Scotland's ‘Vagabonding Greekes’, 1453–1688

Abstract

This article assembles the evidence for the presence of Greek refugees in early modern Scotland. These refugees came in two distinct waves: one in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and another in the seventeenth century. In both periods, inter-regional religious networks brought Greeks to Scotland: in the first phase, these were structured around the church institutions of the Latin West; in the second, they followed ecumenical interest in Protestant Northern Europe. The wanderers were mostly clergymen. This movement of refugees, alongside the capture of Scots by North African corsairs, linked Scotland with the distant Ottoman world.

By the way, I must give the Kings Kingdomes a caveat here, concerning vagabonding Greekes, and their counterfeit Testimonials: True it is, there is no such matter, as these lying Rascals report unto you, concerning their Fathers, their Wives, and Children taken Captives by the Turke: O damnable invention!

—William Lithgow of Lanark.¹

Contexts

During the early modern period, a number of Greeks² travelled to Scotland from the Ottoman Empire. Ever since the publication of Jonathan Harris’ Greek Emigrés in the West, Byzantinists have been aware that at least a few Greek refugees visited Scotland following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453: these wider movements reflect the choice of many Greeks to seek a future in Latin Europe rather than remain under Ottoman rule.³ It is little appreciated, however, that these people were followed by a second wave of arrivals to Scotland in the context of post-Reformation ecumenism: these arrivals clustered in the seventeenth century, a time of particularly important Protestant–Orthodox interaction in the British Isles. When these Greek sojourners gave a reason for their wanderings, it was often that they were seeking alms to ransom relatives or associates who were held captive, predominantly in Barbary (North Africa); this was a fate that befell a large number of Scots, too.⁴ The refugees who came to Scotland were all male and overwhelmingly clergy. In both periods, Scotland was part of wider networks that criss-crossed the British Isles and much of Europe, and in both periods these networks were centred around church institutions. Scotland's experiences of these itinerant alms-seekers therefore comprised one aspect of much larger phenomena; but the great wealth of documentation produced in post-Reformation Scotland in particular, plus the unfamiliarity of this evidence to Hellenists, make the Scottish context deserving of discrete treatment.

Most information regarding the presence of Greeks in Scotland comes from records of almsgiving, either in kirk, burgh, or governmental records. Of the various documents consulted here, kirk session records hold a position of particular importance. The session is a body composed of the minister and elders of a parish. It attends to matters concerning the congregation and the church building itself, and its records are drawn up by the parish's session clerk.⁵ The session was a development of the Reformation in Scotland during the sixteenth century (therefore postdating the first wave of refugees studied here), though the institution survived James VI and I's and Charles I's restorations of the episcopacy in 1610 and 1662 respectively. With the Revolution of 1688–9 that deposed James VII and II and replaced him with Mary and William of Orange, presbyterianism prevailed as Scotland's official form of church governance.⁶

Many of these documents were published by antiquarians and historians in the nineteenth century in Scottish History periodicals and books printed by local clubs and societies, and these form the core of the sources consulted here. Mentions in these texts of wandering alms-seekers, including Greeks, have not gone entirely unnoticed; unfortunately, however, where these people have attracted comment, it has been through the lens of exoticism and with suspicion.⁷ Early modern observers—not least Lithgow—also expressed doubts regarding the truthfulness of these wanderers’ stories of maltreatment, as detailed below.

Moreover, while the tableau of Scottish evidence usefully sheds light on non-elite parochial life, references to Greek refugees are frustratingly laconic. The records sometimes do not provide any names or details, merely listing charitable disbursements to anonymous ‘Grecians’. On a handful of occasions, however, it is possible to trace the movements of an identifiable individual, either inside Scotland or else between Scotland and other areas of Europe. These movements reflect those wider contexts of post-1453 dispersion and early modern Protestant–Orthodox relations. These links added to those in existence between Scotland and the Mediterranean through the military orders, trade, the universities, and pilgrimage.⁸

