Can we speak Greek?

In the late 16th century​ , a stream of Greek émigrés passed through the south German university town of Tübingen. After recounting the indignities they had suffered (or claimed to have suffered) under Ottoman rule, some were allowed to beg at the church door or offered money from church collections. Others were turned away: after all, there was no way to check their identities or their stories.

One local resident was invariably enthusiastic about the visitors. Tübingen’s professor of Greek, Martin Kraus, known to posterity as Martin Crusius, could, by his own admission, ‘rightly be said to be drunk with love for Greek affairs’. To him each new arrival presented an opportunity to learn about the Greeks and their language. Eventually, as Richard Calis writes, Crusius ‘compiled the period’s richest record of Greek life under Ottoman rule’. In The Discovery of Ottoman Greece, Calis reconstructs Crusius’s efforts to learn about modern Greece from his corner of the Holy Roman Empire. What could seem a narrow field of inquiry sheds new light on the Renaissance revival of classical letters, the Reformation and Western philhellenism.

The Protestant tradition of studying Greek began with Martin Luther. Greek – the language not just of the New Testament but of many Church Fathers – was essential to any serious engagement with the Christian tradition. Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German in eleven weeks while hidden in the Wartburg, a castle in Eisenach, between 1521 and 1522. His close ally Philip Melanchthon was the more able Hellenist; he was awarded the first chair of Greek at the University of Wittenberg from 1518 and put his learning in service of the Reformation.

Crusius was a generation younger than Luther and Melanchthon. Born in 1526, he was the son of the first Lutheran minister in his community. He began his studies in Ulm and continued them in Strasbourg, one of the centres of humanist education. In 1559 he was appointed professor of Greek at Tübingen, in the Duchy of Württemberg, where the Reformation had been introduced in 1534. During the 16th century, the university became a bastion of Lutheranism to rival Wittenberg; its seminary would later train Johannes Kepler and Hegel. Crusius taught at Tübingen for nearly half a century until his death in 1607. His lectures on Homer were so popular that the university had to knock down a wall to accommodate more students.

‘Everything Greek delighted’ him, Crusius wrote, ‘as toys delight children’. He boasted that he ‘loved and admired the Greek language and the Greek people like none of my countrymen’. At the outset of his studies, he knew little about contemporary Greece; his first letter to the Greek Orthodox patriarch, Jeremias II, asked whether modern Greeks possessed ‘any culture’ at all. In comparison with their ancient forebears, the Greeks of Renaissance Europe enjoyed little prestige. Not only were they schismatics (the separation between Eastern and Western Christianity had been formalised in 1054), they were thought to have neglected their cultural and intellectual inheritance. The common Ottoman enemy did inspire some feelings of solidarity with the conquered Greeks, who had lost the Eastern Roman Empire when Constantinople fell in 1453. Following Süleyman the Magnificent’s victory at Mohács in 1526, which led to the partition of Hungary, and his siege of Vienna in 1529, the Holy Roman Empire’s foreign policy was driven by the need to contain the Ottoman threat.

Crusius and his Lutheran peers had other reasons to be interested in the Orthodox Church. Lutherans as much as Catholics looked to early Christianity to confirm the validity of their beliefs: if the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church accorded with Lutheran doctrines, they would help to prove that the Reformation was more faithful to Christianity as originally practised than its Roman counterpart.

When, in 1573, a Tübingen graduate was appointed chaplain to the Holy Roman Emperor’s Ottoman envoy, Crusius and his colleagues sensed an opportunity. With the chaplain’s help, they began an eight-year correspondence with Jeremias II. The German contribution was a triumph of theological explication: in their letters, which Crusius translated into Greek, the scholars worked together to give an account of Lutheran doctrines. As a cultural exchange, the correspondence was exemplary: each party came to understand the other’s position minutely. Yet the letters revealed fundamental differences between them. It became clear, for instance, that the Orthodox cult of the saints and devotion to the Virgin Mary resembled Catholic tradition far more than Protestant. Weightier theological disagreements emerged. The correspondents differed on the question of which was the best source for establishing Christian truth: scripture (the Lutheran position) or tradition (the Orthodox view). When his Tübingen counterparts criticised his quoting of the imperfect Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament rather than the original Hebrew, Jeremias retorted that the Greek Orthodox Church was not in communion with the Jews. In his final missive, Jeremias – who by this point had been deposed – accused the Lutherans of innovation: ‘You have quite plainly altered Holy Scripture as well as the interpretation of the … holy men according to your own will.’

