Reconstructing the Ottoman Greek World: Early Modern … · Reconstructing the Ottoman Greek World:...

Reconstructing the Ottoman Greek WorldEarly Modern Ethnography in the Household

of Martin Crusius

RICHARD CALIS Prince ton Univer s i t y

This article uses the life and writings of Martin Crusius (1526ndash1607) professor of Latin and Greekat the university of Tuumlbingen to explore the methods and tools of early modern ethnographers Fordecades Crusius recorded contemporary Greek life under Ottoman rule by investigating a broad arrayof visual material textual and oral evidence and by mustering various scholarly methods The doc-umentary record that Crusius compiled demonstrates that early modern ethnography was one amongmany period forms of knowledge making in which tropes and techniques from several fields and dis-ciplines came together fruitfully

INTRODUCTION

IN THE EARLY morning of 23 January 1581 Katharina Vetscher calledher husband down from his study Accustomed to the help and care of histhird wife Martin Crusius (1526ndash1607) appeared immediately only to findthree men waiting on the stairs two Greek pilgrims and their interpreterfrom Leipzig The two foreigners originally from Santorini had been forcedto flee their island after Ottoman corsairs had raided one of its castles in1577 Their subsequent travels had brought these two men Andreas andLucas Argyrus to many places including Rome Paris Trier MainzAugsburg and Munich Although their particular route was probably not pre-determined their arrival on Crusiusrsquos doorstep was most certainly not acciden-tal either The goal of their journey had been to collect alms to ransom familymembers whommdashas their papal letter of recommendation assertedmdashcertainOttomans kept hostage in Tripoli present-day Lebanon A hefty sum was

I wish to thank Anthony Grafton Ian Maclean Yair Mintzker Ulinka Rublack Tom ToumllleRQrsquos three anonymous referees and audiences in Utrecht and Princeton for their astute inputon earlier drafts of this article

Renaissance Quarterly 72 (2019) 148ndash93 copy 2019 Renaissance Society of Americadoi101017rqx20184

Downloaded from httpswwwcambridgeorgcore 16 Jun 2020 at 010841 subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use

needed to guarantee the captivesrsquo freedom Crusius a professor of Latin andGreek at the university of Tuumlbingen could provide exactly the type of supportthat these men sought His household was renowned for its great generosity andwarm hospitality toward strangers especially those from Greece Indeed overthe next few days Crusius shared his meals with these pilgrims provided themlodgings and gave them some money1

This incident is more than just an instance of early modern hospitality or arare snapshot of itinerant Greeks seeking alms across Western ChristendomBetween 1579 and 1606 just a year before Crusiusrsquos death nearly sixtyGreek men and women found their way to Tuumlbingen All collected alms andall received a warm welcome After all their visits enabled Crusius to acquirefirsthand knowledge about the postclassical development of the Greeks andtheir language He understood that providing lodgings and sharing meals wasa small price to pay in recompense for the valuable intelligence that these pil-grims brought from the Ottoman side of the Mediterranean These native infor-mants helped Crusius read and understand his sizable collection of vernacularGreek books and enabled him over time to gain a good command of the lan-guage they spoke On request they also clarified and verified the manuscriptsletters and written documentation that other local informants who resided inConstantinople had sent to Tuumlbingen in the 1570s All this information sodiverse in nature presented Crusius with an astoundingly broad portrait ofOttoman Greek society full of color and perspective rich in details andexperiences

This article reconstructs the processes of knowledge production that resultedfrom these lively exchanges between one of the most eminent sixteenth-centuryscholars of Greek and his informants from the land that he so dearly caredabout yet himself never visited It connects Crusiusrsquos practices of readingwith his consuming interest in collecting and assessing testimony and it situatesthis form of scholarship firmly within the household setting There Crusius notonly read his books thoroughly and repeatedly but also subjected itinerant vis-itors to systematic interviews collected and compared their testimonies anddocumented the finer details of the Greek vernacular on the blank flyleavesof his books and in well-organized word lists This complex constellation of wit-nesses both human and textual was structured around a form of scholarshipthat reached beyond the material book In Crusiusrsquos household interpreting

1 Universitaumltsbibliothek Tuumlbingen (hereafter UBT) Mb 37 fol 85 pp 57ndash76 Crusiusspecifically kept this manuscript for recording and archiving documents and other evidencerelated to contemporary Greek civilization The notes on the Greeks (ldquoGraeci Hominesrdquo)who visited Crusius are found after page 85 with a separate pagination These pages will here-after be referred to by the abbreviation GH

THE HOUSEHOLD OF MARTIN CRUSIUS 149

and understanding were textual as well as oral processes involving the use ofgestures collaboration translation reading aloud listening attentively andempirical observationmdashhardly the familiar hermeneutic program of philologistsof the age While Crusius may have been a classicist by profession he was nev-ertheless an ocularcentrist by conviction and one who valued highly trainedears His then was a ldquohybrid hermeneuticsrdquo to borrow the words ofLorraine Daston a method in which practices of reading and observing andfirst- and secondhand experiences merged2

The main argument that this article advances across its three sections is thatCrusiusrsquos vivid record of Ottoman Greek culture belongs to the early modernhistory of ethnographymdashthat is the systematic description of human varietyof peoples and their cultures languages customs religions and forms of govern-ment Scholars have cultivated this field intensively and to great effect They haveoffered valuable analyses of the travelers who roamed the world and described thecultures that they encountered on their journeys often as part of Europersquos colo-nial expansion3 In addition to studies that prioritized encounters withAmerindian and Asian civilizations a different strand of research has called atten-tion to early modern Europeans who studied more local societies and culturesSome of these early modern ethnographers turned to their (Ashkenazi) Jewishneighbors and discovered (or imagined) a whole new world of rituals andbeliefs4 Another group directed their gaze toward the Eastern Mediterraneanoffering a plethora of representations of the Jews Muslims and (as inCrusiusrsquos case) the Oriental Christians living in the Levant5 Still othersmdashsome of them travelers others armchair ethnographersmdashadopted a more com-parative or encyclopedic approach and compiled evidence relating to past andpresent civilizations in their quest to map the diversity of human peoples6

In general however more is said about the ethnographies that those ethnog-raphers produced than about the ethnographic craft itself Some historians havestressed the importance attributed to autopsy and firsthand testimony by travelerswho sought to emphasize the solidity of their findings Scholars have also studiedsome of the systems of classification that early modern scholars adopted to accom-modate knowledge about NewWorld civilizations They have scrutinized various

2 Daston 1563 The literature on this topic is vast Some of the most perceptive studies include

Greenblatt Pagden 1982 Rubieacutes 2000 and 2007 Leitch4 Hsia 1994 and 1996 Cohen Holmberg Deutsch5 MacLean MacLean and Matar Mitsi6 Hodgen Vogel Nothaft

RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY150 VOLUME LXXII NO 1

textual and oral sources from which early modern ethnographers drewmdashwhatthey copied from whom and which native informants played a role in mediatingknowledge7 But precisely how ethnographers saw classified interviewed or readhas received less attentionmdashan important exception being the ldquofirst anthropolo-gistrdquo Bernardino de Sahaguacuten (ca 1499ndash1590) whose methods for documentingAztec cultures have been carefully studied Miguel Leoacuten-Portilla and others haveuncovered in great detail how the Nahua people aided Sahaguacuten in his ethno-graphic work by clarifying both their pictorial form of writing and the Nahuatltexts that the Spanish friar had collected8

This article uses the extremely well-documented case of Crusius to developthis line of inquiry further and to identify some of the tools of the ethnographictrade It demonstrates that early modern ethnography was one among manyperiod forms of knowledge making in which tropes and techniques from sev-eral fields and disciplines came together fruitfully Crusius carried out a highlyparticular and very systematic form of inquiry by mustering various scholarlymethods The suggestion however is not that Crusius was sui generis in pull-ing together evidence from various traditions nor that the specific set of skillshe wielded was emblematic of a broader culture Rather the case of Crusiusillustrates how early modern ethnographers often created their own versionsof ethnographymdashmaking the practice appear less as a single discipline andmore as a clutch of pursuits a malleable genre appropriated and assembledas scholars saw fit

The reconstruction offered here is made possible by the survival of a uniqueset of manuscripts and printed documents Hundreds of Crusiusrsquos annotatedbooks multiple working papers and notebooks vocabulary lists an elaboratediary a family history and some genealogical tracts have remained Their sur-vival was no accident Like so many of his contemporaries Crusius recordedand preserved life around him as it unfolded creating a personal archive of mis-cellaneous information In the great early modern family of fastidious note-takers and record keepers Crusius belonged to the branch populated bythose individuals who left no stone unturned archived meticulously and punc-tiliously recorded time itself9 For Crusius then ethnography was in no small

7 Grafton 1992 Pagden 1993 Rubieacutes 1996 Johnson 2008 Davies and the essays col-lected in Horodowich and Markey

8 Leoacuten-Portilla (with references to earlier work) See also Bleichmar 2016 on the CodexMendoza

9 For some recent surveys of early modern archival practices and note-taking see Blair2010 Friedrich Hunter Yale and the articles collected in Corens Peters and WalshamFor some perceptive studies of early modern scholars among their papers see Soll LundinMiller On time keeping see Engammare

part an act of recording as well as the product of years of compilation It was aparticular paper technology the humanist notebook that allowed for such anaccumulation of data10 The flexibility of the notebook made it a powerful toolfor collecting evidence on ldquothe affairs of the Greeks of Byzantiumrdquo a culturethat according to Crusius went almost undocumented in the sixteenth-centuryworld of learning11

COLLABORATIVE READING

Martin Crusius was born in 1526 in Grebern near Bamberg in present-dayBavaria toMariaMagdalena Trummer andMartin Kraus During the unsettlingearly decades of the Reformation Crusiusrsquos father served as a Lutheran minis-ter12 The family had to relocate often but eventually settled in Wuumlrttembergafter Duke Ulrich had officially introduced the Evangelical movement there in1534 In 1540 Crusius enrolled at the local grammar school in Ulm a free impe-rial city and started learning Greek Five years later he was sent to Strasbourgwhere he received the most cutting-edge humanist education in NorthernEurope at the famous Protestant gymnasium of Johannes Sturm13 In 1554 heaccepted the vacant position of rector at the Latin school inMemmingen a posi-tion he left in 1559 to become a professor at the university of Tuumlbingen Crusiusstayed in Tuumlbingen for nearly fifty years until his death in 1607 He marriedthree times and had fifteen children only one of whom he did not outliveAmong the many works that Crusius published are the Latin and Greek gram-mars for pupils that he put out in the 1550s and 1560s In 1584 his seminal pub-lication on early modern Greece the Turcograecia was printed in Basel It wasfollowed in 1585 by the Germanograecia a sample of the fruits that Greek stud-ies according to Crusius had borne in Germany Another work that Crusius isknown for today is theAnnales Suevici (1595ndash96) amassive history of Swabia inthree parts that continues to be one of themain sources for the sixteenth-century

10 For the notebook as a paper technology see te Heesen For the role of the notebook inethnography see Grafton and Weinberg 2016 For a comparable case in the Mesoamericancontext see Bleichmar 2016

11 UBT Mh 466 vol 1 fol 1 ldquoHistorica quaedam a me M Martino Crusio utriusquelinguae professore in inclyta Academia Tybingensi comportata de nostris temporibus praeser-tim Graecorum Byzantii rebusrdquo All translations are the authorrsquos except where otherwise notedPart of Crusiusrsquos nine-volume diary covering the years 1596ndash1605 is edited in four volumesGoumlz and Conrad 1927 Goumlz and Conrad 1931 Stahlecker and Staiger Staiger

12 Gaier13 Goeing

history of this region Crusius himself considered the sermons he collected in theCorona Anni (1602ndash03) his main contribution to the world of print14

Much like his father Crusius was a staunch Lutheran and a member of a veryparticular Lutheran communitymdashcircumstances that infused his scholarly workin no small part In the second half of the sixteenth century theologians at theuniversity of Tuumlbingen endeavored to end the doctrinal controversies that werethreatening to nip Lutheranism in the bud One of Tuumlbingenrsquos theology pro-fessors Jakob Andreae (1528ndash90) worked zealously on the 1577 Formula ofConcord and on the 1580 Book of Concordmdashdocuments that sought to rec-oncile the Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists Ultimately these sixteenth-cen-tury debates about the nature and direction of Lutheranism opened Crusiusrsquoseyes to the contemporary Greek world Between 1573 and 1581 he was thedriving force behind the lengthy correspondence that Lutheran theologiansfrom Tuumlbingen including Andreae maintained with the Greek Orthodoxpatriarch Jeremias II (ca 1536ndash95) Initially the Lutherans were convincedthat their Evangelical principles were in agreement with the teachings of theGreek Orthodox Church Soon however they were proven wrong and eventu-ally the patriarch simply asked them ldquoto write no longer about dogma but onlyfor friendshiprsquos sakerdquo15 This official correspondence on church doctrine mayhave come to nothing but it nevertheless significantly determined howCrusius approached early modern Greece For one it brought him into contactwith individuals from the Eastern Mediterranean who would also act as hisinformants about church matters in the Ottoman capital More importantlythe exchange of letters instilled in Crusius a deep sense of disappointmentabout the religion of the Greeks He believed their form of Christianity to befull of superstition Paradoxically then it was Crusiusrsquos Lutheran bias thatprompted him to record this infelicitous Ottoman Greek world in the firstplace16 His ethnographic project in other words was not an innocentendeavor Early modern travelers and ethnographers often construed long-last-ing hierarchies and promoted dangerous ideas about civilization and barbar-ism17 To some extent Crusius was no exception to this

