2. Thevet, André, Cosmographie de Levant, ed. Lestringant, Frank (Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, cciii. Geneva 1985) 51–2 Google Scholar; the translation omits some historical and geographical remarks. For Thevet’s life, work, editions and expansions of the Cosmographie extending over thirty years, Introduction pp. XIII-LXXXI.

3. Belon, P., Les Observations de plusieurs Singularitez et choses memorables (Paris 1554 Google Scholar). For the Latin translation of Les observations, see below. Among his zoological works are L’Histoire naturelle des estranges poissons marins (London 1551) and L’Histoire de la nature des Oy seaux, avec leurs descriptions, & naifs portraicts retirez du naturel (Paris 1555). For the life of Belon, P. Delaunay, L’aventureuse existence de Pierre Belon du Mans (Paris 1926) [limited ed. of 100 copies] and Dictionnaire de Biographie Française. Delaunay, 122–24, suggests Belon may have been the victim of a political assassination. (More than a century later, another great Levantine traveller and naturalist, Joseph Tournefort [1656–1708] was to die under the wheels of a wagon not far away in a Paris street.)

4. For Athos, Belon, Observations (first ed. of 1554), chapters 35–49, pp. 33v-44r. (paginated as folios). In some copies of Belon’s de la Nature des Oyseaux, is to be found a diorama of Athos. This is reproduced by Hasluck, F.W., Athos and its monasteries (London 1924)Google Scholar, plate 2; cf. also his remarks on p. 197. Runciman, S., The Great church in captivity (Cambridge 1968) 389 Google Scholar, gives ‘three or four’, rather than ‘two or three’ literate monks in each house, citing a French edition of 1583. I have not been able to trace this edition. See also note 16 below.

5. Gregoras, Nikephoros, Historia Byzantina, XIV, 7 Google Scholar; Gilles, Pierre, P. Gyllii de topographia Constantinopoleos … libri quatuor (Lyons 1562)Google Scholar; Rauwolf, Leonhard Aigentliche beschreibung der Raiss, er von dieser Zeit gegen Aussgang inn die morgenländer … selbs vorbracht (Laugingen 1583 Google Scholar) and Dannenfeldt, K.H., Leonhard Rauwolf: sixteenth-century physician, botanist, and traveler. (Cambridge, Mass. 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rauwolf was translated into English by N. Staphorst in Ray, John, A collection of curious Travels and Voyages, 2 vols. (London 1693).Google Scholar

For Rycaut, (sometimes Ricaut) Rycaut, Paul, The Present State of the Greek and Armenian churches (London 1679), 215–63 Google Scholar. (He refers to Bellonius on p. 249) Cf. also the remark of Covel quoted at the end of this paper: also Anderson, Sonia P., An English consul in Turkey: Paul Rycaut at Smyrna, 1667–1678 (Oxford 1989)Google Scholar. Among the later descriptions of Athos, Colonel Leake’s account of its natural beauties, for instance, is altogether more temperate, Leake, W.M., Travels in Northern Greece, 4 vols., (London 1835), iii, 114–42 Google Scholar; Joseph Dacre Carlyle, 1801, was by no means insensible of them, Anghelou, Alkis, ‘J.D. Carlyle’s Journal of Mount Athos (1801)’, 14 (1965) 33–75 Google Scholar. I hope shortly to publish some remarks on this journal. For celebration of the natural beauties of Athos in our own time see the otherwise preposterous novel of Augiéras, François, Un voyage au mont Athos (Paris 1970).Google Scholar

6. Runciman, 389. For an example of Belon’s neutral reporting of Greek practices, pp. 5v-6r.

7. For the account of Athos by Maximos used here, Ržiga, V.F., ‘Neizdannie sochineniya Maksima Greka’, BS 6 (1926), 85–109 Google Scholar esp. 95–99. On Maximos, Denissoff, E., Maxime le Grec et l’occident (Paris/Louvain 1943)Google Scholar: for Athos, see esp. 271–320; J.V. Haney From Italy to Muscovy: the life and works of Maxim the Greek, Humanistische Bibliothek Reihe I: Abhandlungen, 19 (Munich 1973) esp. 26–49;

Obolensky, D., ‘Italy, Mount Athos, and Muscovy: the three worlds of Máximos the Greek (c. 1470–1556)’, Proceedings of the British Academy 67 (1981), 143–161 Google Scholar [= Obolensky, D., Six Byzantine Portraits (Oxford 1986), 201–219]Google Scholar; Gromov, M.N., Maksim Grek (Moscow 1983)Google Scholar, esp. 26–31.

