A reader may, from the opening title of this monograph, glean the sense that English is not the author's native tongue, but in fact the main text of the narrative reads more fluently than the cover promises, though peppered with just the amount of technical jargon to stop it being a thoroughly enjoyable read. It is the published form of a doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Hamburg in 2021, and focuses intensively on the seventeenth-century Orthodox Cretan scholar who became Metropolitan bishop of Philadelphia (hierarch in charge of the Greek community in the Venice region), who lived at different times in Candia when Crete was under a siege from the Ottoman Phanar (a military campaign that ultimately lasted twenty-one years), as well as in Venice and Corfu. The work uses, at first-hand, and very professionally, archival material from the libraries of Heraklion and Athens as well as the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine studies in Venice, the Venetian State Archives and the Biblioteca Marciana. It is undoubtedly a deep analysis of Gerasimos Vlachos's scholarly and political world (particularly of the hierarch's extensive personal library), and points the reader to extensive bibliographic support material. The scholar-bishop emerges as a man of liberal and ecumenical spirit, though siding with Catholic theological trends (which he saw as in general harmony with the ancient traditions) and consistently hostile to Protestant ideas. He had admiration for the learning of the Jesuits and his library contained many of the major theological writers of the medieval West alongside a core of patristic texts. His leadership of the Greek Venetian community was one that was determined to emphasise (and support) Hellenism's intellectual and cultural heritage, but also to advocate the necessity in this time and era of forming alliances with the Catholic West in the face of Ottoman domination to the East and Protestant expansion in the West. He held the Republic of La Serenissima in high esteem and both valued and learned from its open-minded culture. His overarching cultural aim was to rally the Greek community (much in the traditional Byzantine manner) by a double appeal to the Hellenic spirit of paideia and the patristic sense of ecclesial fidelity. This is a work that will be useful to both Ottoman and Modern Hellenic studies.
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