14 There exists no complete biography of Crusius In addition to the diary there is Crusiusrsquosautograph family history (UBT Mh 443)

15 Acta et scripta theologorum Wirtembergensium et patriarchae ConstantinopolitaniD Hieremiae quae utrique ab anno 1576 usque ad annum 1581 de Augustana Confessioneinter se miserunt Graece amp Latine ab ijsdem theologis edita 370 ldquoQuamobrem quantum advos attinet liberastis nos curis Vestram ergo viam euntes ne amplius de Dogmatibus sed ami-citiae tantum causa si volueritis scribeterdquo See also Wendebourg on this exchange of letters

16 Crusius 1584 dedicatory epistle 2v17 This point is most forcefully made in Wolff See also Deutsch 8ndash10 with further

references

Over seven hundred items from Crusiusrsquos private library have come down tous18 The range of these books is broad Befitting a professor of Latin andGreek Crusius possessed works of classical scholarship hermeneutical and rhe-torical manuals and pedagogical works Further books in the collection includetreatises in the various European vernaculars on a variety of topics There aretravelogues historical chronologies and texts of antiquarian and ecclesiasticalscholarship Some of his religious books (including a set of fifteenth- and six-teenth-century Bible texts in both Latin and German) came from his fatherrsquoscollection who himself had been a collector and avid annotator of booksand bear annotations in the hands of both men The Hebrew ItalianFrench and Spanish grammar books in Crusiusrsquos collection attest to his inter-ests in language19 An annotated series of compact editions in French of theadventures of Amadiacutes de Gaula reveals that Crusius was an avid collector andreader of chivalric romances20 Ulrich Moennig has determined that he alsoowned one of the largest and most important collections of vernacular Greekbooks and manuscripts north of the Alps21 In many of these books Crusiusspun a dense web of marginal annotations enriching them not only withdetailed traces of his scholarly practice but also with intimate reflectionsabout his personal life Sometimes he used these marked-up books when teach-ing one such working text was a 1541 edition of Homerrsquos epics In its marginsCrusius recorded the years in which he taught from this very copy detailingthroughout on which specific months and days he finished individual booksfrom the Iliad and Odyssey22

Marginalia such as these have been carefully and widely studied by historiansof reading but they also constitute a type of evidence that as this section dem-onstrates can be brought to bear on the history of early modern ethnographyIn this case reading appears as a collaborative activity that started with Crusiusrsquosinterest in mastering vernacular Greek For Crusius there was ancient Greekand a later offshoot called barbarograeca which was markedly different interms of vocabulary syntax pronunciation and grammar Like many of hiscontemporaries Crusius thought of these developments as corruptions of apure ancient Greek language a deterioration that had started in theByzantine era and continued into Ottoman times Even though Crusius differ-entiated between the Greek vernacular and the Greek of the church it wasancient Greek that provided the yardstick against which to measure their purity

18 Wilhelmi19 On Crusiusrsquos multilingualism see Faust20 Pettegree 15121 Moennig Eideneier22 Grafton 2002

Nevertheless Crusius studied this barbarograeca because he believed it couldenrich his understanding of ancient Greek ldquoI would like to connect the knowl-edge of the modern version of Greekrdquo he once confided ldquowith the ancient andknown Greek because it does not appear good to me to know the old but not toknow what is right in front of my feetrdquo23

It was after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 in which so many Christians losttheir lives that Crusius first began reading his vernacular Greek texts with greatdetermination24 Making productive use of them however was hard not leastbecause Crusius could not read them His first attempt at working throughsome of them was unsatisfactory The specific meaning of many words escapedCrusius leaving one to guess what he made of the texts themselves25 Thatsomeone of his training and status experienced such difficulties in reading com-prehension is telling This was after all the same person who wrote runningsummariesmdashextemporaneously and in ancient Greekmdashof nearly seven thou-sand sermons that he heard while kneeling in the Collegiate Church (theStiftskirche) in Tuumlbingen simply because he felt that as a professor of Greekhe ought to be fluent in the language he was teaching (and perhaps also becausehe wanted to avoid falling asleep)26

Yet vernacular Greek was not ancient or Byzantine Greek and there washardly any lexicographic aid available for those interested in the sixteenth-centurypendant to older literary forms of the language27 Certainly Crusius did notknow such a work in 1571 nor could he easily obtain one Accordingly helooked for other sources of information In the first instance he turned to hisformer student Stephan Gerlach (1548ndash1612) who had joined the imperialambassador David Ungnad on an embassy to Constantinople in 1573 servingas chaplain28 In a letter dated 20 March 1575 Crusius asked Gerlach to findhim a vernacular Greek lexicon and to locate someone who could translate theword list that Crusius had attached to his letter29 But even in Constantinople

23 Crusius 1584 426 ldquoCuperem enim huius novae quoque linguae (in qua breve quid iamdegustavi) aliquantam notitiam (libros duntaxat eo lingae genere editos intelligendi causa) cumvetere amp germana lingua Graeca coniungere cum mihi non videatur decere eum qui priscaaliquatenus intelligat eorum quae ante pedes sunt fere prorsus ignarum amp rudem esserdquoTranslation in Rhoby 2005 267 In this article I use ldquovernacularrdquo ldquocontemporaryrdquo orldquoModernrdquo Greek as a shorthand for what Crusius called barbarograeca

24 Moennig 48ndash4925 Toufexis26Wilhelmi 25ndash172 Methuen27 For the study of ancient Greek in this particular context see Ludwig Ben-Tov28 On Gerlach see Kriebel Muumlller 346ndash123 In 1674 Gerlach published an account of

this stay in the Ottoman Empire see Gerlach29 Toufexis 77ndash86 101n19

vernacular Greek lexica were difficult to come by and it took a while to locatesomeone who was able and willing (for a small fee) to provide the requested trans-lation Crusius finally received it in January 1579 nearly four years after his ini-tial request and long after he had first sat down to read his vernacular Greekbooks30 Without lexica and with such impractical or irregular channels of com-munication how could a sixteenth-century classics professor in a German univer-sity town even start thinking about mastering the Greek vernacular

One solution presented itself serendipitously on 21 February 1579 in theperson of Stamatius Donatus This pilgrim had found his way to Tuumlbingenwhile collecting alms across Europe to ransom family members held hostageby Ottoman corsairs as Andreas and Lucas Argyrus and so many ofCrusiusrsquos other future visitors would31 Although Donatusrsquos arrival must havecome as somewhat of a surprise to Crusius he was not unwelcome as early as1557 when Crusius was still working in Memmingen he had met a Greeknamed Nicholas Kalis whom ldquo[he] interrogated and from whose lips [he]wrote down certain [Greek words]rdquo32 A little later in 1570 hoping to comeinto contact with Greeks in Venice he had written to Francesco Porto a teacherof Greek in Geneva33 So Donatus was exactly what Crusius had been lookingfor And he turned out to be a linguistic gold mine Crusius used him as a livingldquolexiconrdquo during the week that his guest enjoyed his and his wifersquos hospitality34

Together they marked their way through the same vernacular Greek books thathad baffled Crusius earlier They read the 1546 vernacular Greek edition of theFlower of Virtue originally a widely read fourteenth-century Italian anthology ofvices and virtues the 1564 edition of the Apollonios a hugely popular folk epicrecounting the trials and adventures of Apollonius prince of Tyre the 1526vernacular Greek paraphrase of the Iliad and the Tale of Belisarius a medievaltext on the celebrated general of Emperor Justinian35

30 UBT Mh 466 vol 1 fol 71131 Collecting alms to ransom captives has a long history in all three Abrahamic religions On

the development of this phenomenon in Christianity see Osiek For some perceptive case stud-ies see Brodman Friedman Rodriguez For begging and poor relief in the early modernProtestant world more generally see Grell and Cunningham

32 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH1 ldquoeum interrogavi et quaedam ex ore eius annotavi quaescil sequunturrdquo

33 Crusius 1584 516 Pavan34 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH9 ldquoIncepi eo uti praeceptore Barbarograecae linguae divide ut esset

is mihi loco lexicirdquo35 For bibliographical details of these works see Layton 179ndash183 183ndash84 191ndash93 202ndash03

226 231 241 Toufexis 324ndash26 327ndash29 333ndash34 346ndash47 Two of these four books are stillextant the Flower of Virtue and the Apollonios are bound together with two other Greek texts inUBT DK I 64deg

From these books Crusius and Donatus glossed an impressive total ofaround 2200 words36 This was largely an oral process in which Crusius suc-cinctly wrote down how Donatus explicated the book paying close attention todialectal variations and Turkish loanwords Crusius not only recordedDonatusrsquos translations and readings but he also labeled them explicitly ashis as if to ensure that the exact source of the information would be preservedthese were the words of Donatus and no one else This form of collaborativereading is all the more remarkable considering that Donatusmdashas Crusius notedin his description of his guestmdashldquocould not read or writerdquo and knew only a fewwords of German Donatusrsquos illiteracy meant that he and Crusius had to inter-pret texts through a motley mix of languages including Italian Latin andGerman rather than translating from one language into the other OftenDonatus used ldquogestures his hands and paraphrasesrdquo to elucidate specificwords and sentences37 If this was collaborative reading then it was more col-laboration than reading more conversational than textual

In Crusiusrsquos household the boundaries separating the explication of a textfrom the reading of a physical space often blurred At one point Crusius tookhis interlocutor by the hand ldquoguided him through [his] whole houserdquo andrecorded the vernacular Greek names of particular parts of the house and ofindividual domestic items that Donatus translated38 In this way Crusiuslearned of the vernacular Greek equivalents of the stables a chandelier aflour cabinet an oven a grater and many other objects But these conversationswere not all about language The lyre that stood in Crusiusrsquos study set off a con-versation about music A few Byzantine imagesmdashsent to Crusius by Gerlachjust a few months beforemdashsparked a discussion about the type of dress wornin the Ottoman Empire Patterns of clothing offered early modern individualsall sorts of clues about character and culture39 Thus by carefully observing andconsidering these objects with Donatus Crusius acquired not just valuable lex-icographic help but also ethnographic information about the appearance ofGreek women the attributes of the Byzantine patriarch and the garments ofa Turkish soldier40

36 Toufexis 192 20437 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH51 ldquoquae ex ore ipsius excepi quae ipse mihi alias latinis

alias italicis alias aliis verbis saepius vero gestu aut monstratione digiti aut periphrasi verbo-rum indicavit Ipse nec legere nec scribere novitrdquo See also Toufexis 190

38 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH49 ldquoRursus domestica Circumducente me ipsum per meamtotam domumrdquo

39 On the importance of clothing see Jones and Stallybrass Rublack 2010a40 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH10 GH12 GH13

Many of Crusiusrsquos meetings with other itinerant Greeks were structuredaround similar conversations which posed analogous challenges but alsooffered comparable rewards The near three hundred words that AndreasArgyrus explained came from the texts that he and Crusius read togetherand their explication often involved ldquoexamining the contextrdquo in which theyoccurred41 But again reading quickly became an interactive exercise thatwas not confined to books or the study over dinner Crusius and his interloc-utors talked appropriately about tableware42 On this occasion more than onelanguage and form of communication was used if they did not talk in ItalianCrusius spoke ancient Greek Andreas a Greek vernacular That this was notopportune is suggested by the presence of an interpreter Johann FriedrichWeidner who occasionally greased the wheels of communication Thisyoung man from Leipzig spoke Italian with the Greeks and then turned toLatin or German when he spoke to Crusius trying to ensure it seems thatnothing was lost in translation43

Writing down words and phrases as he heard them being pronounced by hisguests was central to Crusiusrsquos scholarly methods He truly hung on his guestsrsquoevery word because listening attentively offered him a chance to hear the soundsand rhythms of daily life in the contemporary Greek world It was his way torecord different regional pronunciations dialectal diversity and other evidenceof the heterogeneity of Greece At a later stage Crusius arranged the very samewords that he had copied down during his interviews in the margins of his copyof Aldus Manutiusrsquos 1496 Thesaurus Cornu Copiae turning this book into hispersonal dictionary with four neat alphabetical lists of vernacular Greek terms44

Crusiusrsquos meetings with Greek informants were generally similar They werein the first place irregular and perhaps for that reason intense moments of col-laboration There was no way of knowing when people might appearSometimes years separated the departure of one Greek from the arrival ofanother Lucas and Andreas Argyrus for instance arrived nearly two yearsafter Donatus and it would take over a year before the next pilgrimAlexander Trucello knocked on Crusiusrsquos door This goes some way towardexplaining the eagerness with which Crusius subjected his visitors to systematicinterviewsmdashhis determination simply jumps off the page Whether it was dayor night early morning or late evening mattered less than the potential profits

41 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH68 ldquoSequuntur fere 300 vocabula quae mihi praecipue aD Andrea exposita sunt saepe contextum libellorum inspicienterdquo

42 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH75 Toufexis 21543 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH6144 Toufexis Crusiusrsquos copy is currently held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript

Library Zi + 5551 copy 3 For the broader context see Considine

that could be reaped It was the dead of night when Crusius together withGerlach recorded the various testimonies that a certain Gabriel Calonas fromCorinth provided in July 1582 During this four-day exchange Crusius was socarried away that his ldquohead was full of Greek and was buzzing with itrdquo while hehad to admit that ldquohis interrogation had tiredrdquo Calonas considerably45 Even asCalonas was departing Crusius would not leave him alone He followed hisguest to the gates of the city pen and paper in hand As Calonas read thecity pointing out and translating individual objects Crusius eagerly scribblednew items on his word listmdashwriting so hastily as Panagiotis Toufexis has notedthat he blotted the pages of his notebook46 At another moment Crusius inti-mated that he had not given Stamatius Donatus who himself had been ldquoa veryeagerrdquo talker a single moment of rest47 Meals rarely interrupted his interroga-tions but rather offered new topics of conversation Next to a short note aboutsome sort of Cypriot ldquoside dish of roasted meat with vinegar and saffronrdquomen-tioned by Donatus in 1579 Crusius recorded excitedly ldquowe had this fordinnerrdquo48