The exchange between Tübingen and Constantinople didn’t inspire either party to shift its position. On the contrary, confronting the Greek Church in all its complexity only deepened Crusius’s Lutheran commitment. From then on, his goal was to persuade the Greek Orthodox of the truth of Lutheranism. As Calis writes, he seemed to think that ‘if only Eastern Christians could be exposed to Lutheran principles … they would see that the Lutherans were the genuine custodians of Christian orthodoxy.’

In 1587, a few years after the correspondence with Jeremias came to an end, Tübingen received its most impressive visitor yet, Gabriel I, the Greek Orthodox archbishop of Ohrid in Ottoman Albania. Crusius arranged rooms at the local inn for Gabriel and his party, which included twelve clergy in their traditional vestments, three carriages and twelve horses. After formally greeting the archbishop in front of a gaping crowd, Crusius joined the group for dinner. The archbishop had been robbed in his own diocese and was travelling across Christian lands to seek alms. Over the days that followed, Crusius gathered as much information as he could about Orthodox Christianity and life under Ottoman rule.

Gabriel I was an unusually distinguished Greek visitor to Tübingen, but he was far from the only one: more than sixty Greek men and women came between 1579 and 1606. Each visit was recorded in Crusius’s diary, which spans nine volumes. (There are also almost seven hundred surviving books from his personal library, many of which are ‘coated with thick layers of marginal annotation’.) We know the menus and seating arrangements of his dinner parties, the topics of conversation (anything Greek), the Greek vernacular words he learned from his guests and the parting gifts he offered them (usually books). Of Crusius’s three wives, two of whom had died before the diary begins (the first in childbirth, the second of the plague), we learn little. Of his fifteen children, even less. Crusius did take special care to record his dreams, however. In June 1597, he dreamed that he was seated at a table in Constantinople with his mother and the sultan, who spoke to him in German. ‘The Turk drank to my health (kindly and with seemly merriment).’ Even while dreaming he was mindful of his research, asking: ‘Is there not something, perhaps an old Greek book, that I could take home with me to Germany?’ The emperor obliged.

The Discovery of Ottoman Greece devotes as much attention to Crusius’s interactions with his Greek guests as it does to his books. If, following the lead of Anthony Grafton, historians of Renaissance scholarship have for decades studied scholarly practices as well as the history of ideas, here the practices take centre stage. Conquistadors such as Hernán Cortés or missionaries such as Matteo Ricci are more often seen as the cutting edge of ‘cultural encounter’, but Calis shows that a curious homebody like Crusius could be just as engaged with the wider world. As he puts it, ‘global lives … need not be lived on a global scale.’ Growing connections between different parts of the world didn’t affect just those who travelled to faraway places, but also the scholars who learned about those places. Crusius didn’t need to travel, as Calis points out, since he could learn so much by letting Greece come to him.

The Holy Roman Empire, known to Germans as the Old Reich, has often been remembered as a quaint, insular place, in contrast to the global empires of Portugal and Spain. Yet Calis argues that ‘the Old Reich and the German home town’ were not, in fact, ‘provincial and isolated’. In making this point, he joins historians who have sought to recover the Holy Roman Empire’s ‘global entanglements’ in the early modern period, from Renate Dürr writing about the Lutheran baptisms of Africans and Muslims to Arne Spohr on the lives and careers of Black court musicians to Craig Koslofsky and Roberto Zaugg on the German speakers who worked in the Atlantic slave trade. And as Giuseppe Marcocci has shown, Crusius wasn’t the only scholar using new sources – in his case, oral and epistolary – to write history in this period. The Portuguese historian João de Barros drew on Persian-language manuscripts in his study of India, Décadas da Ásia, which appeared in three volumes between 1552 and 1563. Only a few years after the publication, in 1584, of Crusius’s major work on Ottoman Greece, Turcograecia, his fellow Lutheran and Hellenist Johannes Löwenklau – who wrote under the name Leunclavius – published the first European history of the Ottoman Empire based on Ottoman sources.