In the wake of the conquest of Constantinople

The group of Greeks that arrived in Scotland in the years after 1453 displays more heterogeneity than marks their seventeenth-century successors, though clergy were always prominent. The earliest member of this first group was a doctor called Serapion (*Σεραπίων⁹). He was in the employ of James II in at least the years 1455–62, as recorded in the Scottish exchequer rolls; though the records never specify his origin, his name suggests that he may well have been a Greek.¹⁰

On the fall of Constantinople, many Christians fled the city; a large number sought refuge in Venice and its overseas territories, but some travelled to northern Europe. In time, a handful of these refugees arrived in Scotland. The only one of these whose name survives is ‘Nicholaus Georgius (*Νικόλαος Γεώργιος) de Arcosson’ (the identification of ‘Arcosson’ remains uncertain). On 20 April 1459, James II granted Georgios a letter of safe conduct that would allow him to seek alms safely in his kingdom. The text survives in the register of the Great Seal of the kings of Scots:

Letter of a Greek with a wooden foot. <James> by the grace <of God> king of the Scots, to each and every prelate, baron, and other official of his kingdom, whom the present letter reaches: greetings. We recently received news of Nikolaos Georgios of Arcosson, in what manner he lost all of his possessions during the capture of the city of Constantinople, and his brother was taken captive by the most execrable Turks, enemies of the Cross, and was offered for redemption, as we understand from letters of the most reverend lord father in Christ with the title of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem [i.e. the patriarch]. It is indeed true that the said Nikolaos on account of his said destitution is unable to make the redemption unless he is helped by the faithful of Christ.

The letter then continues to state that James has had pity on Georgios, compelled by his misfortunes to dwell in Scotland for the sake of collecting charitable donations to ransom his property. He should thus be able to seek alms in the kingdom unmolested.¹¹

The exchequer rolls of Scotland record three disbursements to Greeks in the financial years 1458–60: one of £4¹² made ‘to a certain Greek’ and a German, and one of £15 made to ‘two soldiers of Greece’.¹³ It is possible that the first of the three Greeks was one and the same as Nikolaos Georgios (James II's letter says nothing of him being a soldier); whether it was Georgios or a different person, three, four, or more Greeks had arrived in Scotland within a few years of the Ottoman capture of Constantinople.

One of the earliest books to be printed in Scotland makes reference to the fall of Constantinople. The Aberdeen Breviary was commissioned by James IV to provide Scots with systematized printed texts of the divine office, thereby eliminating the need for Scots clergy constantly to adapt the printed English rite of Sarum for their own needs. The rights to print the breviary were given to Walter Chepman and Andrew Myllar of Edinburgh in 1507, but by the time the two volumes were completed in 1509–10 it is possible that Myllar was already dead. The text is associated with Aberdeen because Bishop William Elphinstone of Aberdeen oversaw its compilation.¹⁴ In the sanctorale section for the winter season, there is a text on the translation of the relics of St Andrew; in the course of this text, there appears a brief account of the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed II:

But in the year 1452 (sic) of our salvation, the city of Constantinople, the pinnacle of the whole East and the singular home of grace, was besieged by Prince Mehmed of the Turks and his infidels for fifty days and attacked, destroyed, and defiled, its temples, altars and fortresses torn down, which had been so marvellously constructed to the honour of Almighty God. The Christians were subjected to slaughter and death of the most foul and savage kind, and the relics of the saints were trampled underfoot into disgrace in an extraordinary manner.¹⁵