The dinner table then was as much a site of knowledge production as thestudy But it was the whole household setting that made it possible to stage suchscholarly encounters and cross-cultural conversations As Gadi Algazi hasshown marrying well and maintaining a family became an increasingly viablemodel for organizing a scholarly household from the fifteenth century onwardThis refiguring of the scholarly habitus prompted a similar reorganization of thedomestic space While scholarsrsquo wives were in charge of the household affairstheir husbands dedicated their energies to what guaranteed social recognitionand a salary scholarship49 Hospitality in all its guises became an integral com-ponent of these scholarly households at the dinner table as Gabriele Jancke hasshown occasions for sociability arose frequently50 This new gendered organi-zation of the domestic sphere with its social and hospitable dimensions evi-dently formed the bedrock of the scholarly practices of Crusius who married

45 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH120 ldquoeum interrogando et discendo fatigavi Loquebamurcum ipso Gerlachius et ego semper Graece Ich kam so gar darein das mir der Kopff vomGriechischen vol war und schwirmetrdquo

46 Toufexis 23947 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH51 ldquoich hab im kain ruumlhe gelassen et ipse fuit πρόθυμοςrdquo48 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH12 ldquoκρειας caro κρειάτα carnes ψισόν κρειας assa caro

κρειας βρασὸ caro elixa ψισόν κρειας μὲ τὸ ξίδι καὶ μὲ τὸν κρόκον ein bei-essen divide carococta cum aceto et crocordquo Marginal note ldquotunc in prandio haec habebamusrdquo

49 Algazi50 Jancke esp 339ndash45

three times Only with a supportive wife a secure income and a hospitabletable could he have received so many informants for so long and reaped thefruit of their labors

At times the margins in which Crusius glossed his texts suggest not justimmense determination in the pursuit of knowledge but also a certain frustra-tion over the fact that specific details kept eluding him even though he hadcalled on the expertise of more than one informant In the 1546 edition ofthe Flower of Virtue for example Crusius discovered the mysterious Greekword τὸ ναέλην A first investigation of its meaning paid no dividendsldquoNone of the Greeks who was with me in 1582 knew this [word]rdquo Crusiusnoted sourly in the margin Four years later Donatus who had come backafter his first visit told him it referred to a stork A year after that in 1587the metropolitan of Philadelphia Gabriel Severus suggested it was some sortof grayish bird Finally in 1589 another one of Crusiusrsquos guests DamatiusLarissaeus suggested yet another rendering eagle51 This was reading as prac-ticed in Crusiusrsquos household in the course of seven years Crusius approached asingle page even a single word again and again with the same purpose in mindalways hoping that a new yet similar reading of the same text with anotherglossator might unlock its lexicographic mysteries Sadly which translationCrusius decided to accept cannot be inferred from the marginal notes He com-piled explanations with concentration and determination but without furthercomment

These reading sessions then apart from being a means to learn about thelanguage and culture of contemporary Greeks point toward a form of scholarlyreading as a collaborative interactive and oral activity This is a picture thatlooks increasingly familiar to historians of knowledge In the last three decadesfor instance historians of early modern reading have stressed the diverse andcomplicated ways in which readers explored and explicated their books bothindividually and together Orality as well as collaboration figure frequently insuch analyses Bible reading for instance could have a distinctively oral andcommunal nature for both men and women especially within a family orhousehold setting Taking in scripture by ear moreover was just as commonas doing so by reading When learned scholars scrutinized their texts together to

51 UBT DK I 64deg Ἄνθος των Χαρίτων fol 10 marginal notes on top of the page ldquoτὸναέλην divide aquila inquit Demetrius Larissaeus 7 Oct 1589 Aliter vocatur ζαρλουκάνια[]rdquoNote in left margin ldquo+ nemo Graecorum qui mecum 1582 erant novit Sed 17 maii 86Stamatius dicit esse ciconiam Patrariarcha verograve archidorum γαβριὴλ ὄρνεον λευκομέλανλέγει 2 sept 1587rdquo

take concrete action reading and conversation also fused in the notes theytook52 The hidden hands involved in early modern scholarly praxis more gen-erally have been the subject of a recent study by Ann Blair She has brought tolight the full range of students servants and family members who aided schol-ars across confessions borders and generations in the composition writing andreading of texts53 This supporting cast has also claimed the limelight in recentstudies of early modern antiquarianism and diplomacy which have stressed therole of intermediaries as active agents in the creation and mediation of knowl-edge across cultural and linguistic boundaries54 Historians of science havestressed in similar fashion how artisans and scholars joined hands in the pursuitof knowledge55

The case of Crusius substantiates this portrait of early modern knowledgemaking but not because of the singularity of his interactions with itinerantinformation brokers Numerous other stay-at-home scholars such as NicolaacutesMonardes (ca 1508ndash88) and Pietro Martire drsquoAnghiera (1457ndash1526) alsorelied on the testimonies of travelers Traveling ethnographers such asBernardino de Sahaguacuten collaborated with native populations in a similarvein56 Crusius however portrayed moments of knowledge making in just asmuch if not more detail as the produce they yielded He recorded not onlyresults but also mechanismsmdashin all their gritty granular detail His recordsthen allow one to lay out with precision the various social cultural and intel-lectual circumstances that shaped the compilation and creation of ethnographicknowledge Crusiusrsquos informants moreover became the accredited witnessesfor his ethnographic studies on early modern Greece In an attempt to imbuehis work with authority and credibility he reproduced fully and often verbatimthe testimonies that pilgrims like Donatus had given him while sharing a mealGenerally the voices of such native and indigenous informants have remainedundocumented They were suppressed by the rhetoric of texts that highlightedtravelersrsquo prowess as observers buried deep in piles of archival documentation

52 On early modern women readers of the Bible see Molekamp On taking in scripture byear see Hunt For scholars as readers see Jardine and Grafton Grafton 1997a Sherman is thebest comprehensive survey of early modern reading practices

53 Blair 2014 Her monograph on this topic is forthcoming54 Miller Ghobrial 2014 Rothman55 Shapin Smith Long56 On Monardes see Bleichmar 2005 on Sahaguacuten see Leoacuten-Portilla For the comparable

case of Ethiopian scholars who introduced their European contemporaries to a hitherto-unknown tradition of Eastern Christianity see de Lorenzi

ignored or even deliberately silenced and defamed Collaboration may havebeen commonplace accrediting (illiterate) informants less so57

It was hard as Crusius knew to establish authority on exotic matters Somelearned individuals like Michel de Montaigne (1533ndash92) insisted that the bestwitness was the simple observer who reported what he or she saw undistortedby shadows of earlier reading58 In general however credibility was closelylinked to onersquos social status and often established by contemporary notionsof etiquette civility and sociability But the Greeks who came to Tuumlbingensome of whom were illiterate all of whom were strangers defied neat categori-zation A motley group of individuals they ranged from farmers to aristocratsWorse still they hailed from distant landsmdasha circumstance that made their tes-timonies even harder to evaluate and potentially suspect Crusius used theirvoices in his published works but how did he himself assess the reliability ofwhat his informants told him

COLLECTING TESTIMONY

In early modern Europe epistemological questions of credibility and mendacityevidently concerned a large and articulate group of individuals Jurists travelersnewsmongers merchants brokers diplomats historians naturalists antiquar-ies doctors churchmen notaries courtiers and generals all knew in theirrespective ways how to weigh the evidence that was relevant to their assortedtasks Coercive methods and public interrogation were the primary tools thatsome of them sharpened while others plied their trade mostly through intelli-gence gathering or selecting classical exempla Still others preferred travel andobservation adhering to the principles of empiricism or trust if virtual witness-ing replaced autopsy Early modern ideas about what sources constituted incon-trovertible proof and about what kind of truth was operating in any givensituation were equally diverse59 Documents that held up in court were notnecessarily authoritative on the marketplace in the library or on the battlefieldTestimonies given in public appealed to different standards of validity thanthose uttered in private or reproduced in print Even within a profession or

57 Exceptions existed Gessner for instance used the bulk of his dedications to acknowledgethe contributions of others But even Gessner often only mentioned his learned collaborators byname See Blair 2016a It is telling that in the case of early modern science the contributions ofothers were acknowledged most often when an experiment had gone wrong See Shapin 389

58 Montaigne 228ndash41 (On the Cannibals)59 Issues of credibility and proof pervade early modern scholarship but they have hardly

been studied as a historical topic in themselves For some perceptive exceptions see the follow-ing selection Randall Frisch Serjeantson 1999 and 2006 Dooley Popper Shapin ShapiroGinzburg 1999

discipline wars were sometimes waged about what constituted reliable evi-dence This happened in the most varied fields from the ecclesiastical scholar-ship that emerged in the wake of the Reformation to the witch trials that tookplace across Europe in the same period60

How did Crusius clamber up these slippery slopes In the first place estab-lishing the fides or credibility of a given testimony was crucial The one pointthat early modern individuals of all professional and confessional stripes appar-ently agreed on was that fides was essential in weighing testimonies oral or writ-ten ancient or modern Establishing the fides of a text or an individual was ahermeneutic practice with roots in Roman oratory commended by Cicero inhisDe partitione oratoria as well as by Quintilian61 Ancient rhetorical standardsheld that both the medium and the message of a testimony needed to be cred-ible and reliable for it to be valid In keeping with this ancient practice Crusiusassumed that testimonies were best evaluated in the first instance by assessingthe reliability of the person that gave them Whenever someone arrived on hisdoorstep Crusius sought to establish his capabilities and credentials and did soby focusing on appearance and genealogy What did the witness wear What didthey know Most important what was their background At the most basiclevel then establishing the fides of a witness meant subjecting nearly every sin-gle visitor to a careful investigation of their place of origin their family situa-tion and the direct itinerary that brought them to Tuumlbingen Crusiusrsquos inquiryalso included the family members that had been taken captive Apparently gene-alogy and origins mattered so much to Crusius that he would check with onevisitor the background of another62 Even Johann Friedrich Weidner the inter-preter who accompanied Andreas and Lucas Argyrus was asked to providedetails about his lineage In his record Crusius remarked that Weidnerrsquos fatherhad been a professor and he made sure to highlight the passage in the margins(ldquoWeidneri stirpsrdquo) for future reference63

Without exception Crusius also noted the linguistic competence of hisinformants and whether or not they were literate The amount of detail andsophistication in these descriptions stands out and attests to the effectivenessof this almost inquisitorial approach64 His recordings bespeak a growing aware-ness of the different Greek dialects and the different regional pronunciations as

60 Ditchfield esp 273ndash327 van Liere Ditchfield and Louthan Grafton and Weinberg2011 164ndash230

61 Serjeantson 2006 147ndash4962 Toufexis 186ndash8763 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH6264 Carlo Ginzburg was the first to identify the early modern inquisitor as a type of anthro-

pologist see Ginzburg 1989

when he realized over lunch that Alexander Trucello who visited Crusius in1582 ldquopronounced the theta as a phi in the Cypriot wayrdquo65 In other casesCrusius labeled specific words as Ottoman Turkish loanwords or commentedon the linguistic diversity of the Ottoman Empire Turkish Albanian Greekand Italian were all spoken there and influenced one another Ever the metic-ulous observer Crusius thus connected language and geography This was notto suggest that a necessary correlation between the two would establish howmuch trust his informants deserved as authoritative witnesses Unlike JeanBodin (1530ndash96) for instance Crusius did not see geography as a key to per-sonal character and intellect66 Rather through oral interactions with Greeksfrom all over the Mediterranean Crusius could become more attuned thanhe would otherwise have been to the heterogeneity of postclassical GreekDialectal diversity showed his informantsrsquo exact position within the culturethat he sought to document

So did their appearance and demeanor Crusius often noted the color andvariety of his witnessesrsquo clothing their beards (if they had one) and the objectsthey carried with them A strong focus on the physiognomy and costume of hisvisitors characterized all his descriptions particularly the ldquoprosopographyrdquo ofGabriel Calonas a Greek priest which Crusius laid out in his notebook in1582 In this case the amount of detail is simply startling (fig 1) Calonaswore a ldquolong black habit with long sleevesrdquomdashwhich had faded so much thatit appeared to be dark bluemdashldquodown to his anklesrdquo resembling the garb of aGreek priest or layman Underneath he wore ldquoanother black tunicrdquo and avest He had covered his head with a ldquosmall travelersrsquo cap that he had boughtin Leipzig called a sokalimaukhordquo and a skoufia the brimless cap (adornedwith a cross) that Greek clergy wear ldquoHis chestnut brown beard was long andpointedrdquo and ldquounlike most young laymen he had [muttonchops] on both sidesof his facerdquo He wore boots and was carrying a walking stick67 Other visitors

65 UBTMb 37 fol 85 GH88 ldquoQuaesivi ex Alexandro quaedam vulgaria Graeca vocabula Τὸ θ pronuntiat more cyprio per φrdquo

66 On Bodin see Couzinet67 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH108ndash09 ldquoHabitus eius erat qualis hodie Sacerdotum et