For the destruction of secular MSS at Iviron and the paucity of humane MSS on Athos in general, cf. John Covel c.1677 in Hasluck, F.W., ‘The first English Traveller’s Account of Athos’, Annual of the British School at Athens 17 (1910–1) 103–31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (117, 127). But for another view of Athonite attitudes to secular learning, Denissoff, p. 290. Haney, 28–33, 136, suggests that Máximos may have taken Suidas’s Lexicon with him from Vatopedi to Muscovy.

8. For Païssius, , Khitrowo, B. de, Itinéraires russes en orient I, i (Geneva 1889), 277–82 Google Scholar. For a severe account of errors and omissions in Belon, see Covel’s remarks in Hasluck, ‘First English Account’, 113–4, 127, 150.

An Ottoman defter of about 1520 also shows the superiority in size of Vatopedi and the Lavra, Lowry, H.W., ‘A note on the population and status of the Athonite monasteries under Ottoman rule (ca.1520)’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 73 (1981) 115–35 Google Scholar. (= JrLowry, H.W., Studies in Defterology, Analecta Isisiana 4 (İstanbul 1992), 229–246 Google Scholar) Lowry’s list of the numbers of monks in the monasteries is incorporated in the table in Appendix I of this essay.

It may be convenient to mention here the Puteshesvie … v Ierusalim v 1582 godu of the Russian merchant Triphon Korobeinikov, first published in Moscow in 1798. This tiny memoir notes that on leaving the straits, the right hand route leads to the holy Athonite mountain and the city of Solun, while the left hand route leads to Jerusalem. (Edition of Moscow, 1888, p. 7). The Viaggio a Constantinopoli di sier Lorenzo Bernardo per l’arresto del Bailo sier Girolamo Lippomano 1591, ed. F. Stefani, Deputazione veneziana dì Storia patria, serie 4, vol. 4: Miscellanea (Venice 1887), 35 notes that twenty miglia distant from Kavalla is the Holy Mountain called by the ancients the Athos promontory where there are said to be more than 20 monasteries of Greek monks.

9. Ioakim of Panteleimon, ‘Skazanie o sv. Afonskoi gor’, Pamyatniki Drevnei Pis’menosti, 30 (St. Petersburg 1882), 1–31. The number of deacons is also given as 150.

10. Charles de ‘Écluse = Carolus Clusius (1526–1609), P. Bellonius, Plurimarum singularium et memorabilium rerum in Graecia … ab conspectarum observationes tribus libris expressae, (Antwerp, 1589: reprinted 1605); Athos is 78–104. An English abridgement of Belon appeared in Ray, John, A collection of curious Travels and Voyages, 2 vols, vol 1. (London 1693).Google Scholar

11. Viaje de Turquía (La odisea de Pedro de Urdemelas), ed. Fernando G. Salinero (Madrid 1980). For the date of composition, literary form and authorship, cf. Introduction; for the author’s knowledge of Belon, 275 n. 1. The conversation about Athos is 26–34.

12. British Library, Lansdowne MS 826 fol. 26r-v.

13. Omont, M.H., ‘Voyages à Athènes, Constantinople et Jérusalem de François Arnaud (1602–1605)’, in Vogué, M. de, Florelegium (Paris 1909), 467–84 Google Scholar; Paton, J.M., Chapters on medieval and renaissance visitors to Greek lands. (American School of Classical Studies at Athens: Princeton 1951), 51–4.Google Scholar

14. Gerlach, Stephan, Stephan Gerlachs dess Aeltern Tage-buch. (Frankfort am Main 1674)Google Scholar, entries for 30/4/1574, 16/11/1576, 20/1/1578 and 20/2/1578. (55, 270, 448, 459–600). Many manuscript books, never printed, are found on Athos. Gerlach has the annual tribute payable to the sultan at 18,000 taler (cf. Belon’s 12,000 ducats and the 1520 defter’s 25,000 akçe [cf. Appendix I below]), 459–60.

15. Sandys, G., A Relation of a lourney begun An. Dom. 1610 (London 1615)Google Scholar. For the life and works of George Sandys, Dictionary of American Biography; Davis, Richard B., George Sandys, poet-adventurer (London 1955)Google Scholar; Friedman, Jack E., A critical study of George Sandys’ ‘Relation of a iorney’ Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1972 (High Wycomb [sic] 1974)Google Scholar. Sandys’s translation of Ovid was republished as recently as 1970.

