4 - A Border-crossing Ottoman Christian at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century: Ḥannā Diyāb of Aleppo and his Account of his Travel to Paris

Summary

The source of this chapter is the travelogue of a Maronite Christian from Aleppo, called Ḥannā Diyāb. He journeyed with the French traveller Paul Lucas, who hired him during his passage through Syria in 1707 and brought him to Paris, without ever mentioning Ḥannā in his published account of his journey. Ḥannā made this peregrination when he was about twenty, but he wrote his account much later, beginning to compose it in 1763 and finally finishing his manuscript on 3 March 1764. Today, the sole copy of this manuscript is preserved at the Vatican Apostolic Library.

In this text we find ourselves in the presence of an Ottoman Christian subject, whose mother language is Arabic and who supplies us with a very rich narration about his discovery of Europe (especially Paris) at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, one has to beware of the idea that this text introduces us directly into the problematic of the confrontation of an Eastern Christian with the West. Indeed, what Diyāb's travelogue reveals is that his perception of differences and borders did not fit with the common idea about them. Today, the categories ‘West’ or ‘Christianity’ are challenged by more recent research on ‘diversity’ and ‘connectivity’ in the Mediterranean of the early modern period. Many historians have advocated a microhistorical approach to early globalisation, consisting in following an individual through the different stages of their biography, in order to observe not only their own connectedness to different milieux across multiple borders, but what their path points to for a more general understanding of the connections between different worlds which are usually assumed to be culturally distant. Ḥannā belongs to this cast of ‘border-crossing’ characters who have been brought to light in recent years.

Before we can answer the question of how an Easterner looked at the West through his testimony, we first must reflect on the nature of this narrative and on the position of the narrator.