The most amply attested Greek in Scotland from this period is George Branas (*Γεώργιος Βρανᾶς), a Uniate priest who was appointed to the very poor Ulster see of Dromore, and subsequently the slightly less impoverished bishopric of Elphin. He held both these charges in absentia, apparently spending much of his life in Scotland. He was from Attica, and there is a village there that shares his name. (Branas was a well-established elite family in the Palaiologan period.¹⁶) Branas enters the historical record as an alms-seeker: in 1477 he was at Rome, where he received the advocacy of Pope Sixtus IV to help him ransom his captive family and associates; this took the form of an indulgence for remitting as much as five years of penance, the text of which Branas could carry around to encourage almsgivers. By 1482 he had come to Ireland with English legal protection, and entered the Augustinian priory of All Saints, Dublin, as a canon. His consecration as bishop of Dromore occurred the next year, for which he was rushed through the ecclesiastical ranks from minor orders; he was probably at least the canonical age of thirty by this time, suggesting that he was born before 1453. He was likely sent there by Sixtus in order to found a hospital dependent on Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome, where Branas held office; despite prolonged absence from Ireland, Branas succeeded in achieving this end, establishing a hospital at Trim, County Meath. From 1499 he was bishop of Elphin, thereby leaving Dromore vacant for a period of twelve years. Branas died at some point between 15 August and 27 December 1529. When consecrating some altars at Arbroath in 1484 or 1485, he styled himself Georgeus Brana, quondam dominus Athenarum, nunc autem episcopus Dromorensis. This style implies that he had held some sort of official position in his native city.¹⁷ The dates of his consecration and death make it very unlikely that he held his office of dominus Athenarum under its Acciaiuoli dukes; rather, he was probably an official sanctioned by the Ottomans, who conquered the city in 1458. Branas evidently had a long association with Scotland: years after his presence at Arbroath, he moved to Edinburgh, apparently more or less retired, and lived out the rest of his life just beneath the castle.¹⁸

In 1520, during Branas’ lifetime, Neophytos (*Νεόφυτος), a monk of the Monastery of St Catherine, Mount Sinai, signed a document drawn up at the convent dedicated to the same saint at Sciennes (pronounced ‘Sheens’), near Edinburgh. This document enrolled a certain Richard Maitland in the confraternity of St Catherine, intended to fund the upkeep of the monastery on Mount Sinai.¹⁹ Like Branas, Neophytos had travelled to Scotland by way of Rome, where on 14 September 1517 Pope Leo X had granted his party an indulgence that would award the right to membership of the confraternity to those who gave them alms. The context of the plea was the hardship that the convent had suffered in the course of the final Ottoman–Mamlūk war, which culminated earlier that year with the conquest of the Mamlūk Sultanate by the Ottomans under Sultan Selim I.²⁰ The travels of both Branas and Neophytos were therefore defined by the interregional structures of the church.

The seventeenth century

After these initial refugees reached Scotland, evidence for the presence of Greeks remains sparse for some time; the next evidence comes from the period after the Reformation in Scotland. Protestants were interested in establishing contact with the Orthodox because they perceived the latter's traditions, unlike those of Catholics, to be rooted in the early church. Substantial dialogue began in 1574 between Patriarch Jeremiah II (1530–95) and German Protestants. Then, in the context of burgeoning Anglo–Ottoman trade, Cyril Loukaris (then patriarch of Alexandria) wrote to Archbishop George Abbot of Canterbury; this resulted in Abbot and King James VI of Scotland (r. 1567–1625) and I of England (from 1603) inviting certain Greeks to come to Oxford for their education (from 1617) and led eventually to the establishment of a short-lived Greek College at Gloucester Hall (1699–1705). Loukaris became acquainted with Calvinism through the Dutch and famously published his Calvinist-leaning Confession in 1629 while patriarch of Constantinople. Loukaris’ fate was determined by the competition for influence at Constantinople between the Protestant Dutch and English on the one hand and the Jesuits, supported by the Catholic French and Austrians, on the other; in 1638, he was executed. Following his death, his Confession was condemned by Metropolitan Peter of Kiev at Iași (1643) and then again by Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem at the Synod of Jerusalem (1672).²¹

In the context of this seventeenth-century spike in Anglo–Hellenic relations, Scotland too received a notable number of Greek visitors. This presence is all the more visible for the introduction of kirk session records with the Reformation. The next notice comes in the summer of 1596, when the Presbytery of Glasgow recorded a resolution to gather alms for an unnamed Greek:

