Richard Calis on Martin Crusius and the discovery of Ottoman Greece

Richard Calis on “The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius” (Harvard University Press)

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Who was Martin Crusius and how did he become such a renowned scholar in his time?

Crusius is no longer a household name, but in the 16th century, this was one of the most famous professors of Greek in Europe. He was born in Bavaria to a father and a mother who came from a very humble background. But through scholarships and a passion for Greek, he managed to make a name for himself. He studied in Strasbourg and ultimately ended up in Tübingen, where he started teaching in 1559. He stayed in Tübingen, in the southern western part of Germany, until his death in 1607. For almost 50 years, he stayed in Tübingen, where he made a name for himself as a professor of Greek. He wrote very famous Greek grammars, but he also wrote this really beautiful and strange book called the Turcograecia. It was not a book about the ancient Greeks, which is what most Renaissance humanists at the time were interested in, as they all studied ancient Greek and the Greek language and authors like Plato and Herodotus, as well as early Christian authors. But Crusius was also interested in what happened to the Greeks after the Middle Ages, when the Ottomans took over.

Turcograecia was a really strange book that no one really knew what to do with, but it made a name for him, especially among Byzantinists in the 17th and 18th centuries, before slowly fading from sight. When I went to Tübingen for the first time 10 years ago, I realised that there is a massive collection of documents that really says a lot about him, his interest in the Ottoman Greek world, and the way he wrote his books, how he got his information. So you have to imagine that everything he ever touched exists still. There's a nine-volume diary, hundreds of annotated books, notebooks, a will, etc. So we have a person who's now unknown and at the time came from very humble origins but grew to become one of the most famous professors of Greek at the time, known for his command of ancient Greek but also modern Greek, and who we can now learn about again because of this amazing archive that has survived.

Crusius was writing around a century after the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul. The arrival of the Ottomans had a major impact on the psychology of the European and Christian world. As you write: "By the late 16th century, the Ottomans’ rapid advancements into Hungary and Austria had provoked a strong sense of anxiety throughout Western Christendom, and especially in Italy and the Germanic lands of the Holy Roman Empire... sermons, broadsheets, single-leaf pamphlets, and numerous other treatises addressed the 'Turkish menace'." How did Crusius's work reflect this anxiety?

Crusius was part of the first generation to be born Lutheran, after Martin Luther protested against the Catholic Church and over the course of the 16th century people decided to build their own churches. Crusius was the first to be born into that new church, into that new way of believing Lutheranism. But this was a very new religious movement that was looking for confirmation of its beliefs. That's what makes the 16th century so interesting, but in this period the Ottomans appeared. The Turks are then taken into this really complex cosmology of the world. They are at once this really interesting continuation of the Byzantine Empire, continuing centuries of Eastern rule in Istanbul; yet at the same time they're Muslims, and therefore seen as a threat to the Christian way of life, both by Catholics and by Protestants. In Protestant circles - so in the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, but also in the Netherlands and in England - pamphlets circulate about the Ottomans and how they're allegedly sent by God to punish Christians or exterminate the Christian way of life. That's the general scene in which Crusius comes to grow up.

What's interesting about Crusius is that he combines this general fear of the Turks or anxiety about what the Turks might do to Christian way of life with a very strong interest in the Eastern Christian churches, mostly the Greek Orthodox Church. For those who are less familiar with the details of different Christian groups, on the one hand you have European Christians - so Catholics and Protestants - and throughout the Ottoman Empire, what we now call the Middle East, there are various Eastern Christians. The Greek Orthodox Church is the largest church at the time among these Eastern Christians. Crusius and other theologians from Tübingen reach out to the patriarch to figure out what their beliefs are.

For us it seems normal that a person like Crusius knows about the Ottomans. But in the book I try to break that down a little bit and kind show that it took serious work to get real factual information from places like the Ottoman Empire. So there was lots of fears and anxieties about the Ottomans, lots of weird ideas that were incorrect, for instance, about the Sultan. The same ideas also circulated about Eastern Christians. So Crusius combines this general fear of the Ottomans with a strong interest in wanting to figure out what happened to the Greek Orthodox Church, partly because he was a professor of Greek and partly because he was a very pious and devout Lutheran. In his interesting life you see these two forces merge. That turns him to the Greek Orthodox Church, which allegedly suffers at the hands of the Ottomans. This is a trope that occurs and reoccurs throughout early modern Europe: That the Ottomans are somehow suppressing the Greeks, that they're closing down churches and turning them into mosques. To some extent was true. Hagia Sophia, converted to become one of the most famous mosques after the Ottoman conquest, used to be a church. So these fears circulate in Crusius's world and he, more than anyone at the time, tries to reach out to the Greek Orthodox Church to figure out what actually happens. That is one way to answer your question. You see a combination of his interest in classical Greek, his interest in the Greek Orthodox Church, combined with a general fear of the Ottomans.