When the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II seized Constantinople in 1453 shockwaves radiated by Christian Europe. In response to Pope Pius II, the autumn of the Byzantine capital amounted to nothing lower than a second dying for Homer and Plato. Others lamented the destruction or conversion of church buildings, together with Hagia Sophia, and feared that the Ottomans may uproot the Christian lifestyle. However because the Ottomans unfold into Greece, taking Athens in 1456 and many of the Peloponnese a couple of years later, few in Latin Europe knew a lot in regards to the post-Byzantine destiny of the nation. The circumstances of the Greeks had been largely the topic of hypothesis, and fears about what life beneath Muslim oppression would entail prevailed over makes an attempt at discovering out the fact of the scenario.
One Sixteenth-century particular person steered a distinct course. For almost 40 years, a Lutheran professor of Greek named Martin Crusius (1526-1607) compiled a wealthy report of Greek life beneath Ottoman rule. Lengthy earlier than the plight of the Greeks perturbed Lord Byron, Crusius knew in regards to the state of the Greek Church, studied literature within the Greek vernacular, and discovered about Greek gown and people songs. And he did so from Tübingen, a German college city, with out ever visiting Greece – unable to go there himself as a result of he didn’t have the means, and, as he favored to emphasize, as a result of his instructing saved him occupied.
How did Crusius change into Europe’s foremost knowledgeable on Ottoman Greece? His intensive archive affords vital proof. He left a nine-volume diary, every quantity 1,000 pages lengthy, in addition to quite a few notebooks and a whole bunch of books, coated in thick layers of annotation. In these paperwork the non-public and the skilled merged: he recorded seating preparations for dinner events and the scholars that lodged with him as meticulously because the books that he learn, the information that reached him, and all the pieces that he ‘found’ about Ottoman Greece.
Travelogues by Pierre Belon (1517-64) and Greek histories by Laonikos Chalkokondyles (c.1430-70) drew Crusius right into a world he would by no means see, whereas Greek texts, resembling a e-book with crusing instructions and translations of the Iliad and Aesop’s fables, revealed how the language had developed. German informants in Istanbul had been one other vital supply of knowledge: alumni from the College of Tübingen had joined the imperial embassy as chaplains, from the place they despatched Crusius letters, manuscripts, objects – together with an historical bronze coin with a picture of Homer – in addition to detailed observations of the church buildings they entered, the ceremonies they attended, and the individuals they met. In 1573, for instance, one Stephan Gerlach despatched to Tübingen an evocative set piece on the gown of Greek ladies: ‘They veil their hair with the purest gold. They adorn their heads and ears with treasured gems and opulent earrings … And with their different ornaments they don’t compete with our Empress. They depart her behind by miles.’
Greater than something, although, Crusius knowledgeable himself by speaking to Greeks themselves – not in Greece however in his Tübingen residence. In whole he interviewed almost 40 Greek women and men who travelled by Christian Europe seeking alms and sooner or later handed – serendipitously – by Tübingen. Crusius supplied them a mattress and gave them meals and cash. In return, they knowledgeable him about their language, tradition, and faith. They helped him draw maps, of Athens, as an example, but in addition of Mount Athos, crucial website of monasticism in Greek Orthodoxy. They usually helped him visualise the Greek world by vivid descriptions that he referred to as ‘verbal work’. One in all his visitors made Crusius Cypriot meals, whereas one other – a lady referred to as Antonia – sang him a music in regards to the many hardships she had suffered in captivity, accompanying herself on his lyre.
Crusius’ visitors additionally helped him decode his vernacular Greek books. Initially, these had baffled him; the language was so totally different from the traditional Greek that he taught at college. Crusius’ first Greek visitor, Stamatius Donatus, who arrived in Tübingen in 1579, grew to become, Crusius wrote, a ‘residing lexicon’, glossing 1000’s of phrases within the week that they spent studying books collectively. This was no imply feat. Donatus couldn’t learn or write and knew only some phrases of German. He and Crusius thus needed to interpret texts utilizing totally different languages, together with Italian and Latin, and generally different methods of communication: ‘He typically defined these phrases to me by gestures, his arms, and paraphrases’, Crusius defined in his pocket book.
They might additionally research Crusius’ residence: a home filled with mundane objects, but in addition the scholars who boarded with him, his spouse and kids, and infrequently a maid. Donatus would take Crusius by the hand and information him, giving the Greek names of specific elements of the home and of particular person home gadgets. With different visitors such collaborative studying continued. As soon as Crusius obtained so carried away that his ‘head was filled with Greek and was buzzing with it’, and he admitted that he had drained one other visitor, a priest by the title of Calonas, significantly. At the same time as Calonas was departing, Crusius wouldn’t depart him alone: he adopted his visitor to the gates of town, pen and paper in hand. As Calonas ‘learn’ town, declaring and translating particular person objects, Crusius scribbled new gadgets on his wordlist.
The results of Crusius’ lifelong inquiry was a physique of data unparalleled in its day. A few of his findings had been printed in his Turcograecia of 1584, a groundbreaking e-book filled with proof that Edward Gibbon referenced repeatedly in his Historical past of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89). But the Turcograecia was by and enormous forgotten, as had been Crusius and his notebooks. Leopold von Ranke would bear in mind Crusius as Europe’s first philhellene, however he was not deeply aware of Crusius’ work. Certainly, the Turcograecia offered poorly and the various vibrant vignettes in Crusius’ notebooks remained unexplored till the twentieth century.
It’s no small irony – and certainly one which Crusius would have appreciated – that it took an Ottoman Greek from Istanbul, Basileos Athanasiou Mystakides (1859-1933), to attract consideration to Crusius’ archive as an vital however untapped supply for Ottoman Greek historical past. After a three-year sojourn in Tübingen, Mystakides printed a collection of articles that reproduced excerpts from Crusius’ notebooks and diaries and made seen once more how Crusius, with out ever travelling, had change into the interval’s foremost knowledgeable on Ottoman Greece.
Richard Calis is the writer of The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Information, Encounter, and Perception within the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius (Harvard College Press, 2025).
