Discovery of Ottoman Greece

The surprising story of the sixteenth-century Lutheran scholar who became Europe's foremost authority on Ottoman Greece, shedding new light on the place of Greek culture and religion in the Western imagination.

In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled an exceptionally rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Although he never left his home in the university town of Tubingen, Crusius spent decades annotating books and manuscripts, corresponding with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, and interviewing Greek Orthodox alms-seekers. Ultimately, he gathered his research into a seminal work called the Turcograecia, which served for centuries as Europe's foremost source on Ottoman Greece. Yet as Richard Calis reveals, Crusius's massive-and largely untapped-archive has much more to tell us about how early modern Europeans negotiated cultural and religious difference.

In particular, Crusius's work illuminates Western European views of the religious "other" within Christianity: the Greek Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule, a group both familiar and foreign. Many Western Europeans, including Crusius, developed narratives of Greek cultural and religious decline under Ottoman rule. Crusius's records, however, reveal in exceptional detail how such stories developed. His interactions with his Greek Orthodox visitors, and with a vast network of correspondents, show that Greeks' own narratives of hardship entwined in complex ways with Western Europeans' orientalist views of the Ottoman world. They also reflect the religious tensions that undergirded these exchanges, fueled by Crusius's fervent desire to spread Lutheran belief across Ottoman Greece and the wider world.

A lively intellectual history drawn from a forgotten archive, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece is also a perceptive character study, in which Crusius takes his place in the history of ethnography, Lutheran reform, and European philhellenism.

Review: Sheds new light on the Renaissance revival of classical letters, the Reformation and Western philhellenism...shows that a curious homebody like Crusius could be just as engaged with the wider world. -- Alexander Bevilacqua * London Review of Books *
Gives readers a well-rounded picture of how knowledge was acquired and disseminated in the 16th century...This work aptly illustrates a lesser-known link in classical reception. It will have broad scholarly appeal between both religious history and classical studies readers. -- Margaret Heller * Library Journal *
In this lovely intellectual history, Richard Calis recreates how Martin Crusius, a sixteenth-century Lutheran clergyman who never left the Black Forest, became Europe's greatest expert on Ottoman Greece. Calis deftly works through Crusius's voluminous papers and his foundational but perplexing Turcograecia, illuminating his exchanges with diplomatic correspondents and scores of itinerant Greeks. His fascinating picture of a forgotten form of German philhellenism invites us to rethink important chapters in the history of humanistic scholarship. -- Suzanne L. Marchand, author of German Orientalism in the Age of Empire
Martin Crusius never went to Greece, yet he became a brilliant student of the Greek world in his time. Richard Calis's eloquent and imaginative book follows Crusius on his mental journeys, revealing how he became the greatest of armchair ethnographers through his reading, correspondence, and above all, remarkable interviews with traveling Greeks. -- Anthony Grafton, author of Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa
This spellbinding and deeply researched book shines a bright light on the Greek Ottoman world as refracted through the lens of a sixteenth-century German Lutheran scholar. In turn, it illuminates an entire period and its possibilities for cultural encounter. Revealing rich and surprising interactions between two entangled worlds, this nuanced work is a key contribution to the histories of Greece, Germany, and early modern global exchange. -- Ulinka Rublack, author of The Astronomer and the Witch
Few scholars possess the linguistic talents and historical creativity to do justice to the archive left behind by the sixteenth-century scholar and humanist Martin Crusius. Richard Calis has breathed new life into his subject: inviting us to join him as he reads over Crusius's shoulder, he brings together the profound imagination of antiquarian scholarship, the global ambitions of the Reformation, and the close personal networks that facilitated both. This book will change how we understand not only Crusius himself, but also the world of relationships, sociability, and correspondence that linked early modern Germany to the Mediterranean. -- John-Paul Ghobrial, author of The Whispers of Cities