Laicorum Graeciae Longa manuleata nigra tunica (ad caeruleum vergens propter vetustatem)fere usque ad calceos nomine ἀπανωφόρι ἢ φέρενζε Sub ea interior tunica nigraἐσωφόρι ἢ σωφόρι ἕτεροι δὲ ντουλαμα Sub ea χιτὼν divide camisia hemmet ἐπὶ τηςκεφαλης pileolus+ [Marginal note + Huic postea pileum viatorium nigrum Lipsiae emptumimponebat] capiti applicatus ein heublin habens crucem als schwantz qui diceturσοκαλίμαυχο τὸ σκούφια est barbarum et gestatur a Laicis Barbam habebat castanei col-oris satis longam et acuminatam De utroque κροτάφῳ hatte er ein langes haar sed Laici nongestant nisi οἱ γέροντες Indutus et caligis eratrdquo

carried sacks and heavy arms Donatus even showed Crusius ldquoa booklet inwhich he recorded the alms that he had collectedrdquo68

Figure 1 Crusiusrsquos description of Gabriel Calonasrsquos appearance UniversitaumltsbibliothekTuumlbingen Mb 37 fol 85 GH108

68 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH52 ldquoItem libellum [habet] in quo quod in singulis locis acce-perit scriptum estrdquo

As Valentin Groebner has demonstrated establishing onersquos genealogy andappearance was a means of identification and verification widely practiced inpremodern Europe Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries writtendocumentation and evidence of all sorts were current in systems of classificationand identification Seals passports letters of safe conduct coats of arms badgesand banners but also birthmarks names tattoos skin and linguistic compe-tence determined how people identified and responded to strangers InCrusiusrsquos world individuals gained identities from the words of others andtheir relationships to others often determined their position in societyIdentity papers in that sense represented an individual in words and provideda double of the person described They were moreover not faithful portraitsfrom life of the people that carried them but rather descriptions of their appear-ances their height and especially their dress69

The importance of appearance in early modern societies explains in part whyas Ulinka Rublack has shown individuals expended such vast amounts ofmoney on their clothing Onersquos perception of selfhood was intrinsicallybound up with what one wore garments immediately revealed the socialgroup one belonged to or the status one enjoyed within a particular commu-nity70 Tailors made men and women as well as communities and societiesThis fixation on dress is reflected in the many costume books that emergedfrom the mid-sixteenth century onward Ulrike Ilg has shown how thesebooks not only portrayed the full diversity of the worldrsquos peoples as visible intheir appearance but also advanced specific and complex classifications of thehuman race Costume books were connected to the cartographic impulse tomap the globe and they exhibited that ldquopreference in the sixteenth centuryfor organizing knowledge in an encyclopedic mannerrdquo71 In that sense theyoffered certain ethnographic clues to character and culture Illustrations of vest-ments and onersquos appearance in other words informed the way Crusius and hiscontemporaries understood other peoples such as happened in the case of JewsTurks and other groups deemed exotic72

So when Crusius documented the finer details of his visitorsrsquo appearance hefocused on evidence that throughout early modernity not only acted as a meansof identification but also spoke to his particular ethnographic interests in con-temporary Greece He knew as did his contemporaries the importance of dressfor understanding his informants and their culture But Crusius also wanted tosee written documentation that could vouch for his guests This became

69 Groebner70 Rublack 2010a See also Jones and Stallybrass71 Ilg 3372 For some perceptive case studies see Mukerji Holmberg 105ndash26 Colding Smith

increasingly more urgent as he began to suspect that the growing number ofalms-seeking visitors that arrived at his doorstep might not all have been honestabout their intentions Not without a touch of resignation Crusius shared inhis diary his concerns about the validity of their motives ldquobecause nowadaysGreeks come to us more frequently it seems likely to me and to StephanGerlach that they are sent out by the patriarch or the bishops in order to collecta church tax from the Germans by stealth under the pretense of captivitymdashwhich they perhaps feignrdquo73 Crusiusrsquos reservations were understandablebecause some individuals presented by contemporary standards dubiouspersonal credentials Most of his informants could be considered beggarswhose movements were monitored closely in early modern societies Beggarswere often the butt of jokes and stereotyped as being poor because of theirlazinessmdashdeviant behavior according to contemporary critics74 Early moderncities even issued specific instructions to refuse entry to beggars and vaga-bonds75 For this reason Crusius made sure to always obtain a permission tobeg on behalf of his guests even though he did not always succeed in this76

Worse still the specific life trajectories of Crusiusrsquos informants suggestedduplicity and deceit Consider the case of the Greek renegade PhilippusMauricius In August 1585 Mauricius had good reason to present to Crusiusall the documentation that he was carrying At an early age he had been selected(or stolen according to indignant contemporaries) by the Ottoman authoritiesfor an elite education as preparation for state service Like the countless otherGreek boys that this child levy (commonly known as devşirme) turned intoapostates Mauricius was ultimately recruited into the Janissary corps theelite guards of the Ottoman sultan only to later join the ranks of the Sipahithe fief-based Ottoman provincial cavalry corps Anyone who wanted to ques-tion Mauriciusrsquos sincere belief in Christianity could find further incriminatingevidence in his marriage to a Turkish woman and the child that she had bornehim Only his flight to Venice albeit under unclear circumstances and his sub-sequent baptism by Gabriel Severus the Greek Orthodox metropolitan ofPhiladelphia could help account for his current position as a Christian alms-seeking pilgrim77

73 UBT Mh 466 vol 3 fol 298 ldquoquia nunc graeci frequentius ad nos veniunt mihi (ut etDD Steph Gerlachio) verisimile est eos emitti a Patriarcha aut Episcopis etc ut sub prae-textum captivitatum (quas forte fingunt) tributum ecclesiasticum a Germanis etiam latentercolligant etcrdquo

74 R Juumltte75 D Juumltte76 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH158ndash5977 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH153ndash60

With such a life story Mauricius had appearances against him by definitionLike other intermediaries captives and go-betweens renegades who converted(and thus rebelled against their faith) were often subjected to rigorous scrutinyby inquisitors and neighbors alike when they sought readmittance to their for-mer religious community78 Apostasy although an effective means of self-pres-ervation and social mobility in the early modern world warranted severepunishment if the accused was unable to provide evidence of mitigating circum-stances (such as coercion or fear for onersquos life)79 This meant that for individualslike Mauricius the only proof that their intentions and testimonies were sincereand their itineraries justified could be found in the letters of support that theycarried with themmdashevidence that in Mauriciusrsquos case had paradoxically markedhim as a renegade in the first place Traveling meant venturing on thin ice

In most cases however Crusiusrsquos visitors made sure they gave him noreason to mistrust them They carried letters of recommendation that vouchedfor them and confirmed their status as itinerants Travelers and alms-seekingmigrants in particular were supposed to carry such documentation80

Mauricius managed to produce no fewer than fourteen such testimonies81

Others could show but a scrap of paper though Stamatius Donatus hadreceived a letter of recommendation from Pope Gregory XIII (r 1572ndash85)as well that document had subsequently been torn to pieces by a group ofsoldiersmdashthe only thing that he could show Crusius was the metal part of apapal seal that bore Gregoriusrsquos name82 Over time more and more visitorsincluding Mauricius came with several recommendations from all kinds ofindividualsmdashranging from the queen of Poland to local Lutheran theologiansBut documentation from ecclesiastical authorities such as the patriarchal lettertaken from Donatus ranked among the most authoritative Crusius could use aletter from the patriarch for instance to confirm details mentioned in anotherletter as happened in the case of Mauricius In general an ecclesiastical stampof approval verified or at least mentioned the woeful fates of the individuals inquestion (and their relatives) while also vouching for their good intentions andendorsing their reasons for collecting alms Notes from scholars whom Crusiusknew personally or corresponded with could confirm a travelerrsquos bona fides in

78 On renegades and conversion to Islam in the early modern Mediterranean see DavisBaer Krstić Dursteler 2011 Graf

79 Dursteler 201580 On letters of recommendation see Maczak 112 Kresten 1969ndash70 Heyberger On pass-

ports in general see Groebner On the longer history of the migration of Eastern Christians seeGhobrial 2017

81 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 pp 156ndash57 This is a new separate pagination that starts after theldquoGraeci Hominesrdquo section has finished

82 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH51ndash52

similar ways Hugo Blotius the head librarian of Maximilian IIrsquos ImperialLibrary sent Greeks to Tuumlbingen on more than one occasion providing eachof them with a signed letter of recommendation83 A note from such a reliableacquaintance made it easier to trust a person who had arrived on Crusiusrsquosdoorstep

In Crusiusrsquos household letters of recommendation which doubled as pass-ports or letters of safe conduct documented the ethical quality of testimonyBut his notebooks suggest that they perhaps did little more It is somewhat sur-prising that he left no evidence of actually using these letters beyond establish-ing his informantsrsquo itinerary finding out where they came from and assessingtheir fidesmdashhowever fundamental these issues were And even then Crusius har-bored considerable doubt about the captivity stories that his guests told himNevertheless it is evident that he decided to believe what he was toldHowever insincere the direct motives of his interlocutors may have seemedto him by comparing these pilgrimsrsquo testimonies and verifying with great deter-mination the information that they gavemdasheven a single word could requireexplication from various informantsmdashCrusius could separate the accountfrom the person that gave it Being a liar about one thing would not automat-ically disqualify you in his eyes from being informative about another

The documents that Crusiusrsquos guests showed him also appealed to his deepinterest in what could be called the materiality of proof Despite the distinctlyoral nature of Crusiusrsquos scholarly exchanges he approached the evidence thathis Greek informants provided in a fundamentally textual way He alwayswanted to make copies or summaries of the documents that his visitors broughtto Tuumlbingen More than anything he looked for clues that made these testimo-nies authoritative Sometimes for instance he requested his guests to writeentries ldquoin their own handsrdquo84 because he like so many early modern individ-uals deemed autograph letters more valuable and meaningful than versions inthe hand of a third party Handwriting added a special layer of meaning85 Atother times Crusius made extraordinarily detailed copies of the seals and signa-tures that he found at the bottom of letters Signatures lingered somewherebetween the visual and textual between letter and image and had becomeby the sixteenth century the preferred method of validating a document andimbuing it with authority86 Seals on the other hand were critical to givingany legal document its authoritative status

83 Kresten 1970 25ndash26 Gerstinger84 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH119 ldquoabiturus hoc sua manu scripsitrdquo and GH160 ldquoaliaque

sua manu scripsitrdquo85 Daybell Blair 2016b86 Fraenkel

But this process of verification was not always straightforward or easyGreeks made their signatures with elaborate calligraphic strokes complex liga-tures and distinctive abbreviations and contractions These monokondyla asthey are known were often written in one stroke without the pen leavingthe page They were a visual language of their own reading such scrawledworks of Greek art was a formidable exercise Yet Crusius carried it out dili-gently and repeatedly ldquoIt reads Joachim father and patriarch of the greatcity of Alexandria by the grace of Godrdquo was the careful caption that he printednext to one such signature from a letter dated 1561 (fig 2) He also made sureto reproduce the two patriarchal seals that adorned the document to unraveltheir various textual and material threads in his copious annotations to thisletter and to discuss their material qualities in almost microscopic detail87

It is evident that Crusius took great pride in his ability to reproduce the mate-rial and visual aspects of letters In 1581 for instance he read and copied a totalof twenty-two letters that Stephan Gerlach had brought to Tuumlbingen fromConstantinople At the very end of his transcription he confided ldquoIn manycases I have imitated the writing of the autographsrdquo88 Transcribing for himconcerned both form and content As he carefully replicated the white waxseal affixed to a letter from a certain Joasaph of Thessaloniki Crusius noted(aptly in Greek) that the ldquoductus of the letters had been unclearrdquo89 The spatialorganization of the crosses that so often framed Greek letters also drew his atten-tion they indicated how the original letter had been folded90 Crusiusrsquos interestin codicological details was virtually exhaustive it even included such details asthe color of the ink At one moment Crusius shared how the signature of theByzantine emperor that he reproduced had originally been written ldquoin dark redand the rest of the signatures in black inkrdquo91 At another Crusius requested thatTheodosius Zygomalasmdashthe notary in theOrthodox patriarchate with whomhemaintained a lively correspondencemdashconvince his wife Irene to send Crusiusletters ldquoso that [he] could see the handwriting of a laudable Greek womanrdquo92

87 Crusius 1584 230 ldquolegitur dagger ἰοακεὶμ ἐλέῳ Θεου πάπα καὶ πατριάρχης τηςμεγάλης πόλεως ἀλεχανδρείαςrdquo

88 UBT Mb 37 fol 149 p 52r ldquoin plerisque imitatus sum scripturam autographorumrdquoThis is a new separate pencil pagination starting after fol 149

89 UBT Mb 37 fol 149 p 42r ldquoCera alba sed literarum ductus ἀμυδροὶ erantrdquo90 UBT Mb 37 fol 149 p 34v91 Crusius 1584 191 ldquoImperatoris hoc cinnabari scriptum erat reliquorum omnium

ὑπογραφαὶ atramentordquo92 UBT Mh 466 vol 8 fols 212ndash213 ldquoγραψάτω δὲ καὶ ἡ κυρία εἰρήνη ἡ

γλυκυτάτη σου σύζυγος καὶ ὁ υἱὸς φώτιος καὶ ἡ ἀγαπητὴ μελλόνυμφος σωσάννατὰ φίλτατά σου τέκνα ἵνα καὶ γυναικεια χειρόγραφα ἔχω καὶ τούτοιςἐναβρύνωμαιrdquo See also fol 606 The text is mentioned in Rhoby 2005 264