Almous to an afflicted Grecian. The presbiterie ordenis everie minister in this persbiterie to bring in his contribution of almous fra the gentilmen within his paroche to the afflicted Greciane for his cheritie towardis the Christianis, and that wpone the nixt Frydaye; and that everie minister gang to the gentilmen of his paroche to the effect forsaid. The presbiterie ordenis Mr Niniane Drewe, minister at Leinzae [= Lenzie, East Dunbartonshire], to gang to my lord Fleming, the lard of Badinhethe, and Johne Stark his parouchineris, and to ask and crave of them sum almous to the Grecian afflicted, and ransomed be the kirk for the cheritie schawin to the afflicted Christianis, and to report his diligence to the presbiterie the nixt Frydaye.²²

This resolution demonstrates that Scottish ministers were sometimes required to make personal approaches to their wealthier parishioners on behalf of itinerant alms-seekers, and it is clear from the nature of the resolution that this particular instance was taken seriously and approached with considerable effort at a presbytery level, not just on an ad hoc basis, session-by-session.

The accounts of the burgh of Ayr, to the southwest of Glasgow, are exceptionally fully preserved. On three occasions in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the burgh made disbursements to people listed as Greeks. The entries are terse: in the period 1587–8, £10 12s 6d was given ‘to the Greciane’; in 1609–10, some needy Greek ‘professouris of the word’ (that is, people who profess the Word of God), were given £20, presumably shared between them; in 1611–12 another individual was given £3.²³ Regrettably, no details can be inferred regarding any of these people: in the absence of names, it is impossible to connect them with any other contemporary attestations across Scotland.

Some itinerant Greeks travelled as far north as Aberdeen City and Shire. On 8 July 1610, the Kirk Session of Aberdeen granted twenty pounds to a man called Constantine Achilles (*Κωνσταντῖνος Ἀχέλης), described as ‘a Grecian gentillman, persecute be the Turkis for his professioun of the faith of Chryst’. The session wrote that he came by recommendation of the Council of Scotland, suggesting that he had found a patron either in Edinburgh or else through a contact in Edinburgh.²⁴ The accounts of the Burgh of Aberdeen for the period 1610–11 record that ‘twa strangeris’ were granted a disbursement of £10 (probably £5 each). The first is described as a ‘Grecian’ and the second as a ‘Caldean’.²⁵ It is almost certain that the ‘Grecian’ was Constantine Achilles, since both these records are contemporaneous, and no other named Greeks are recorded as seeking charity in Aberdeen at this time. The ‘Caldean’ cannot be identified with any other attested figure. In England during the reign of Charles II (d. 1685), the Treasury disbursed £5 (sterling) to a man called Kas Isa, described in the Quarter Sessions records as a ‘Caldean minister’ from Mosul, which was noted to be near ancient Nineveh; his wife and children were in captivity ‘in Turkey’, probably meaning Barbary/North Africa.²⁶ It is likely that the ‘Caldean’ who visited Aberdeen in 1610–11 was a Syrian too, though it cannot be inferred to which of the many confessions of the region he belonged.

In the early seventeenth century, Scotland's ‘vagabonding Greekes’ found an influential champion in the person of Patrick Young, graduate of the University of St Andrews and librarian to King James.²⁷ Young earned himself the nickname ‘patriarch of the Greeks’ because of his tireless advocacy on behalf of Greeks who came from the Ottoman Empire to Great Britain—perhaps a consequence of his scholarly interest in Greek language and literature. Young wrote various letters of introduction on behalf of Greeks with relatives in captivity; Anastasios Ioseph (Ἀναστάσιος Ἰώσηφ: accentuation sic) of Amaseia/Amasya, Cappadocia, was one person for whom Young advocated. Ioseph had been a successful merchant until the Ottomans stripped him of his wealth and captured his one and only son. In June 1611, Young wrote to one of the royal councillors in Edinburgh, Sir George Young of Wilkinton, to ask that Ioseph be provided with alms-seeking letters courtesy of the councillors for use in Scotland; Ioseph had enjoyed considerable success in obtaining charity in England by the good offices of Young's own letters and intended to travel north. Ioseph fulfilled his intentions and wrote to Young from Edinburgh on 23 March 1612. He announced his intention to be in London before the end of April, should he be fit enough. What then became of him is not known.²⁸

