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MIGRATION FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF EASTERN CHRISTIANS IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2017

John-Paul A. Ghobrial
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Abstract

From Lebanese politicians in Argentina to Iraqi immigrants in Sweden, Middle Eastern Christians can be found today scattered across the entire world. Too often, however, this global migration has been seen purely as a modern development, one arising from contemporary political and religious tensions in the Middle East. In fact, this type of mobility had earlier manifestations in the early modern period. From the sixteenth century onwards, Christians from the Ottoman Empire set out for distant worlds and foreign lands, travelling as far as Europe, India, Russia and even the Americas and leaving traces of themselves in countless European and Middle Eastern archives, chanceries and libraries. This paper lays out a framework for understanding movement in the early modern world in a way that pays as much attention to how migrants understood their own travels as to contemporary European ideas about Eastern Christian mobility. Focusing on the intersection of two traditions of sources, I explore here how European and Eastern Christian perspectives about migration drew from one another, reinforcing and feeding on each other in powerful, mutually constitutive ways. In doing so, this paper seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of the everyday experience of circulation and mobility in the early modern world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 27 , December 2017 , pp. 153 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Professor Peter Mandler and the RHS Council for its kind invitation to speak and to the members of the Society in attendance for their helpful questions and comments. I have preserved here the original tone of the lecture. This paper is dedicated to Jack Tannous with whom I spent a happy year discussing the issues in this paper, among other things, while on research leave in 2016–17 as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz. I am grateful to Professor Rudolf Schlögl, Fred Girod and all the staff and Fellows at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg for making my stay such a stimulating and memorable one. The paper draws on research conducted for the project Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World, which is supported by funding from a European Research Council Starting Grant under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 638578).

References

1 In other words, there are simply too many unnecessary dots in this man's signature, rendering him as ʿAnd al-Masīh Ilyāsh instead of ʿAbd al-Masīh Ilyās. The document is preserved today in the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Cádiz among the notarial protocols for Cádiz, PROT, 18 Feb. 1679, t. 1150, fos. 39–42. ‘Manuel’ must be the name taken by ʿAbd al-Masīh in Spain, and the reference to his being ‘Greek’ almost certainly a sign that he was a member of the Orthodox church in his native Aleppo.

2 Documents related to Athanasius Safar and his servant, described here only as Juan José, are in the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville in Contratación, 5451, no. 37; on his experiences in the New World, see AGI, Mexico 312, ‘Memorial sobre Don Athanasio Safar, 1691’. See also Heyberger, Bernard, Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique (Syrie, Liban, Palestine, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Rome, 2014), 217 Google Scholar.

3 This example of Elias's signature comes from AGI, Contratación, 5440, no. 2, r. 135. More generally, see Ghobrial, John-Paul A., ‘The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory’, Past and Present, 222 (2014), 51–93 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 92 for another example of his signature.

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11 For a comparison, consider Spanish approaches to gypsies in Richard Pym, The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425–1783 (2007). I am grateful to Cecilia Tarruell for her advice on the wider context in which this law was issued.

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14 La Sainte Messe des caldéens et des maronites du Mont-Liban: mise en françois, suivant le souhait de plusieurs personnes pieuses, & par l'ordre expres de la Reyne, lors que sa Majesté voulut bien entendre celle que Dom Hissa Prestre Caldéen, celebra en Langue Syriaque, & avec les ceremonies qui sont propres aux chrestiens de son pays, dans la chapelle du vieux chasteau de S. Germain en Laye, le vingt-deuxieme iour du mois d'avril de l'an 1673 (Paris, 1678).

15 See Brentjes, Burchard, ‘Josephus Adjutus, der Chaldäer zu Wittenberg’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 26, 4 (1977), 131–8Google Scholar; the essays collected in Anglicanism and Orthodoxy 300 Years after the ‘Greek College’ in Oxford, ed. Peter Doll (Oxford, 2005); Barron, From Samos to Soho; Ghobrial, John-Paul A., ‘The Life and Hard Times of Solomon Negri: An Arabic Teacher in Early Modern Europe’, in The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe, ed. Loop, Jan, Hamilton, Alastair and Burnett, Charles (Leiden, 2017), 90–111 Google Scholar. I am grateful to David Taylor for first drawing my attention to Josephus Adjutus's writings.

16 See, for example, George A. Chatziantoniou, Protestant Patriarch: The Life of Cyril Lucaris, 1572–1638, Patriarch of Constantinople (1961).

17 The story was published as part of de La Roque, Jean, Voyage de Syrie et du Mont-Liban . . . avec un abregé de la vie de monsieur de Chasteuil et l'Histoire du prince Junès, Maronite (Paris, 1722)Google Scholar.

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20 Ghobrial, ‘The Life and Hard Times of Solomon Negri’, 317.

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23 Dietmar W. Winkler and Wilhelm Baum, The Church of the East: A Concise History (2003); Brock, Sebastian, ‘The “Nestorian” Church: A Lamentable Misnomer’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 78 (1996), 23–35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See, for example, Ebied, R. Y. and Young, M. J. L., ‘An Arabic Treatise on the History of the Nestorians’, Parole de l'Orient, 3 (1972), 375–98Google Scholar. More recently, this has been the subject of a considerable and excellent series of studies by Professor István Perczel, which promises to transform our understanding of relations between the Eastern churches and south India, for example his ‘Some New Documents on the Struggle of the Saint Thomas Christians to Maintain the Chaldaean Rite and Jurisdiction’, in Bruns, Peter and Luthe, Heinz Otto, Orientalia Christiana: Festschrift für Hubert Kaufhold zum 70. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden, 2013), 415–36Google Scholar.

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34 Ghobrial, ‘The Life and Hard Times of Solomon Negri’, 315.

35 The journal is held today in the Mingana Collection at the University of Birmingham, Christian Arabic MS 72, fo. 27a for the books, and fos. 28–9 for the students.

36 Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Syriaque 279, fo. 66.

37 Dakhlia, Jocelyne and Kaiser, Wolfgang, Les Musulmans dans l'histoire de l'Europe (2 vols., Paris, 2011–13)Google Scholar.

38 D'Alep à Paris, ed. Heyberger et al., 283.

39 Ghobrial, ‘The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon’, 62.

40 D'Alep à Paris, ed. Heyberger et al., 241–2.

41 Ibid., 340–5.