Figure 2 Crusiusrsquos reproduction of the material and visual aspect of letters Martin CrusiusTurcograeciae libri octo Basel 1584 page 230 Universitaumltsbibliothek Tuumlbingen Fo XVI 182

This is a rare instance in which an early modern European scholar showed inter-est in the handwriting of a woman because her gender could enrich his under-standing of a foreign culture

At times however Crusiusrsquos ambitions exceeded his competence WhenSalomon Schweigger showed him his Ottoman letter of safe conductCrusiusrsquos inability to read Turkish or Arabic did not discourage him from tryingto copy the document and record its material idiosyncrasies in great if unusualdetail (fig 3) He accurately reproduced the fine Ottoman calligraphy of the seal(or tughra) of Sultan Murad III but then scribbled a very loose impression ofthe rest of the document fifteen lines of Turkish in Arabic script underneath itIn this case recording meant preserving the layout of the original documenteven when such a graphic reproduction would not preserve its content Thathe could also copy Schweiggerrsquos German translation and thus could accessthe content anyway must have been reassuring93

The diligence with which Crusius documented these testimonies and auto-graphs in his scholarly notebooks was to some extent exceptional None of hiscorrespondents expressed enthusiasm for signatures and seals like Crusius didNone of his direct colleagues in Tuumlbingen copied them so attentively so sys-tematically and with such pride Few contemporaries it seems wrung knowl-edge out of handwriting in equal fashion On the other hand Crusiusrsquos generalinterests in handwriting and the materiality of testimony were at the same timenot completely unheard of Scholars across the confessional divide also engagedwith material culture in order to gain practical knowledge studying objects toread the world around them Dress is a case in point and so are seals and coinsMore specifically early modern scholars sometimes cut ownersrsquo signatures offtitle pages and collected them as treasured objects In Lutheran circles to whichCrusius belonged some men and women even venerated signatures and piecesof handwriting as relics believing these snippets of paper to be imbued withreligious efficacy94

More relevant still the period witnessed the rise of the alba amicorum tradi-tion In these paper friendship books learned men and women collected thesignatures witty aphorisms and inscriptions of their friends and acquaintancesThese alba became a means to foster group identities establish or affirmscholarly networks or cement or even immortalize friendship bonds in

93 UBT Mh 466 vol 2 fol 505 The original document was reproduced in the traveloguethat Schweigger published in 1608 See Schweigger 233 At various moments in his lifeCrusius confessed he was incapable of reading similar documents in Arabic and Syriac Seefor instance the notes and sketches that he left in UBT Mb 37 fol 149 p 70r

94 For the Lutheran interest in ldquothe materialization of the wordrdquo and handwritten auto-graphs and inscriptions see Rublack 2010b

writing95 Whatever the specific purpose of individual copies they were allbased on the premise that the inscription could in a way serve as a memorial

Figure 3 Crusiusrsquos attempt to reproduce a Turkish letter of safe conduct Universitaumltsbiblio-thek Tuumlbingen Mh 466 vol 2 fol 505

95 Schnabel

stand-in for the individual who had left it on the page Crusius inscribed manyalba leaving quick-witted notes in his friendsrsquo and studentsrsquo paper books andhe eagerly requested his guests to do the same ldquofor the sake of memorializingrdquo96

These inscriptions not unlike the Greek signatures that Crusius collected in hisnotebooks represented the writer in writing They preserved tangible traces ofintimate connections They immortalized friendships at a distancemdashinCrusiusrsquos case the distance between Tuumlbingen and a world he would nevervisit97

REPRODUCING EVIDENCE

The Greeks that visited Crusius in Tuumlbingen not only helped him speak theirlanguage but they also told him about other matters They informed him aboutthe topography and demographics of Greece for instance with nearly all hisvisitors Crusius talked about Athens eager to know more about the cityrsquosschools and churches its inhabitants and physical contours One pilgrimDaniel Palaeologus even drew Crusius a map of the city98 Other informantslike Andreas and Lucas Argyrus told him about the islands of the Aegean andthe castles and cities adorning them99 Still others explained to Crusius the finerdetails of the Greek Orthodox religious landscape some described bishopricsand monasteries while with others Crusius debated about church doctrine100

These conversations were part of a much larger documentary record thatCrusius had been compiling since the 1560s For years he had been readingaccounts of Byzantine and Ottoman history (both in print and in manuscript)such as Francesco Sansovinorsquos history of the Turks and LaonikosChalkokondylesrsquos famous account of the fall of the Byzantine Empire andthe rise of the Turks101 He had also marked his way through Pierre BelonOgier Ghiselin de Busbecq and Georgius Dousa whose travelogues provideddetailed descriptions of what they encountered on their journeys to theOttoman Empire102 Crusius knew Pierre Gillesrsquos accounts of the Bosporus

96 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH150 ldquoInscripserunt et aliis et Limpurgensibus 3 baronibushic studentibus in libellos μνήμης ἕνεκα valde ἀνορθογράφως Nam vulgariL loquunturrdquo

97 For further connections between the signatures Crusius collected and the alba amicorumtradition see Crusius 1584 235

98 UBT Mh 466 vol 3 fol 30299 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH63ndash65 Cf Crusius 1584 207100 UBT Mb 37 fol 85 GH90 and GH149 UBT Mh 466 vol 3 fols 303ndash304101 UBT Fo XI 24 UBT Mb 11 UBT Gi 1282102 UBT Fc 334 UBT Fo XI 4c UBT Fo XI 25

and of the antiquities of Constantinople103 He had collected Franz vonBillerbegrsquos report on the Ottoman state as well as other news items on forinstance the famous Siege of Szigetvaacuter of 1566 at which thousands ofHabsburg and Ottoman soldiers clashed and lost their lives104

Documentation sent to Tuumlbingen from the Ottoman Empire further contextu-alized what Crusius had learned from interviewing and reading StephanGerlach to whom Crusius had turned for information about the Greek vernac-ular also sent letters to Tuumlbingen that recounted what he had experienced asLutheran chaplain in the Sublime Portemdashand so would Gerlachrsquos successorSalomon Schweigger It was Gerlach moreover who acquired a few Greekchronicles and manuscripts for Crusius which supplied him with a valuableinside perspective on the political and ecclesiastical history of the Greekworld during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries

Together all the materials and information that Crusius collected amountedto nothing less than a full-fledged ethnographic record of various aspects ofGreek culture from religion to topography from linguistics to food andfrom dress to politics It was both tightly focused and wide-ranging Heobtained information about Greek marriages the ways in which Greeksdated the days and the years the various types of coins in circulation in theOttoman Empire and the ancient monuments that were still extant inConstantinople and other cities105 Not unlike others who after the Battle ofLepanto studied Ottoman affairs Crusius learned that Christian boys who hadbeen taken by the Ottomans to receive an elite education at court filled theranks of the Janissaries106 He was familiar with the origin of their namemdashldquonew soldierrdquo (ldquoyeni-ccedilerirdquo)mdashand that they differed from the Sipahi theOttoman cavalry corps107 Crusius recorded the names and locations of thevarious Orthodox monasteries on Mount Athos as well as the number ofmonks inhabiting the peninsula He knew what customs dictated contactwith the patriarchmdashone approached him with onersquos hand on onersquos chest Hehad intimate knowledge of the funerary rites of the Greeks the feasts held inhonor of the deceased and the laments sung at such ceremonies He alsorecorded how Greeks performed their liturgy and celebrated Massmdasha questionof central interest given the belief that the Orthodox churches followed partic-ularly ancient rituals And Crusius knew what garments Greek ecclesiastics

103 UBT Fo XI 54104 UBT Fo XI 76 UBT Ke XVIII 4a2105 Crusius 1584 64 239 498 507106 Crusius 1584 193107 Crusius 1584 65

wore not to mention that some of the churches were richly decorated withimages of the saints apostles and church fathers108

Not everything that reached him was music to his ears though Especially thereports of Johannes and Theodosius Zygomalas influential clerics at theOrthodox patriarchate contained much new information that disturbedCrusius greatly109 Their letters made it unequivocally clear that Greek bookswere difficult to come by that levels of literacy were distressingly low andmdashsomething that must have disheartened Crusius in particularmdashthat fewGreeks had access to scripture and that even fewer were able to understandit since the Bible was not readily available in vernacular Greek Like the pilgrimsthat visited Crusius Zygomalas also reported on contemporary Athens but hepainted a rather bleak picture hardly any ancient monument had survived andthe population of Athens had decreased dramatically110 Once the center of cul-ture Athens had become an insignificant point on the map of letters and learn-ing This account may perhaps not have been completely unexpected but it wasnevertheless terrible news to Crusius and his contemporaries for whom ancientAthens served as both metaphor andmodel of a cultured city Theodor Zwingerfor instance with whom Crusius corresponded in the 1580s and whose work heowned had chosen ancient Athens along with Paris Basel and Padua (each ofwhich he called the Athens of respectively France Switzerland and Italy) asone of his case studies in the Methodus Apodemica his praised treatise ontravel111

Crusius then had intimate knowledge of Greek civilization including thechanges it had undergone since the arrival of the Ottomans In part Crusiusmanaged to discover so much on so many topics because he tabbed from dif-ferent types of sources and compiled the observations of others whether thesewere textual or empirical Much of this material ultimately made it into printIn 1584 Crusius reproduced many of the testimonies that he had collected inhis Turcograeciae libri octo published by Sebastian Henricpetri in Basel112 Inthis work Crusius departed from the narrative or topical histories that otherearly modern scholars wrote of civilizations both past and present113 In eachof the Turcograeciarsquos eight books Crusius meticulously edited Greek primary

108 Crusius 1584 48 189ndash90 197 198 203 205109 On this epistolary exchange see Rhoby 2005 and 2009 Legrand110 Crusius 1584 430 437111 Zwinger For the broader context see Stagl112 A year later its companion piece followed the Germanograeciae libri sex a collection of

poems and oration in Latin and Greek which illustrated the transfer of Greek erudition toGermany Some of what Crusius uncovered at a later stage was incorporated in the AnnalesSuevici (1595) his comprehensive history of Swabia

113 Meserve Greenblatt Grafton 2007 Rubieacutes 2000

sources translated them carefully into Latin and explicated them in lengthysets of notes creating a vast repository of primary sources that illuminated var-ious aspects of Ottoman Greek society Book 1 for instance was dedicated tothe political history of Constantinople from the end of the fourteenth centuryall the way up to 1578 Book 2 offered testimonies that pertained to the eccle-siastical affairs of the Ottoman Greek world In books 3 4 7 and 8 Crusiusreproduced the letters that he was sent his chief source of information for thesocial fabric of Greek society Books 5 and 6 completed Crusiusrsquos survey ofOttoman Greek life by showing the pedagogical potential of vernacularGreek texts Unlikely sources such as a vernacular Greek version of theBatrachomyomachia (Battle of frogs and mice)mdasha late antique parody ofthe Iliad long attributed to Homer and reproduced in book 6 of theTurcograeciamdashcould Crusius insisted teach readers much about matters ofwarfare and politics114 In his explications of these texts Crusius appendedoften verbatim choice passages and full texts from relevant books in hisstudy At strategic places in the work he also incorporated the firsthand evi-dence that he had gathered by interviewing his informants

A single example may illuminate how these various bits of evidence bothoral and textual formed an intricate mosaic that must have conveyed a strongsense of immediacy to Crusiusrsquos readership One of his principal aims had beento find out as much as he could about the Orthodox Church This was in itselfclear evidence that Crusiusrsquos confessional background shaped his scholarlyinterests Although he eventually concluded that the Greeks had fallen intosuperstitious ways he was nevertheless (or because of this) determined to docu-ment their religious practices It was Stephan Gerlach more than anybody elsewho helped Crusius acquire such knowledge From Gerlachrsquos precise andempirical observations packed with spellbinding detail Crusius assembledwhat was arguably the most accurate representation of the sixteenth-centuryGreek Orthodox patriarchate in Western Europe (fig 4)115 Word for wordand line for line Crusius reproduced what he had read and seen in Gerlachrsquosletter first in his diary and then in his notes to book 2 of the Turcograecia Theresulting image in combination with an elaborate legend identified the entirelayout of the patriarchal complex including the house of the patriarch the vis-itorsrsquo rooms and the ancient cisterns116

But Gerlachrsquos testimonies however dense in empirical detail they were didnot suffice to understand the full richness of Greek Orthodox life When

114 Crusius 1584 dedicatory epistle 3r115 UBT Mh 466 vol 1 fols 722ndash723116 Crusius 1584 189ndash90 Crusiusrsquos manuscript draft can be found in UBT Mh 466 vol

1 fols 721ndash722

Figure 4 Crusiusrsquos representation of the sixteenth-century Greek Orthodox patriarchateMartin Crusius Turcograeciae libri octo Basel 1584 page 190 UniversitaumltsbibliothekTuumlbingen Fo XVI 182

Crusius sought to understand the set of images that Gerlach had sent himincluding one of the Orthodox patriarch he had to rely on the linguistic exper-tise of native informants in this case Stamatius Donatus As they talked aboutthe image Donatus not only labeled all the individual elements and colors ofthe garment of the patriarch for Crusius but also placed the image and espe-cially the clothing depicted on it in its proper religious context He told Crusiusthat ldquotwelve ecclesiastics choose crown and consecrate the Patriarchrdquo byvesting him with his patriarchal attire117 Knowing full well the importanceof dress to understand a culture Crusius included in the Turcograecia thevery image that Gerlach had sent him as well as the explications andnotes that Donatus had provided In this way the oral glossators of Crusiusrsquosbooksmdashthe informants that lodged with himmdashmetamorphosed into the foot-notes of his publications lending authority to the main text in such a way thatthe notes themselves became an organic and visible part of the whole

