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By the 1580s he had already hired a professional researcher from Chania in Crete—there was a Venetian connection—to search for the oldest and purest of the Chrysostom manuscripts and to buy them. Savile recommended the agent look in Patmos, the beautiful island in the eastern Aegean where the monastery of St John was said to harbour the greatest treasures, and to acquire what he could. It was a lifelong fascination for Savile which culminated in his great edition of Chrysostom’s work, printed and published between 1610 and 1612 at the appalling cost of £ 8,000. By then, Savile had assembled 15,800 sheets of manuscript (which he presented to the Bodleian Library in Oxford). All the great libraries of Europe had been searched, not only in Mount Athos, Constantinople and the island of Chalce, but in Paris, Vienna, Augsburg and Munich.
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