Anastasios Ioseph was one of many people in similar predicaments who received advocacy under the Stuart kings south of the border. For example, Chariton Salibas, once metropolitan of Dyrrachion, and Pankratios Grammatikos, a homme d'affaires of Wallachia whose son, like Ioseph's, was apparently in Ottoman captivity, were aided under King James. Gregorios Argyropoulos, a Thessalonian hieromonk and dispossessed landowner, obtained a letter from James's son Charles I in response to an appeal from Cyril Loukaris.²⁹ Loukaris played a similar role in the Mediterranean region during his time as patriarch of Alexandria: in 1617, he assisted a Christian man called Haji Pietro de Georgio in his claim against Hospitaller robbers by writing a letter in Italian to the French consulate at Saida, today part of Lebanon.³⁰

Records are then sparse until the latter half of the century. On 30 September 1626, the Burgh of Glasgow made a disbursement of forty marks to ‘ane Grecian bishop’, who is unnamed.³¹ In 1656, at least two Scottish communities gave alms to a certain ‘Anastasius Comnenus’ (*Ἀναστάσιος Κομνηνός). His presence in Ashkirk (Scottish borders) is recorded in parish documents, where he was listed as a ‘distressed Waldensian minister’.³² On 3 December, he made his supplication in front of the Presbytery of St Andrews, where he was recorded as ‘a minister of the Grecian Church’, seeking alms to release fifteen of his brother priests whom he reported were held captive in Algiers.³³ The ‘grecian man’ given £3 10s at nearby Balmerino on 21 January was also surely Komnenos.³⁴ He had already been in London, to which he would later return: on 27 March 1653, ‘Armastatius Comnonus Minister to the Greeke church’ received a disbursement of 10s (sterling) at St Olave's, Hart Street.³⁵ The state papers from the period of Oliver Cromwell's rule record that a petition was received on 25 March 1658 from ‘Anastasius Cominus’, given as a bishop subject to the Patriarchate of Alexandria, also on behalf of other clergy (as at St Andrews); his petition and papers were sent for approval.³⁶

Komnenos is also recorded in the correspondence of Bishop John Cosin of Durham as ‘the Greek Archbishop of Laodicea’ (probably Lādhiqīya, Syria), where it becomes evident that he was living in London and drawing a pension from Cosin. The latter received a letter from Komnenos (one of many), bewailing his gout and asking that Cosin, who had left London (the civitas), should appoint a deputy to deliver the pension payments due to him. Cosin acted on Anastasios’ request: on 3 February 1662 he told Miles Stapylton to pay Komnenos five pounds (‘his last Michaelmas pension’), and to inform him that he would receive the same amount ‘at our next Lady Day in March’, which Stapylton was to administer.³⁷ Komnenos was clearly settled in the city at this time, though it is unclear when and where he had established links with Cosin, who was in exile in France c.1644–60.³⁸ It is also possible that a poem entitled Δῶρον Ἐκκλησιαστικόν, attributed to ‘a Grecian, the Bishop of Mount Sinai, named Anastasius Comnenus’, in Lambeth Palace, Tenison. 688 (which contains texts of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), is his work.³⁹ A man of the same name, born in Constantinople, is attested in Germany in 1649, though no connection may be proven on available evidence.⁴⁰

On 15 August 1678, the Scottish Privy Council received a petition from an individual given as ‘Mercurius Lascary’ (*Μερκούριος Λάσκαρις), a ‘Grecian priest’. In his petition, Laskaris related that he came from Samos. One night three years previously he, his brother and fellow priest Demetrios, and Demetrios’ two sons, had been captured by ‘pirats of Algiers’. Laskaris promised corroboration from the higher clergy, ‘as by testimonialls from the Patriarchs (sic) of Constantinople and by recommendation of severall archbishops and bishops of Greece will at more large (sic) appear’. Laskaris accordingly requested of the council that alms be gathered for him from across Scotland; the council acceded to his plea, recommending him to the (restored) episcopacy.⁴¹ In 1678, the Parish of Fordyce, Aberdeenshire, responded with £4.⁴² At Alford, also Aberdeenshire, in October 1679, he was recorded as ‘Mercurius Lascaris’ ‘the Grecian priest’.⁴³ He is also attested in the parish of Longforgan (west of Dundee), where his name appears as ‘Mercury Sascurie’.⁴⁴