In this undertaking as in so many other things Crusius strove to be com-prehensive The Turcograecia is in that sense more than just an edition of first-hand sources Throughout the book Crusius also included carefulreproductions of the testimoniesrsquo material aspectsmdashevidence that had helpedhim establish the fides of his sources in the first place Seals signatures the duc-tus the ink and even the shapes and sizes of the original testimonies were allreproduced or described in great detail There are over two dozen such repro-ductions meant to imbue the printed testimonies with authority and credibil-ity In most cases Crusius also included a transcription and some codicologicalnotes Printing these material characteristics was a salient choice and not onlybecause they served as a means of verification Reproducing them was alsoexpensive The inclusion of Greek signatures required the cutting of a set ofwoodcuts In fact in a later publication published by a different printerCrusius confided that he had been unable to reproduce a similar set of Greeksignatures with their ldquoelegant ductusrdquo because the printer lacked the right equip-ment for the job118

However idiosyncratic the Turcograecia was it emerged from the broadercurrents of sixteenth-century scholarly praxis Crusiusrsquos commitment to offerfull reproductions for instance rivaled the zeal with which antiquaries

117 Crusius 1584 188 ldquoδώδεκα ἐκκλερικοὶν ἐκκλησιαστικοὶ ειναι στὸπατριαρχειο ὅπου ἠποίγουνε τὸν πατριάρχην καὶ τὸν στεφανώνουν τον sunt 12Clerici in Patriarchatu qui faciunt Patriarcham amp coronant eum καὶ βάνουν του τὸπετραχήλι του πατριάρχη amp imponunt ei vestem cuius foramini caput inseritur nec appa-ret ea sed intra reliquum vestitum gestaturrdquo

118 Crusius 1586 unpaginated ldquoPonam autem absque elegantibus adhuc ductibus donecforte Typographus tales καλλιγραφίας sculpendas curans contingatrdquo

scrutinized and recorded all aspects of ancient artifacts and objects both localand exotic Many antiquaries naturalists and ethnographers roamed the earlymodern world in search of new exotica and extraordinary objects for their cab-inets of curiosities and paper museums Some also went to great lengths to cap-ture objects and animals in drawings and then to reproduce these in theirprinted works119 Another group expended much effort and even moremoney on acquiring and copying (Oriental) manuscripts for their ever-expand-ing collections and well-stocked libraries120 Few of Crusiusrsquos contemporarieshowever committed themselves with comparable energy to the study of hand-writing and seals as a means to understand a whole culture True antiquariessuch as Jean Mabillon (1631ndash1707) and Johann Michael Heineccius (1674ndash1722) collected seals as part of a broader interest in antiquities or studiedthe material aspects of documents as a means of authentication but theywrote their works long after Crusiusrsquos deathmdashat a time when sigillographyand paleography began to emerge as distinct scholarly subjects out of themore encyclopedic forms of antiquarian studies that sixteenth-century practi-tioners knew121

Yet despite their differences Crusius and the antiquaries sang a similar tunein one hugely important respect the presentation of evidence For antiquariesreproducing and showing evidence was part and parcel of their scholarly praxisAs Anthony Grafton and Arnaldo Momigliano have demonstrated since antiq-uity a whole tradition of scholars chose to reproduce evidence and establish factsrather than ldquoweaving them into an eloquent storyrdquo122 Antiquaries firmlybelieved in the supreme value of primary sources and formulated criteria forestablishing the credibility of sources They organized their material systemati-cally rather than chronologically and while they pieced together evidence of avariegated nature they generally expressed a preference for materials outside theliterary realm coins inscriptions and statues Yet they also expressed an abidinginterest in the materiality of documents and they often presented their findingsin visual form123 It was crucial in any given case to record evidence firsthandand to disclose under what conditions an observation was made If scholars hadbeen unable to examine the object themselves they made sure to rely on a

119 Kusukawa Egmond120 The literature on these topics is vast For an insightful selection see Daston and Park

Findlen Bevilacqua and Pfeifer Ghobrial 2014121 Mabillon Heineccius For the broader seventeenth- and eighteenth-century context see

Head Hiatt122 Grafton 1997b 153 Momigliano 1950 For history writing in this period more gen-

erally see Grafton 2007123Wood Stenhouse See also Shalev 33ndash43

trustworthy informant who had (even if in practice antiquaries did not alwaysadhere to these standards) Antiquarian writings moreover evince a propensityfor systematic collecting and encyclopedic comprehensiveness In the end anti-quaries believedmdashjust as Crusius didmdashthat the gradual accumulation of evi-dence would allow for an extensive survey of not just individual items butalso all the individual threads of a civilizationrsquos social fabric

The Turcograecia also demonstrates how Crusius drew heavily from thecriteria for source criticism that ecclesiastical historians and travelers appliedin their publications Their works helped Crusius think about how he couldcommunicate in print not only the sheer enormity and diversity of Greeklife but also the prominence of his testimonies and the results of his laboriouspractice of establishing credibility therein From ecclesiastical historians helearned that the inclusion of full text rather than scant quotations offeredreaders the possibility of verificationmdashan operation that was vital in the religiouswars over theology church doctrine and tradition fought out in Catholic andProtestant camps alike Nowhere in fact was there a greater emphasis on factualevidence than in early modern church histories Following the fourth-centuryChurch History of Eusebius bishop of Caesareamdashthe archetype of such adocumentary historymdashearly modern historians of the church searchedmeticulously and restlessly ldquofor the true image of Early Christianity to beopposed to the false one of the rivalsrdquo124 These (often apologetic) endeavorsproduced vast repositories of direct evidence that became powerful tools inthe hands of scholars across the confessional divide

Church historians cited documents in many ways Eusebius tended to quotewhole documents with headnotes a practice that would justify accepting thedocuments as genuine or would otherwise localize them in time and spaceJohannes Nauclerus (ca 1425ndash1510)mdashwhose early sixteenth-century WorldChronicle Crusius knew well and cited repeatedlymdashusually jammed documentsinto the text with very little explication and no typographical separation125 Inthe Magdeburg Centuriesmdashanother collaborative and compilatory project thatCrusius referenced oftenmdashMatthias Flacius (1520ndash75) and his team of collab-orators steered a middle course In some cases they inserted whole documentsinto their work explicated by sets of headnotes In others they simply summa-rized or excerpted them In the Turcograecia Crusius adopted their eclecticmethods eclectically

Travel writers on the other hand showed Crusius the full complexity ofreporting a world that lay beyond what was directly visible Early modern

124 Momigliano 1990 150 Momigliano 1963125 On an early reader of Nauclerusrsquos world chronicle and his and Nauclerusrsquos ways of repro-

ducing medieval sources see Grafton 2016

travelers maintained a vexed relationship with established standards of truthAlthough scholars of the period firmly believed travel and autopsy to be pow-erful ways to gain accurate knowledge travel writers regularly found themselvesconfronted with a pressing problem of credibility how to entertain convey toan audience the known and unknown and portray incredible facts and marvel-ous fictions without compromising their reliability How to escape the longshadow cast by a tradition of travel writing known for its fabulous tales andwondrous creatures126 Most writers deployed elaborate rhetorical strategiesor adduced firsthand experiences to tackle such issues In their writings andCrusiusrsquos library shows he read many he discovered the importance of empiricalobservation But such works also gave him a format for citing reliable infor-mants and their firsthand testimonies

These then are the methods and models adopted by Crusius who as thebooks in his library suggest was intimately familiar with all these bodies ofscholarship They showed him the lasting value of obtaining firsthand observa-tions as well as the necessity of recording the materiality of documents as part ofimbuing a work with credibility Full reproductions Crusius must have real-ized offered readers a direct sense of the nature of contemporary Greek culturealmost as if Ottoman Greek life unfolded in front of their eyes Documentscould speak for themselves and would take the reader on a vivid journeythrough the many fabrics of Ottoman Greek society This journey could asfar as Crusius was concerned be an actual one even though it was undertakenfrom a scholarrsquos studiolo In the preface of the Turcograecia he insisted that hisreader ought to be a pilgrim (peregrinus) who ldquostanding at a distance couldcontemplate the present-dayrdquo situation of Greek civilization127 It is evidentthat for such a hermeneutics precise reproductions of authoritative testimoniessurpassed by far the potential of narrative and analytical history Original doc-uments the Turcograecia suggests could replace a physical journey throughspace128

This was a matter of poignant urgency In Crusiusrsquos view few realized whatwas really going on in the Greek lands That is not to say that Crusius knew allthere was to know At times he openly acknowledged his inability to verify spe-cific bits of information It is evident that he also missed parts of the story andmisinterpreted others It is therefore important to bear the limits of Crusiusrsquos

126 On travel credibility and autopsy see Greenblatt Pagden 1993 Johnson 2007Davies On travel as knowledge see Stagl

127 Crusius 1584 dedicatory epistle 3r ldquoperegrinus aliquis quasi ἔξωθεμισάμενοςθεωρει (foris stans contemplatur) praesentes Graecorum res quales sintrdquo

128 In the 1593 Antiquitatum judaicarum libri IX Benito Arias Montano would make a similarpoint about maps arguing that they could serve as a replacement for pilgrimage See Shalev 57

scholarly enterprise in mind his interactions with Greek pilgrims were irregularthe arrival of letters from the Ottoman Empire was subject to the vagaries of thepostal network and unlike contemporary Orientalists and even some of hisGerman informants Crusius never sought to enrich his vision by studyingArabic and Ottoman Turkish or materials in these languages Crusiusrsquos storythen was to some extent serendipitous and in no small part a story of theGreeks told through Greek sources Perhaps because of this bias Crusiuscould make one point crystal clear in the Turcograecia ldquoGreece has been turki-fiedrdquo he wrote in the preface admitting perhaps that this was no longer theworld that he and his audience had known through the study of Plato andHomer Neither was it a world upheld by the orthodoxy of the church TheGreeks Crusius bemoaned had erred and fallen into superstitious ways andGreecersquos ldquomisfortune should therefore be lamentedrdquo129 Only in original docu-ments then could his readers experience the precariousness of Greek culture infull and in its full complexity

CONCLUSION

The Turcograecia is a complex publication and part of the life cycle of a muchlarger scholarly project an extensive investigation into the language and lives ofOttoman Greeks For decades Crusius read and corresponded He met peopleassessed them and their documents fed them interviewed them and learnedfrom them Some of what he learned went into his general store of knowledgeor his unpublished lexica Other materials he decided to reproduce in hisprinted works in the fullest of detail Crusiusrsquos selection criteria are admittedlynot always clear In the preface of the Turcograecia he confides that he initiallywas unsure whether the material was fit for publication at all It was only aftersome of his highly esteemed colleagues had heard about it that Crusius was con-vinced that the documents should see the light of day130 Although such expres-sions of modesty were commonplace this is also the only indication of whyCrusius published such miscellaneous material The documents amounted toa body of knowledge that defied neat categorization but combined and printedtogether in a single scholarly work they did offer an incredibly detailed andwide-ranging insight into Ottoman Greek society The Turcograecia was inmany ways a paper archive that preserved the evidence about a culture whosecharacter had changed dramatically in the previous century

129 Crusius 1584 dedicatory epistle 2v ldquoἑλλας ibi ἐκτουρκωθεισα est Graecia servitutiTurcicae subiecta insuperque multis in Religione erroribus amp superstitionibus (quod initio noslatebat) obnoxia ideoque merito infelicitas eius deplorandardquo

130 Crusius 1584 dedicatory epistle 2v

For that reason it is a document that also belongs to the history of earlymodern ethnography The testimonies that Crusius printed in combinationwith all the other evidence that he collected in his notebooks gave him a sophis-ticated understanding of the full diversity of a culture that was not his own Theimpact of discovering what was going on in the Ottoman Empire was in manyways comparable to the shock waves that radiated from the Americas and Asiaand that would break on European shores of all professional and confessionalstripes Just as early historians of Amerindian civilizations had recorded thevibrant cultural and religious life that they encountered theremdashsometimeswith amazement sometimes with a misguided sense of cultural superioritymdashso Crusius sought to assemble a full profile of Ottoman Greek society surprisedabout the survival of the Greek Orthodox Church disappointed about itssuperstitious ways Just as Jesuit missionaries studied local cultures in supportof a proselytizing agenda so the Lutheran in Crusius dreamed that his scholar-ship would someday bring Greek Orthodox Christians into the Lutheranfold131 Early modern Greece was uncharted territory but promising land

Crusius arrived at his conclusions by marshaling an interdisciplinary set ofskills he combed works of antiquarianism church history and travel writingto publish his results he compared material and visual characteristics to assesstestimonies and he conducted interviews in the comfort of his study to obtainfirsthand accounts of Ottoman Greek culture and its language He read exten-sively and collaboratively and maintained a correspondence with local Ottomaninformants Discovery in Crusiusrsquos case was thus a prolonged process It was acontinuous act of recording the information of others and the product of stead-fast compilation This is not to say that empiricism and firsthand observationsdid not matter to Crusius On the contrary his scholarly works teach us underwhat conditions an early modern individual could see a distant civilizationthrough the eyes of others

131 On Jesuits and ethnography see Rubieacutes 2017 On Crusiusrsquos hopes see UBT Mh 466vol 9 fol 250

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival and Manuscript SourcesUniversitaumltsbibliothek Tuumlbingen (UBT) DK I 64deg Andreas Kunades Ἄνθος των Χαρίτων