16. For Athos, 81–2. Sandys, 82, has ‘three or four’ literate monks. For criticism of Belon, cf. 31–2. Belon is referred to as Bellonius, the form used by de l’Écluse. For Sandys’s use of Belon, Friedman, 104 and appendix B.

17. Sir John Mandeville, in the mid-fourteenth century, had noted in his Travels that the shadow of Athos reached Lemnos, 76 miles distant, though a few lines before he placed Athos on the island of Lemnos, , Mandeville’s Travels ed. Hamelius, P., Early English Text Society (Oxford 1919), 10 Google Scholar. Belon, p. 26r., notes the phenomenon and claims it.occurs on June 2nd. The earliest notice that the shadow of Athos extended to Lemnos seem to be Sophocles, Fragmenta, no. 776 [The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. A.C. Pearson, 3 vols. (Cambridge 1917), vol. 3, 26–7 (with helpful notes) and Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. S. Radt, 4 vols., (Göttingen 1977), 4, 535.]; it perhaps came via pre-Apollonian versions of Argonautica, i, lines 601–4. For the Latin version given by Sandys, cf. Erasmus, Adagia, III, 2, 90.

For Démocrates, Strabo, xiv. i. 23. In The character of Holland, lines 97–8, Andrew Marvell wrote: ‘They try, like statuaries, if they can/Cut out each other’s Athos to a man’, The poems & letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H.M. Margoliouth 3rd ed., vol. 1, (Oxford 1971), 311; Meyer, H., ‘Der Berg des Athos ais Alexander: zu den realen Grundlagen der Vision des Deinokrates’, Rivista di Archeologia 10 (1986), 22–30 Google Scholar; Schama, S., Landscape and memory (London 1995), 401–5.Google Scholar

18. For Patmos, 89–90. On women’s work, cf. Gerlach, 448, [the monks] ‘… weben Seidenzeug und andere kleider und alle menschliche Gesellschaft fliegen’. I have not found in Sandys any justification for Chew’s remark that Sandys ‘reports upon the excellence of the manuscripts at Mount Athos’: Chew, S.C., The crescent and the rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York 1937) 42.Google Scholar

19. Friedman, 292–98.

20. L. (?) des Hayes, Voiage de levant fait par le commandement du roy en l’année 1621 (Paris 1624). The Dardanelles and Athos are 303–5. Des Hayes’s Christian name is uncertain. His mission was to establish a French consulate in Jerusalem and dedicate a silver shrine at the Holy Sepulchre before going on to Persia. This last part of his mission was not accomplished. He was in his late forties at the time of the embassy and travelled overland to Constantinople. He died in 1637.The Voiage was reprinted in 1632 and 1635. In the British Library are two near-contemporary abstracts of des Hayes, Harl. 4520 (175) ff. 551–4 and Harl. 6796 (11) ff. 33–37. For the spare details of his life, see Dictionnaire de biographie française.

21. For the life of Lithgow, preface to Maidment, J. (ed.) The poetical remains of William Lithgow (Edinburgh 1863) esp. viii–xii Google Scholar; DNB; Bosworth, CE., ‘William Lithgow of Lanark’s Travels in Greece and Turkey, 1609–11’, reprinted from the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 65, no. 2 (1983) 1–36 Google Scholar. The quotations are from the London edition of 1632 (cf. note 22 below), 507 and 483. For the shipwreck, ibid., 100. (Thomas Coryate [15777–1617] walked from Venice to London in 1608, and calculated he had covered 1,975 miles.)

22. Lithgow, W., A most delectable, and true discourse, of an admired and painefull peregrination from Scotland … (London 1614 Google Scholar; second impression, corrected and enlarged, 1616); A most delectable … newly imprinted and exactly inlarged, by the author … with certaine rare relations of his second, and third travels.. . (London 1623): [also in S. Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes, ii (London 1625)]; The Totali Discourse, of the Rare Adventures.. . (London 1632) [Also another edition, Edinburgh, the same year]. The continual expansion of his work may be compared to that of Thevet, cf. note 2 above.

