3 - Security and Insecurity: Syrian Christians in the Mediterranean (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)

Summary

This chapter is the modest result of what Giovanni Levi has called an ‘intensive technique for the reconstruction of the biographical events’ of a number of Christians from Syria. While some have questioned the validity of a method that starts on the level of the individual, such an approach has the advantage of enabling one to determine a certain coherence among individual attitudes, faced with events considered part of ‘great history’. What appears from these analyses is the existence of a rationalisation of behaviour, a strategy on the personal or family level. But it is a strategy that aimed not solely at economic objectives. Returning to Giovanni Levi's analysis, we may say that it sought less the realisation of simple, predetermined economic concerns alone than the managing of uncertainty. What no doubt obsessed the Christians of the Middle East, like men from ancien régime societies in general, was a guarantee of security in the face of unpredictable events.

Let us begin with an observation: there was a continuous circulation of people and goods between Italy and the Middle East. The enormous proportion of documents concerning Syrian Christians, and Eastern matters in general, in the archives of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide in Rome reveals the dominance of the Mediterranean in a Vatican ministry which might be expected to be more preoccupied by the missions of America or China during this period.

One should bear in mind that the religious, cultural, or even spiritual connections with the Catholic West were always accompanied by economic relations. Furthermore, the symbolic advantages gained from connecting with the Roman Church could be exploited financially and socially by those who benefitted from them. This is not surprising: the small Churches of the Middle East blended in with the confessional group (ṭāʾifa) that they defined, and local lay notables played a predominant role in their midst. One therefore must avoid trying to separate the socio-economic sphere from the religious one.