Venice 1546UBT Fc 334 Pierre Belon Les observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables

trouveacutees en Gregravece Asie Indeacutee Egypte Arabie et autres pays estranges Antwerp 1555UBT Fo XI 76 Franz von Billerbeg Epistola Constantinopoli recens scripta 1582UBT Fo XI 4c Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum ad

Solimannum Turcarum Imperatorem C M oratore confecta Antwerp 1582UBT Fo XI 25 Georgius Dousa De itinere suo Constantinopolitano epistola Leiden 1599UBT Fo XI 54 Pierre Gilles De Bosporo Thracico libri III Lyon 1561UBT Fo XI 54 Pierre GillesDe topographia Constantinopoleos et de illius antiquitatibus libri 4

Lyon 1562UBT Fo XI 24 Francesco Sansovino Historia universale dellrsquoorigine et imperio dersquo Turchi

Venice 1573UBT Gi 1282 Laonikos Chalkokondyles De origine et rebus gestis Turcorum libri decem

Basel 1556UBT Ke XVIII 4a2 Warhafftige Contrafactur vnd verzeychnuszlig des gewaltigen Schloszlig Zigeth

mit allen seinen Festungen Augsburg 1566UBT Mb 11 Martin Crusiusrsquos manuscript copy of several Byzantine texts including Laonikos

Chalkokondylesrsquos HistoriesUBT Mb 37 Manuscript notebook that Martin Crusius kept for recording both the Greek

letters that he was sent as well as his interactions with itinerant Greek Orthodox ChristiansUBT Mh 443 Manuscript copy of the history that Martin Crusius wrote of his own family

Three volumesUBT Mh 466 Martin Crusiusrsquos manuscript diary Nine volumes

Printed SourcesActa et scripta theologorum Wirtembergensium et patriarchae Constantinopolitani D Hieremiae

quae utrique ab anno 1576 usque ad annum 1581 de Augustana Confessione inter se miseruntGraece amp Latine ab ijsdem theologis edita Wittenberg 1584

Algazi Gadi ldquoScholars in Households Refiguring the Learned Habitus 1480ndash1550rdquo Sciencein Context 161ndash2 (2003) 9ndash42

Baer Marc David Honored by the Glory of Islam Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman EuropeOxford Oxford University Press 2008

Ben-Tov Asaph Lutheran Humanists and Greek Antiquity Melanchthonian Scholarship betweenUniversal History and Pedagogy Leiden Brill 2009

Bevilacqua Alexander and Helen Pfeifer ldquoTurquerie Culture in Motion 1650ndash1750rdquo Past ampPresent 2211 (2013) 75ndash118

Blair Ann Too Much to Know Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age NewHaven CT Yale University Press 2010

Hidden Hands Amanuenses and Authorship in Early Modern Europe The 2014A S W Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography podcast httprepositoryupennedurosenbach8

ldquoConrad Gessnerrsquos Paratextsrdquo Gesnerus 731 (2016a) 73ndash123

ldquoEarly Modern Attitudes toward the Delegation of Copying and Note-Takingrdquo InForgetting Machines Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe edAlberto Cevolini 265ndash85 Leiden Brill 2016b

Bleichmar Daniela ldquoBooks Bodies and Fields Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Encounterswith New World Materia Medicardquo In Colonial Botany Science Commerce and Politics edLonda Schiebinger and Claudia Swan 83ndash99 Philadelphia University of PennsylvaniaPress 2005

ldquoTranslation Mobility and Mediation The Case of the Codex Mendozardquo In Sites ofMediation Connected Histories of Places Processes and Objects in Europe and Beyond1450ndash1650 ed Susanna Burghartz Lucas Burkart and Christine Goumlttler 240ndash69Leiden Brill 2016

Brodman James William Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain The Order of Merced on theChristian-Islamic Frontier Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press 1986

Cohen Mark R ldquoLeone da Modenarsquos Riti A Seventeenth-Century Plea for Social Toleration ofJewsrdquo Jewish Social Studies 344 (1972) 287ndash321

Colding Smith Charlotte Images of Islam 1453ndash1600 Turks in Germany and Central EuropeLondon Pickering amp Chatto 2014

Considine John Small Dictionaries and Curiosity Lexicography and Fieldwork in Post-MedievalEurope Oxford Oxford University Press 2017

Corens Liesbeth Kate Peters and Alexandra Walsham eds The Social History of the ArchiveRecord Keeping in Early Modern Europe Past amp Present 230 Supplement 11 (2016)

Couzinet Marie-Dominique Sub specie hominis Eacutetudes sur le savoir humain au XVIe siegravecleParis Librairie Philosophique J Vrin 2007

Crusius Martin Turcograeciae libri Octo Basel 1584 Hodoeporicon sive Itinerarium D Solomonis Sweigkeri Sultzensis Leipzig 1586 Annales Suevici Frankfurt 1595ndash96

Daston Lorraine ldquoThe Sciences of the Archiverdquo Osiris 271 (2012) 156ndash87Daston Lorraine and Katharine Park Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150ndash1750

New York Zone Books 1998Davies Surekha Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human New Worlds Maps

and Monsters Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2016Davis Natalie Zemon Trickster Travels A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds

New York Hill and Wang 2006Daybell James The Material Letter in Early Modern England Manuscript Letters and the Culture

and Practices of Letter-Writing 1512ndash1635 Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan 2012de Lorenzi James ldquoRed Sea Travelers in Mediterranean Lands Ethiopian Scholars and Early

Modern Orientalism ca 1500ndash1668rdquo InWorld-Building in the Early Modern Imaginationed Allison B Kavey 173ndash200 Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan 2010

Deutsch Yaacov Judaism in Christian Eyes Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism inEarly Modern Europe Oxford Oxford University Press 2012

Ditchfield Simon Liturgy Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy Pietro Maria Campi and thePreservation of the Particular Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1995

Dooley Brendan The Social History of Skepticism Experience and Doubt in Early ModernCulture Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press 1999

Dursteler Eric R Renegade Women Gender Identity and Boundaries in the Early ModernMediterranean Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press 2011

ldquoFearing the lsquoTurkrsquo and Feeling the Spirit Emotion and Conversion in the EarlyModern Mediterraneanrdquo Journal of Religious History 394 (2015) 484ndash505

Egmond Florike Eye for Detail Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science 1500ndash1630London Reaktion Books 2017

Eideneier Hans ldquoVon der Handschrift zum Druck Martinus Crusius und David Houmlschel alsSammler griechischer Venezianer Volksdrucke des 16 Jahrhundertsrdquo In Graeca recentiorain Germania Deutsch-griechische Kulturbeziehungen vom 15 bis 19 Jahrhundert ed HansEideneier 93ndash112 Wiesbaden Harrassowitz 1994

Engammare Max On Time Punctuality and Discipline in Early Modern Calvinism TransKarin Maag Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2010

Faust Manfred ldquoDie Mehrsprachigkeit des Humanisten Martin Crusiusrdquo In Homenaje aAntonio Tovar 137ndash49 Madrid Gredos 1972

Findlen Paula Possessing Nature Museums Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early ModernItaly Berkeley University of California Press 1994

Fraenkel Beacuteatrice La signature Genegravese drsquoun signe Paris Gallimard 1992Friedman Yvonne Encounter between Enemies Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of

Jerusalem Leiden Brill 2002Friedrich Markus Die Geburt des Archivs Eine Wissensgeschichte Munich Oldenbourg 2013Frisch Andrea The Invention of the Eyewitness Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern

France Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press 2004Gaier Albert ldquoPfarrer Martin Krauβrdquo Blaumltter fuumlr Wuumlrttembergische Kirchengeschichte 68ndash69

(1968ndash69) 497ndash521Gerlach Stephan Tage-Buch Frankfurt 1674Gerstinger Hans ldquoMartin Crusiusrsquo Briefwechsel mit den Wiener Gelehrten Hugo Blotius und

Johannes Sambucus (1581ndash1599)rdquo Byzantinische Zeitschrift 30 (1929) 202ndash11Ghobrial John-Paul The Whispers of Cities Information Flows in Istanbul London and Paris in

the Age of William Trumbull Oxford Oxford University Press 2014 ldquoMigration from Within and Without The Problem of Eastern Christians in Early

Modern Europerdquo Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 27 (2017) 153ndash73Ginzburg Carlo Clues Myths and the Historical Method Trans John Tedeschi and Anne C

Tedeschi Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press 1989Ginzburg Carlo History Rhetoric and Proof Hanover NH University Press of New

England 1999Goeing Anja-Silvia ldquoMartin Crusiusrsquo Verwendung von Notizen seines Lehrers Johannes

Sturmrdquo In Johannes Sturm (1507ndash1589) Rhetor Paumldagoge und Diplomat ed MatthieuArnold 239ndash60 Tuumlbingen Mohr Siebeck 2009

Goumlz Wilhelm and Ernst Conrad Diarium Martini Crusii 1596ndash1597 Tuumlbingen HLaupprsquosche Buchhandlung 1927

Diarium Martini Crusii 1598ndash1599 Tuumlbingen H Laupprsquosche Buchhandlung 1931Graf Tobias P The Sultanrsquos Renegades Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of

the Ottoman Elite 1575ndash1610 Oxford Oxford University Press 2017Grafton Anthony New Worlds Ancient Texts The Power of Tradition and the Shock of

Discovery Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1992 Commerce with the Classics Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers Ann Arbor

University of Michigan Press 1997a The Footnote A Curious History Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1997b ldquoMartin Crusius Reads His Homerrdquo Princeton University Library Chronicle 641

(2002) 63ndash86What Was History The Art of History in Early Modern Europe Cambridge Cambridge

University Press 2007 ldquoReading History Conrad Peutinger and the Chronicle of Nauclerusrdquo InGesammeltes

Gedaumlchtnis Konrad Peutinger und die kulturelle Uumlberlieferung im 16 Jahrhundert edReinhard Laube and Helmut Zaumlh 19ndash25 Lucerne Quaternio Verlag 2016

Grafton Anthony and Joanna Weinberg ldquoI have always loved the Holy Tonguerdquo IsaacCasaubon the Jews and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship Cambridge MAHarvard University Press 2011

ldquoJohann Buxtorf Makes A Notebookrdquo In Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices AGlobal Comparative Approach ed Anthony Grafton and Glenn W Most 275ndash98Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2016

Greenblatt StephenMarvelous Possessions The Wonder of the New World Chicago Universityof Chicago Press 1991

Grell Ole Peter and Andrew Cunningham eds Health Care and Poor Relief in ProtestantEurope 1500ndash1700 London Routledge 1997

Groebner Valentin Who Are You Identification Deception and Surveillance in Early ModernEurope Trans Mark Kyburz and John Peck New York Zone Books 2007

Head Randolph C ldquoDocuments Archives and Proof around 1700rdquo The Historical Journal564 (2013) 909ndash30

Heineccius Johann Michael De veteribus germanorum aliarumque nationum sigillis Frankfurt1719

Heyberger Bernard ldquoChreacutetiens orientaux dans lrsquoeurope catholique (XVIIendashXVIIIe siegravecles)rdquo InHommes de lrsquoentre-deux Parcours individuels et portraits de groupes sur la frontiegravere de lameacutediterraneacutee (XVI endashXX e siegravecle) ed Bernard Heyberger and Chantal Verdeil 61ndash93Paris Les Indes Savantes 2009

Hiatt Alfred ldquoDiplomatic Arts Hickes against Mabillon in the Republic of Lettersrdquo Journal ofthe History of Ideas 703 (2009) 351ndash73

Hodgen Margaret T Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth CenturiesPhiladelphia University of Pennsylvania Press 1964

Holmberg Eva Johanna Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination A Scattered NationFarnham Ashgate 2011

Horodowich Elizabeth and Lia Markey eds The New World in Early Modern Italy1492ndash1750 Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2017

Hsia Ronnie Po-Chia ldquoChristian Ethnographies of Jews in Early Modern Germanyrdquo In TheExpulsion of the Jews 1492 and After ed Raymond B Waddington and Arthur HWilliamson 223ndash36 New York Garland 1994

ldquoWitchcraft Magic and the Jews in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germanyrdquo InFrom Witness to Witchcraft Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought ed JeremyCohen 419ndash34 Wiesbaden Harrassowitz 1996

Hunt Arnold The Art of Hearing English Preachers and Their Audiences 1590ndash1640Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2010

Hunter Michael ed Archives of the Scientific Revolution The Formation and Exchange of Ideasin Seventeenth-Century Europe Woodbridge Boydell 1998

Ilg Ulrike ldquoThe Cultural Significance of Costume Books in Sixteenth-Century Europerdquo InClothing Culture 1350ndash1650 ed Catharine Richardson 29ndash47 Farnham Ashgate 2004

Jancke Gabriele Gastfreundschaft in der fruumlhneuzeitlichen Gesellschaft Praktiken Normen undPerspektiven von Gelehrten Goumlttingen V amp R unipress 2013

Jardine Lisa and Anthony Grafton ldquolsquoStudied for Actionrsquo How Gabriel Harvey Read HisLivyrdquo Past amp Present 1291 (1990) 30ndash78

Johnson Christine R ldquoBuying Stories Ancient Tales Renaissance Travelers and the Marketfor the Marvelousrdquo Journal of Early Modern History 116 (2007) 405ndash46

The German Discovery of the World Renaissance Encounters with the Strange andMarvelous Charlottesville University of Virginia Press 2008

Jones Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of MemoryCambridge Cambridge University Press 2000

Juumltte Daniel ldquoEntering a City On a Lost Early Modern Practicerdquo Urban History 412 (2014)204ndash27

Juumltte Robert Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1994

Kresten Otto ldquoEin Empfehlungsschreiben des Erzbischofs Gabriel von Achrida fuumlr LeontiosEustratios Philoponos an Martin Crusius (Vind suppl gr 142)rdquo Rivista di Studi bizantini eneoellenici 6ndash7 (1969ndash70) 93ndash125