Crusius plundered contemporary travel accounts for information alongside chronicles and histories. He recognised the connections between Greeks and Ottomans, seeing them as part of a common tradition of rule and placing Byzantine and Ottoman history on a continuum – unlike some of his contemporaries, who thought that the history of Byzantium had ended in 1453. Yet at a time when some of his colleagues were starting to teach themselves Arabic or Turkish, he didn’t attempt to learn either. (Even Löwenklau relied on translators.) Crusius’s innovation, then, lay not in his methods, much less in his linguistic proficiency, but in the object of his curiosity: no other Western Christian of his time thought to produce such a detailed record of Ottoman Greece. He pursued his goal, moreover, with a remarkable sense of purpose, making a virtue of his unfavourable location and Lutheran network.

The Tübingen philhellenist best known today is the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who studied at the seminary from 1788 to 1793. Hölderlin, who translated Sophocles and Pindar, is an example of the modern German fascination with ancient Greece that Eliza Marian Butler characterised in 1935 as the ‘tyranny of Greece over Germany’.* As Suzanne Marchand has shown more recently, modern German philhellenes imagined that they had a direct connection to ancient Greece and ‘wished to see themselves as rediscoverers of a lost Arcadia’. Yet, in his own way, Crusius anticipated those modern philhellenists, even if they didn’t acknowledge his contribution. As Calis notes, even when he attacked the beliefs of Greek Orthodox writers, Crusius admired ‘the beauty of their Greek’. And like modern philhellenists, he saw the German lands as the true successor to ancient Greece, the place where Greek letters, cast out of their native land, had found a home. (He devoted an entire publication to this argument, the Germanograecia of 1585.) Crusius studied spoken Greek carefully, treating his visitors as crucial primary sources. Yet he regarded modern vernacular Greek as a corrupt version of its classical ancestor: Greek hadn’t evolved but declined. (He called his collection of vernacular words ‘barbarograeca vocabula’.) This was, he believed, a symptom of a broader cultural deterioration. Yet, at the same time, he taught Homer with the aid of the 12th-century commentary of Eustathius of Thessalonica. The post-classical Greek tradition had its uses after all.

Crusius’s ambivalence towards Greek culture is evident throughout the enormous Turcograecia. The book was turned down a dozen times before being published in Basel in 1584, and proved a commercial failure. Perhaps this was due to the nature of the project: an edited anthology of Greek documents with Latin translations and elaborate notes, it was out of step with the fashion for narrative history. Turcograecia aimed to describe ‘the status of the Greeks under Turkish rule with regard to politics and the church, the household and schooling’. It covered the history of Constantinople and the patriarchate over the previous two centuries, and reproduced scholarly exchanges about ‘ecclesiastical, political and social matters’ as well as letters sent to Crusius and his friends that addressed Greek education, vernacular poetry and contemporary affairs. Crusius’s own annotations ranged even more widely, offering up a web of observations about Ottoman Greek life.

In time the book found a readership among some of the most learned men in Europe – including Joseph Scaliger and Edward Gibbon, whose antipathy towards Byzantium perhaps exceeded Crusius’s own. Crusius thus earned himself a place in a long Western European tradition of lamenting the fate of Greece that began with the fall of Constantinople and continued until the Greek war of independence in the 1820s. In recent years historians, among them David Nirenberg in his survey of anti-Judaism in the Western tradition or Noel Malcolm on the Ottoman influence on early modern European political thought, have shown the way the Western intellectual tradition distorted the perception of particular religions and societies. While Calis studies a comparatively brief period, he situates Turcograecia in the long history of anti-Byzantine writing in Western Europe.

Calis characterises Crusius’s work as ‘ethnography’. Oral research had been a method of historical inquiry since Herodotus, but ‘ethnography’ is a modern coinage, and neither Crusius nor Herodotus used the term. Employing it allows Calis to place Crusius in the company of other Renaissance students of foreign societies, such as the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún. Born in Castile in 1499, Sahagún spent most of his life in colonial Mexico, where he edited and translated the oral testimonies of Indigenous Mesoamerican elders, gathering their recollections with the help of a group of Nahuatl-speaking Latin scholars. Like Crusius, Sahagún regarded spoken and written evidence as equally valuable. Neither man, however, was above disparaging his subject. For Sahagún, the wrongness of Mexican beliefs was the very reason to learn about them: ‘The physician cannot advisedly administer medicine to one infirm without first knowing … from which source the ailment derives.’ Whoever said ‘tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner’ was not talking about the 16th century.