23. Edition of 1623, p. 71.

24. Edition of 1632, pp. 120–1, 129. For other comments on this passage, Bosworth, 19–20.

25. Note 17 above.

26. Samuel Richardson, author of Pamela, published Roe’s correspondence in 1740: The Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe.. . [edited and] printed by Samuel Richardson (London 1740) 16 (27/i/1621 [=1622 new style]), 320 (19/12/1624), 334–35, 343–44 (24/i/1624 [=1625 new style]). Ducke Lane, later Duke St. and now Little Britain in Smithfield was well-known for its publishing houses and bookshops, new and secondhand. Pepys bought there, and on 10 April 1668 kissed the wife of one of the booksellers: Wheatley, H.B., London Past and present, 3 vols. (London 1895), i, 529–30 Google Scholar; The Diary of Samuel Pepys ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews (London 1976), ix, 160–61. On Roe and Arundel and the search for MSS in Greece, Hervey, Mary F.S., The life and collections of Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel (Cambridge 1921) 268–70, 275–80 Google Scholar, 500. Ricaut commented on the spoliation of the Athos libraries by French and other collectors, Present State of Greek & Armenian Churches, 260–1. For the Codex Alexandrinus, H.I. Bell, The Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Alexandrinus, 2nd revised edition (London 1963) 30–35.

27. Hofmann, G., ‘Rom und der Athos’, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 142 (1954)Google Scholar; for Rossi, 6–9: it is not absolutely certain that Rossi was ordained. For the College, Krajcar, J., ‘The Greek College under the Jesuits for the First Time’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 31 (1965) 85–118 Google Scholar. Denissoff, 281, 301–2, considered that Vatopedi was the most intellectual of the Athonite monasteries and the Lavra the most sympathetic to the west, cf. Obolensky, 147–9. Belon, however, noted 37r, that there had formerly been a close association between Vatopedi and an unnamed church in Rome.

28. Des Hayes, 119–20; Roe, 758–63 has a long account of Jesuit and French machinations in Constantinople in 1627.

29. The tone of Rossi’s letters becomes more plaintive, despite the admission of monks to St. Athanasius.Hofmann, nos. 4 (pp. 37–9), 16 (62–3), 17 (64–5), 23 (70–3), 24 (73–5) for the progress of the school; nos. 6 (42–3), 19 (66–68), 21–2 (69–70) for the admissions. In 1643 the synod on Athos asked the pope for a church in Rome for the use of Athonite monks while studying there. In return, accommodation on Athos was offered for Basilian monks from Italy, Ware, T., Eustratios Argenti: a study of the Greek church under Turkish rule (Oxford 1964) 22.Google Scholar

30. Hofmann, no. 16 pp. 62–3 (20/3/1638) and no. 18 p. 66 (24/9/1638).

31. Hofmann, introduction, 17–20, no. 25 (pp. 76–80).

32. Hofmann, G., ‘Ein “Handschriften”-Verzeichnis des Athosklosters Dionysiu aus dem Jahre 1627’ Byzantinische Zeitschrift 44 (1951) 272–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. Hofmann, introduction, 20–22; no. 25 (pp. 84–6). The reference to the bequest has not been noticed before; for Margounios, Geanakoplos, D.J., Byzantine East and Latin West (Oxford 1966) 165–193 Google Scholar esp. 180–2.

34. Hofmann, no. 33 (90–92) [15/8/40] and no. 35 (93–94) [17/8/40].

35. Twells, [L.], The lives of dr. Edward Pocock (sic) the celebrated orientalist 2 vols. (London 1816), i, 56–62 Google Scholar (Pococke’s activity collecting MSS in Constantinople), 66–7; Pearson, J.B., A Biographical Sketch of the Chaplains to the Levant Company 1611–1706, (Cambridge 1886) 19–21 Google Scholar (for Pococke in Aleppo); Trevor-Roper, H.R., Archbishop Laud, 2nd ed. (London 1962 repr. 1965), 281–3 Google Scholar. Pococke’s portrait watches over readers in the Lower Reading Room in the Bodleian Library.