Das Patriarchat von Konstantinopel im ausgehenden 16 Jahrhundert Der Bericht desLeontios Eustratios im Cod Tyb Mb 10 Vienna Boumlhlau Verlag 1970

Kriebel Martin M ldquoStephan Gerlach Deutscher evangelischer Botschaftsprediger inKonstantinopel 1573ndash1578 Diasporafuumlrsorge in der Tuumlrkei und die ersten Beziehungenzur Griechisch-orthodoxen Kirche im 16 Jahrhundertrdquo Die evangelische Diaspora 29(1958) 71ndash96

Krstić Tijana Contested Conversions to Islam Narratives of Religious Change in the Early ModernOttoman Empire Stanford CA Stanford University Press 2011

Kusukawa Sachiko Picturing the Book of Nature Image Text and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany Chicago University of Chicago Press 2012

Layton Evro The Sixteenth Century Greek Book in Italy Printers and Publishers for the GreekWorld Venice Istituto ellenico di studi bizantini e postbizantini di Venezia 1994

Legrand Eacutemile Notice biographique sur Jean et Theacuteodore Zygomalas Paris 1889Leitch Stephanie Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany New Worlds in Print

Culture Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan 2010

Leoacuten-Portilla Miguel Bernardino de Sahagun First Anthropologist Trans Mauricio J MixcoNorman University of Oklahoma Press 2002

Long Pamela Artisan Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences 1400ndash1600 CorvallisOregon State University Press 2011

Ludwig Walther Hellas in Deutschland Darstellungen der Graumlzistik im deutschsprachigen Raumaus dem 16 Und 17 Jahrhundert Vorgelegt in der Sitzung vom 30 Januar 1998 HamburgJoachim Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 1998

Lundin Matthew Paper Memory A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes His WorldCambridge MA Harvard University Press 2012

Mabillon Jean De re diplomatica libri VI Paris 1709MacLean Gerald Looking East English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800

Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan 2007MacLean Gerald and Nabil Matar Britain and the Islamic World 1558ndash1713 Oxford

Oxford University Press 2011Maczak Antoni Travel in Early Modern Europe Trans Ursula Phillips Cambridge Polity

Press 1995Meserve Margaret Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought Cambridge MA

Harvard University Press 2008Methuen Charlotte ldquoPreaching and the Shaping of Public Consciousness in Late Sixteenth-

Century Tuumlbingen Martin Crusiusrsquo Corona Annirdquo Zeitschrift fuumlr Kirchengeschichte 1232ndash3(2012) 173ndash93

Miller Peter N Peirescrsquos Mediterranean World Cambridge MA Harvard University Press2015

Mitsi Efterpi Greece in Early English Travel Writing 1596ndash1682 London PalgraveMacmillan 2017

Moennig Ulrich ldquoOn Martinus Crusiusrsquos Collection of Greek Vernacular and ReligiousBooksrdquo Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 21 (1997) 40ndash78

Molekamp Femke Women and the Bible in Early Modern England Religious Reading andWriting Oxford Oxford University Press 2013

Momigliano Arnaldo ldquoAncient History and the Antiquarianrdquo Journal of the Warburg andCourtald Institutes 133ndash4 (1950) 285ndash315

ldquoPagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century ADrdquo In The Conflictbetween Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century ed Arnaldo Momigliano 77ndash99Oxford Clarendon Press 1963

The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography Berkeley University of CaliforniaPress 1990

Montaigne Michel de The Complete Essays Trans and ed M A Screech London PenguinBooks 1993

Mukerji Chandra ldquoCostume and Character in the Ottoman Empire Dress as Social Agent inNicolayrsquos Navigationsrdquo In Early Modern Things Objects and Their Histories 1500ndash1800ed Paula Findlen 151ndash69 London Routledge 2013

Muumlller Ralf C Prosopographie der Reisenden und Migranten ins Osmanische Reich (1396ndash1611)Berichterstatter aus dem Heiligen Romischen Reich ausser burgundische Gebiete undReichsromania 3 vols Leipzig Eudora-Verlag 2006

Nothaft C Philipp E ldquoThe Early History of Man and the Uses of Diodorus in RenaissanceScholarship From Annius of Viterbo to Johannes Boemusrdquo In For the Sake of LearningEssays in Honor of Anthony Grafton ed Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing 2711ndash28Leiden Brill 2016

Osiek Carolyn ldquoThe Ransom of Captives Evolution of a Traditionrdquo Harvard TheologicalReview 744 (1981) 365ndash86

Pagden Anthony The Fall of Natural Man The American Indian and the Origins ofComparative Ethnology Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1982

European Encounters with the New World From Renaissance to Romanticism NewHaven CT Yale University Press 1993

Pavan Massimiliano ldquoI corrispondenti greci di Martin Crusius e la conoscenza in Europa dellaGrecia del XVI secolordquo Roumlmische historische Mitteilungen 31 (1989) 185ndash209

Pettegree Andrew The Book in the Renaissance New Haven CT Yale University Press 2010Popper Nicholas ldquoAn Ocean of Lies The Problem of Historical Evidence in the Sixteenth

Centuryrdquo Huntington Library Quarterly 743 (2011) 375ndash400Randall David Credibility in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Military News London Pickering amp

Chatto 2008Rhoby Andreas ldquoThe Friendship between Crusius and Zygomalas A Study of Their

Correspondencerdquo Medioevo Greco Rivista di storia e filologia bizantina 5 (2005) 249ndash67 ldquoThe Letter Network of Ioannes and Theodosios Zygomalasrdquo In Ιωάννης και

Θεοδόσιος Ζυγομαλάς Πατριαρχείοndashθεσμοίndashχειρόγραφα Ioannes et TheodosiosZygomalas Patriarchatusndashinstitutionsndashcodices ed Stavros Perentides and Georgos Steires125ndash52 Athens Daidalos 2009

Rodriguez Jarbel Captives and Their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon WashingtonDC Catholic University of America Press 2007

Rothman Natalie E Brokering Empire Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and IstanbulIthaca NY Cornell University Press 2012

Rubieacutes Joan-Pau ldquoInstruction for Travellers Teaching the Eye to Seerdquo History andAnthropology 92ndash3 (1996) 139ndash90

Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance South India through European Eyes 1250ndash1625Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2000

Travellers and Cosmographers Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel andEthnology Farnham Ashgate 2007

ldquoEthnography and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern Missionsrdquo Studies inChurch History 53 (2017) 272ndash310

Rublack Ulinka Dressing Up Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe Oxford OxfordUniversity Press 2010a

ldquoGrapho-Relics Lutheranism and the Materialization of the Wordrdquo Past amp Present206 Supplement 5 (2010b) 144ndash66

Schnabel Werner Wilhelm Das Stammbuch Konstitution und Geschichte einer textsortenbezo-genen Sammelform bis ins erste Drittel des 18 Jahrhunderts Tuumlbingen M Niemeyer 2003

Schweigger Salomon Ein newe Reyszligbeschreibung auszlig Teutschland Nach Constantinopel undJerusalem Nuumlrnberg 1608

Serjeantson Richard ldquoTestimony and Proof in Early-Modern Englandrdquo Studies in History andPhilosophy of Science 302 (1999) 195ndash236

ldquoProof and Persuasionrdquo In The Cambridge History of Science Volume 3 Early ModernScience ed Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston 132ndash75 Cambridge CambridgeUniversity Press 2006

Shalev Zur Sacred Words and Worlds Geography Religion and Scholarship 1550ndash1700Leiden Brill 2012

Shapin Steven A Social History of Truth Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century EnglandChicago University of Chicago Press 1994

Shapiro Barbara A Culture of Fact England 1550ndash1720 Ithaca NY Cornell University Press2000

Sherman William H Used Books Marking Readers in Renaissance England PhiladelphiaUniversity of Pennsylvania Press 2008

Smith Pamela H The Body of the Artisan Art and Experience in the Scientific RevolutionChicago University of Chicago Press 2004

Soll Jacob The Information Master Jean-Baptiste Colbertrsquos Secret State Intelligence System AnnArbor University of Michigan Press 2009

Stagl Justin A History of Curiosity The Theory of Travel 1550ndash1800 Chur HarwoodAcademic Publishers 1995

Stahlecker Reinhold and Eugen Staiger Diarium Martini Crusii 1600ndash1605 Tuumlbingen HLaupprsquosche Buchhandlung 1958

Staiger Eugen Diarium Martini Crusii Gesamtregister Tuumlbingen H LaupprsquoscheBuchhandlung 1961

Stenhouse William ldquoPanvinio and Renditions of History and Antiquity in the LateRenaissancerdquo Papers of the British School at Rome 80 (2012) 233ndash56

te Heesen Anke ldquoThe Notebook A Paper Technologyrdquo InMaking Things Public Atmospheresof Democracy ed Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel 582ndash89 Cambridge MA MIT Press2005

Toufexis Panagiotis Das Alphabetum vulgaris linguae graecae des deutschen Humanisten MartinCrusius (1526ndash1607) Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der gesprochenen griechischen Sprache im16 Jh Cologne Romiosini 2005

van Liere Katherine Simon Ditchfield and Howard Louthan eds Sacred History Uses of theChristian Past in the Renaissance World Oxford Oxford University Press 2012

Vogel Klaus ldquoCultural Variety in a Renaissance Perspective Joannes Boemus on thelsquoManners Laws and Customs of all Peoplersquo (1520)rdquo In Shifting Cultures Interaction andDiscourse in the Expansion of Europe ed Henriette Bugge and Joan-Pau Rubieacutes 15ndash34Muumlnster Lit Verlach 1995

Wendebourg Dorothea Reformation und Orthodoxie Der okumenische Briefwechsel zwischender Leitung der Wurttembergischen Kirche und Patriarch Jeremias II von Konstantinopel inden Jahren 1573ndash1581 Gottingen Vandenhoeck amp Ruprecht 1986

Wilhelmi Thomas Die griechischen Handschriften der Universitaumltsbibliothek TuumlbingenSonderband Martin Crusius Handschriftenverzeichnis und Bibliographie WiesbadenHarassowitz 2002

Wolff Larry Inventing Eastern Europe The Map of Civilization on the Mind of theEnlightenment Stanford CA Stanford University Press 1994

Wood Christopher S ldquoNotation of Visual Information in the Earliest ArcheologicalScholarshiprdquo Word amp Image 171ndash2 (2001) 94ndash118

Yale Elizabeth ldquoThe History of Archives The State of the Disciplinerdquo Book History 18 (2015)332ndash59

Zwinger TheodorMethodus apodemica in eorum gratiam qui cum fructu in quocunque tandemvitae genere peregrinari cupiunt Basel 1577

Reconstructing the Ottoman Greek World Early Modern Ethnography in the Household of Martin Crusius
- INTRODUCTION
- COLLABORATIVE READING
- COLLECTING TESTIMONY
- REPRODUCING EVIDENCE
- CONCLUSION
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Archival and Manuscript Sources
- Printed Sources

Page 2: Reconstructing the Ottoman Greek World: Early Modern … · Reconstructing the Ottoman Greek World: Early Modern Ethnography in the Household of Martin Crusius RICHARD CALIS, Princeton

needed to guarantee the captivesrsquo freedom Crusius a professor of Latin andGreek at the university of Tuumlbingen could provide exactly the type of supportthat these men sought His household was renowned for its great generosity andwarm hospitality toward strangers especially those from Greece Indeed overthe next few days Crusius shared his meals with these pilgrims provided themlodgings and gave them some money1

This incident is more than just an instance of early modern hospitality or arare snapshot of itinerant Greeks seeking alms across Western ChristendomBetween 1579 and 1606 just a year before Crusiusrsquos death nearly sixtyGreek men and women found their way to Tuumlbingen All collected alms andall received a warm welcome After all their visits enabled Crusius to acquirefirsthand knowledge about the postclassical development of the Greeks andtheir language He understood that providing lodgings and sharing meals wasa small price to pay in recompense for the valuable intelligence that these pil-grims brought from the Ottoman side of the Mediterranean These native infor-mants helped Crusius read and understand his sizable collection of vernacularGreek books and enabled him over time to gain a good command of the lan-guage they spoke On request they also clarified and verified the manuscriptsletters and written documentation that other local informants who resided inConstantinople had sent to Tuumlbingen in the 1570s All this information sodiverse in nature presented Crusius with an astoundingly broad portrait ofOttoman Greek society full of color and perspective rich in details andexperiences

This article reconstructs the processes of knowledge production that resultedfrom these lively exchanges between one of the most eminent sixteenth-centuryscholars of Greek and his informants from the land that he so dearly caredabout yet himself never visited It connects Crusiusrsquos practices of readingwith his consuming interest in collecting and assessing testimony and it situatesthis form of scholarship firmly within the household setting There Crusius notonly read his books thoroughly and repeatedly but also subjected itinerant vis-itors to systematic interviews collected and compared their testimonies anddocumented the finer details of the Greek vernacular on the blank flyleavesof his books and in well-organized word lists This complex constellation of wit-nesses both human and textual was structured around a form of scholarshipthat reached beyond the material book In Crusiusrsquos household interpreting

1 Universitaumltsbibliothek Tuumlbingen (hereafter UBT) Mb 37 fol 85 pp 57ndash76 Crusiusspecifically kept this manuscript for recording and archiving documents and other evidencerelated to contemporary Greek civilization The notes on the Greeks (ldquoGraeci Hominesrdquo)who visited Crusius are found after page 85 with a separate pagination These pages will here-after be referred to by the abbreviation GH