released to the Holy Trinity-Sergius Lavra, where he spent his last three years of relative freedom. He died at the Lavra on January 21, 1556 at the age of approximately 81.
Canonized in 1988 by the Russian Orthodox Church — at the millennium celebration of the baptism of Kievan Rus'.