The same person is found in connection with two Scandinavian universities at this time. From 1683–4, ‘Melchior Farulphus Pius Ansprandrus De Lascaris Dalmata’, undoubtedly a variant form of the same name, was Språkmästar at Lund University, Sweden. Later, in 1688, he visited Turku, though apparently did not enrol as a student there.⁴⁵ He received a disbursement of three riksthalers, this time seemingly under the name ‘Mercurius Laskaris’.⁴⁶ Laskaris was now apparently from Dalmatia, and not Samos. Furthermore, a man of the name ‘Mercurius Lascaris’ is known to have passed through Winterthur, Zürich Canton, Switzerland, in 1693. He gave himself as a priest of or from (‘von’) Bethlehem, recommended by Patriarch Dositheos II of Jerusalem. Apparently, Laskaris appeared to the local congregation in order to emphasize to them that he and they were of ‘the same belief and religion’—something that would surely have jarred with his purported patron, Dositheos, condemner of Loukaris’ Confession. This back-story also obviously contradicts his claim to the Privy Council that he was from Samos, as well as his association with Dalmatia as given in the records of Lund University. Perhaps different connections were played up for the benefit of multiple audiences; perhaps one or more pieces of information were false. In Winterthur, Laskaris sought alms in order to accompany a relative to England to continue his studies. He fell in with the local mayor and governor Salomon Hegner, who made sure Laskaris was given hospitality before sending him on to Zürich.⁴⁷ This would suggest that the Laskaris family put down some sort of roots in the British Isles, though no trace of the name is found in the records of Oxford alumni for these years.⁴⁸

In July 1693 Laskaris was also at Frankfurt, according to the testimony of Johann Jakob Schudt published some seven years later. This time, he stated that he was from the island of Patmos—not so far from Samos. Schudt describes him as a trickster, proficient in Russian, Greek, English, and Italian, and with a little Latin, but conspicuously ignorant of ecclesiastical affairs in the Orthodox Church. Schudt also suspected that Laskaris was not a ‘true Greek’, but a ‘deceitful Dalmatian’ (quem Dalmatam potius fallacem, quàm verùm Graecum suspicabar), thus strengthening the inference that he was one and the same person as the Dalmatian ‘De Lascaris’ of Lund. Laskaris apparently inveighed against a certain Metrophanes Tzitzilianos for approving in word but neglecting in deed the Confession of Cyril Loukaris. Schudt continues:

When I made mention of his letters of recommendation and testimonials, he pleaded that the Jesuits had taken them away and thrown him in chains in Vienna; he had been freed from them—only, not with the restitution of his testimonials—by the intercession of Lord [William] Paget, English Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, and by letters from the Grand Duke of Russia. He added that he had been sent to Germany by Dositheos [II], the Patriarch of Jerusalem, to inquire how much the Protestants differed from the Greek Church, and in which ways they differed from it in their articles of faith, for the afore-mentioned patriarch of the Greek Church is now attempting union with the Evangelical Church, and <he said> that the Jesuits knew of this matter and sought to take away his documents and testimonials at Vienna; but all this seemed to have been made up dishonestly, so that he would easily trick the Protestants.⁴⁹

Schudt's account fills in a number of gaps left by the often-contradictory sources already mentioned. Laskaris’ apparent mission seems to clarify the motive for his ecumenical preaching in Winterthur, although the Orthodox Church had long rejected Loukaris’ authorship of the Confession: Dositheos himself attempted to demonstrate it a western forgery. The Jesuits were inveterate enemies of Loukaris and Protestants alike, and the English diplomatic mission was indeed a bulwark against Jesuit influence in Constantinople:⁵⁰ whether or not Laskaris’ tale of captivity in Vienna was true, Schudt was right that it would have helped his case with Protestant audiences. If Laskaris was on some sort of mission, it is unlikely that it was official, and it is totally implausible that he was promoting ecclesiastical union with European Protestants on Dositheos’ behalf.