36. Hofmann, no. 7 pp. 44–48 (15/6/36 and 20/6/36): an entertaining account of how Italians and Maltese enslaved by the Turks and released on Athos sought to persuade Rossi that Chrysostom had taught that Christ took the Cross up to heaven. Rossi referred them to the original MSS against the printed work of a heretic. Before leaving England after five years at Oxford (1617–22) Metrophanes Kritopoulos had been given Saviles’s Chrysostom by Archbishop George Abbot, Roe, 171–2. His progress to Venice was interrupted by visits in Germany and he reached Venice only in 1630. From Venice he went to Alexandria either directly or via Constantinople, but there seems to be no evidence that he revisited Athos where he had been a monk in his early years. On Metrophanes, Colin Davey, Pioneer for unity: Metrophanes Kritopoulos (1589–1639) and relations between the orthodox, roman catholic and reformed churches (London 1987). Davey thinks Metrophanes went directly to Alexandria, 288; Tillyrides, A., ‘Some seventeenth century Greeks in Britain’, The Greek Gazette 14 no. 154 (London, May 1980), 6–10 Google Scholar, has him in Constantinople in 1631, p. 8. For Savile, cf. also Tillyrides, 6 n. 3. Roe, 765, has a passing reference to Savile’s edition of Chrysostom. Margounios gave some assistance to Savile in editing Chrysostom, Geanakoplos, 176. Sheila Lambert, ‘Richard Montagu, Arminianism and censorship’, Past & Present 124 (August 1989) 36–68 (43) regards Richard Montagu, the future bishop, as the editor.

37. For Georgirenes’s life and work, Stamatiades, E., ‘ 1666–1671’ (Samos 1892)Google Scholar. On Georgirenes in London, Konstantinides, M., The Greek Orthodox Church in London, (Oxford 1933 Google Scholar) [parallel Greek/English text] 1–9. Georgirenes is said to have died in 1686, p. 7; Spencer, T., Fair Greece, Sad Relic (London 1954) 103–4 Google Scholar. For another derivation of Greek Street, Pevsner, N., The Buildings of England: London, vol. 1 Google Scholar (The cities of London & Westminster) 2nd ed., (Harmondsworth 1962) 595–6. Further details and convincing argument for the derivation of the name ‘Greek Street’ from the church are in Survey of London, ed. F.H.W. Sheppard (London 1966), vols. 33, pp. 278–82 and 34, plates 16–18; Runciman, , Great Church, 296–300 Google Scholar; I have not yet seen Catsiyannis, Bishop T., The Greek community in London (London 1993)Google Scholar. An inscription in the church referred to James as porphyrogenitos.

38. Georgirenes, J., A Description of the Present State of Samos, Nicaria, Patmos, and Mount Athos, (London 1678) 85–112 Google Scholar. For Denton, cf.Pearson, J.B., Biographical Sketch, 15.Google Scholar

39. This compares with Sandys’s seven hundred furlongs distant, [8772 miles] and Mandeville’s 76 miles: in fact the distance is rather less than 40 miles, cf. note 17 above.

40. Georgirenes, 93–4. Porpat is the church/monastery of Protaton in the village of Karyes: on its status, Hasluck, Athos, 168–171 and Lowry, 119 n. 19. Isaiah, a monk of Khiliadarion, made a short report on Athos in 1489 (Khitrowo, 257–64).

41. Smith remarks that Georgirenes’ account was written in vulgar Greek and translated into French in Paris before being published in English. I have not been able to trace this French version. In commending Georgirenes’ Description, he adds that the author ‘lived severall years there’ [i.e. on Athos], Smith, T., An account of the Greek church as to its doctrine and rite of worship (London 1680) 97–8 Google Scholar. For Stamatiades, see note 37 above.

42. For the appeal, Survey of London, vol. 33, pp. 278–82; the broadsheet was entitled From the arch-bishop … of Samos … an account of his building the Grecian church in So-hoe fields and the disposal thereof by the masters of the parish of St. Martins in the feilds (sic) (London 1682).

The pamphlet is: A true and exact relation of the strange finding out of Moses his tombe, in a valley neare unto Mount Nebo in Palestine communicated by a person of quality residing at Constantinople, to a person of Honour here in England, now by him permitted to be printed, for the fascination of the Ingenious (London 1657). This is, of course, before Georgirenes was in England. Wood states that it was done to tease the presbyterians and continues, ‘This book at its first appearance, made a great noise, … at length the author thereof becoming known, and his story found to be meer sham, the book became ridiculous and was put to posterior uses’. Wood, A.A., Athenae Oxoniensis, ed. Bliss, P., 4 vols. (London 1817)Google Scholar, iii, cols 532–33.

43. Hasluck, , ‘First English Account’, 114–5 Google Scholar. The chapter on Athos in Rycaut’s State of the Greek and Armenian churches, 215–263, acknowledges the author’s debt to ‘that worthy and ingenious person Mr. John Covel’.

* The word is struck out in the MS