The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius

by Richard Calis

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 Tübingen, 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 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.

Genres: History, Religion

311 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 14, 2025

Reviews

[Marissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting exploration of how early Lutheranism and a passion for ancient Greece inspired the scholar Martin Crusis--a man while never left Tübingen in Germany--to learn about the Greek language and Orthodox Church. Moving from the stories of traveling alms collectors to annotating sermons, the book is a rich discussion of how knowledge was made, shared, and spread through cross-cultural interactions in early modern Europe which sometimes entrenched, rather than challenged, set ideas about religious truths and values.

[Kostas · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has very little to do with the history of Ottoman Greece. It is basically a chronicle of the life and works of Martin Crusius, a 16th century German scholar. Readers who are looking for information about the life of Greeks in Ottoman Greece should look elsewhere.

[Margaret Heller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reviewed for Library Journal.