It is likely that these various anecdotes do refer to one and the same person, despite the discrepancies in the back-stories. It is conceivable that Merkourios/Melchior Laskaris was indeed a single individual, who had associations with multiple places (Samos, Patmos, Bethlehem, Dalmatia), each of which he might employ variously, dependent on circumstances now unknowable, and that his fortunes and those of his relatives changed over time. Perhaps having been initially endorsed by Dositheos in his recourse to charity (which would not have been exceptional for this period), Laskaris came to present himself as some sort of ecclesiastical emissary, banking on the memory of Cyril Loukaris and his Confession to strengthen his own position in a Protestant world, where many were prejudiced against ‘vagabonding Greekes’. His northern European career would suggest that he was highly successful.⁵¹

A few notices of further individuals may be added. In the period 1652–80, a ‘Grecian presbyter’ received a disbursement of £7 15s 10d at Dunblane, during which time charitable aid was also forthcoming for Scots captives, fire damage at Kelso, and civil engineering projects.⁵² At Anstruther East (Fife) on 26 November 1678, a ‘Grecian priest’ named ‘Nichola Vaphias’ (*Νικόλαος Βαφειάς) was given £16 16s.⁵³ The year 1680 saw £3 disbursed to an unnamed ‘Grecian priest’ at Hassendean, in the Scottish borders. That same year, £7 8s was collected in the same parish on behalf of three men taken captive by Barbary corsairs.⁵⁴ Two years later, another named ‘Grecian’ is attested twice in Fife. The Presbytery of St Andrews noted him as ‘Fransesco Pollani’ when he visited on 22 March, and recorded that his two brothers and one sister were held captive at Tripoli. The recommendation stemmed from the archbishop (the see had been restored), as communicated by the archdeacon. The parishes of the presbytery were accordingly asked to provide voluntary contributions.⁵⁵ He then moved to Dunfermline, where he received £4 4s ‘out of the boxe’ on 4 May, as recorded under the name ‘Franciscus Polloni’.⁵⁶ ‘Pollani’/‘Polloni’ may represent a corruption of a name such as Apollonios; Franciscus is a Latin-Italian name, but common enough among Greek-speakers of the early modern period.⁵⁷ His name was perhaps *Φραγκίσκος Ἀπολλώνιος. In the only episode so far known to postdate James VII and II's deposition, on 28 March 1697, ‘some Grecian priests’ and John Atchison, skipper of the Pittenweem-registered boat Anna, received alms from the people of Kemnay in Aberdeenshire; they were all held in slavery by ‘the Turks’, probably in North Africa.⁵⁸

Fig. 1. Locations in Scotland Visited by or Associated with Greeks, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries (Created by the author with QGIS)

Criticism

A number of contemporary commentators supposed many such alms-seeking Greeks to be frauds.⁵⁹ One of the most nuanced and sustained statements of these suspicions is found in the work of William Lithgow. Lithgow, a Protestant of Lanark born c. 1582, travelled extensively throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, including the Aegean region in 1609–11; he left an extensive account of his travels, The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations of long Nineteene Yeares Travayles from Scotland to the most famous Kingdomes in Europe, Asia and Affrica (London 1632). Soon after Lithgow published his magnum opus, he once more expressed some of his thoughts on the supposedly duplicitous Greeks in a section of his lengthy poem Scotlands Welcome to her Native Sonne, and Soveraigne Lord, King Charles, written for the occasion of Charles I's visit for his long-delayed Scottish coronation in 1633. Several discrete points are included in Lithgow's account of Scotland's ‘vagabonding Greekes’: first, many were deceitful in their claims that their children or friends had been captured by the Ottomans and needed to be ransomed (though it is their stories and not their identity as Greeks that he explicitly doubted); second, the treatment of Greeks under the Ottomans was no longer as oppressive as it had once been, since, he claimed, the devşirme (‘tythes of children’: the levy of non-Muslim boys for employment in the infantry janissary corps) and the giving of Christian women's dowries to the fisc (the ‘arūs resmi, Lithgow's ‘female dote’) were no longer practised; thirdly, the Ottomans did not persecute Christians, with the sole exception of banning the ringing of bells.⁶⁰

