1 - Eastern Christians in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Catholic Europe

Summary

Through the archives of the Roman Congregation de Propaganda Fide, one can attempt to reconstitute partially the careers of a certain number of Eastern Christians who travelled between the Middle East and Catholic Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The outcomes of this ‘intensive technique for the reconstruction of biographical events’ can seem trifling, resulting in fragments of lives, picturesque indeed, but with little significance or representative value, revealing quite dissimilar individual lives of people of little importance, whether social, political, or cultural. It is also obvious that, limited in our documentation, we can only give a coherent image of the individuals at one moment in their lives and in precise circumstances. Through a close analysis and case comparison, however, it is possible to make sense of all the anecdotes collected from the Roman archives and to identify a few characteristic patterns in those lives.

This ‘intensive technique’ allows us to focus on people previously ignored and, beyond this, to reveal broader experiences of Eastern Christian migration with its routes and networks, much earlier than the great waves of the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The corpus of sources extracted from the archives of Propaganda Fide maps out a territory, that of the Mediterranean and its ports of call; a sea experienced according to the rhythm of wind-powered vessels and maritime conflicts; the Mediterranean as a political, military and religious border that adherence to the Catholic faith inspired or impelled people to cross. The most common reasons given by those who came to ‘throw themselves at the feet of ‘ the pope or of his cardinals were the persecutions suffered in the Ottoman Empire. In view of defending Christianity, the Church instigated these types of mobility, while at the same time trying to organise and control them.

But this Mediterranean border was also a space for mediation. The anonymous Christians of the Ottoman Empire mentioned here created links between people and places, forming the outline of all kinds of exchanges. As foreigners in Europe, they suffered the consequences of social instability inherent to their status, but they also benefitted from it, promoting their specific skills.