Lithgow's three objections to the claims of Scotland's alms-seeking Greeks should have been based on his own eyewitness knowledge. At one point he actually did reveal a fraud in London, who had gathered money on the false pretence of raising funds to repair the Monastery of the Holy Cross, Jerusalem. Lithgow's report on the situation of the Greeks under the Ottomans, however, was skewed by prejudice: when recording his impressions of Greece and the Greeks in his Totall Discourse, he condemned the contemporary people's ‘degeneracy’ compared with their ancient predecessors, and noted that the ancient Greeks’ term ‘barbarian’ was ‘now most fit for themselves, being the greatest dissembling lyers, inconstant, and uncivill people of all other Christians in the world’.⁶¹ He was, furthermore, incorrect that the devşirme had ceased with an act of abolition by Ahmed I (r. 1603–17): while it was by that time of less importance than in previous centuries, the practice continued, but now also coincided with free Muslims joining the janissaries.⁶² His prejudiced stance, however, was based on doubts shared by Patrick Young, the Greeks’ staunchest ally in the British Isles at that time, who acknowledged that stories of captivity and impoverishment created scepticism among his contemporaries. In writing in 1612 to John Williams of Jesus College, Oxford, Young stated that he was ‘not unaware of their crooked customs and disposition, and of their great passion for lying (for their people seems to have been born to contrive tall tales and fraudulent letters)’.⁶³

Conclusions

A notice of 23 January 1686, one of the latest pieces of evidence for Scotland's ‘vagabonding Greekes’ to survive, reveals the sort of backlash that itinerant alms-seekers might face from the elite legal professionals of the seventeenth century:

A motion is made, that the Advocats [the equivalent of English barristers] having a considerable stock of money, which they get by the Lords Act allowing them to exact 500 mks. of every intrant Advocat, and the Lords being importuned by a Grecian Minister, and several others, for charity, that therfor they may take inspection how they spend their money, and take some of it for bestowing on charitable uses. Tho’ this was pretended, yet the true case was thought to be, the Popish Priests had incensed the Chancelor, that the Faculty of Advocats had given Monsieur Du Pont, the French Protestant Minister, 500 mks. out of our publict money, and he was heard say, ‘What! had we nothing to doe with our money, but to bestow it on such rebells and vagabonds?’⁶⁴

The sectarian divisions evident in this vignette might be understood to have heralded the end of an era. The Revolution of 1688–9 seems to have been a watershed moment, for while Christians from the Middle East as well as converts from Judaism and Islam are attested in Scotland in the eighteenth century,⁶⁵ Greeks are not. On the other hand, it is not clear whether the Revolution really ushered in a period of greater hostility towards Greeks in Scotland, or whether the apparent absence of evidence for almsgiving is misleading: the selection of kirk and burgh records to have reached print is only a small sample of what survives in manuscript, and a selection perhaps influenced by editors’ biases in favour of the period before 1688. (The present study is therefore only a preliminary enquiry.) In either case, however, the largely unknown evidence considered here challenges the suggestion that early modern Scotland was ‘introverted and xenophobic’ by comparison with late medieval Scotland.⁶⁶

This article has drawn together the evidence for the presence of Greek refugees in Scotland in the early modern Period. These refugees came in two distinct waves: one in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and another in the seventeenth century. The evidence is concentrated in the south and east of the country. In both phases, inter-regional religious networks brought Greeks to Scotland: in the first phase, these were structured around the church institutions of the Latin West; in the second phase, they followed ecumenical interest in Protestant Northern Europe—indeed, the wanderers were themselves mostly clergymen. This movement of refugees, together with the capture of Scots by North African corsairs, linked Scotland with the distant Ottoman world.