‘We are at the furthest part of the inhabited world’: Venetian Greeks and the English Reformations

Abstract

This article examines encounters between Venetian Greeks and English reformers, c.1545–c.1700, focusing on two figures, Andronikos Noukios alias Nikandros (c.1500–c.1556) and Kyrillos Loukaris (1572–1638), and their textual afterlives. It is the first study to examine the role the Venetian empire played in Greek Orthodox contacts with the Church of England during the early modern period. In doing so, it takes an under-utilized approach to studying early modern encounters between Eastern and Western Christianities, bringing the field of religious history into direct dialogue with that of bibliographical history to extend our understanding of the long-term intellectual and religious impact of specific episodes of encounter. It argues that Anglo-Hellenic religious contacts were shaped by a shared sense of operating on the peripheries of power, but also limited by the mutual perception of the other as intriguing but inferior, or of marginal importance.

Venetian Greeks and English Protestants represent two religious and ethnic groups who could be seen, in different ways, as operating on the margins of early modern European history. Yet an examination of interactions between these two communities has potential to shed new light on the unfolding of the Reformations. Relatively little work exists exploring Anglo-Greek religious encounters in this period, ¹ and no study focuses specifically on the impact of the Venetian empire on the nature and direction of Greek Orthodox relations with the English church. This is a significant lacuna. The Venetian empire was home to the second largest population of Greek Christians after the Ottoman empire, which in this period included Greece. Moreover, Venice – occupying a liminal position between ‘East’ and ‘West’ – played a critical role in mediating Greek contacts with Western Christianity, and English dialogue with Eastern Christianity.

This article has three main objectives. First, it seeks to rebalance early modern historiography on Anglo-Greek religious encounters by highlighting the role of the Venetian Greek community. Secondly, in response to the wider subject of this volume, the article examines the concept of marginality, asking how far the course of Anglo-Hellenic religious relations was shaped by Greek and English Christians’ experiences of – and fears about – being marginalized. Thirdly, it approaches the study of early modern encounters between Eastern and Western Christianities by bringing the field of religious history into direct dialogue with that of bibliographical history. While there has been excellent work on Greek involvement in manuscript and book production in Venice, ² and there is increasing scholarly interest in Eastern Christian contacts with the West, ³ there are surprisingly few studies examining Greek books as a site for cross-confessional encounters. ⁴ This article argues that examining textual afterlives (in terms of evidence of both ownership and usage) extends our understanding of early modern contacts between Eastern and Western Christianities. In this particular case, without considering such textual afterlives, one might conclude that Anglo-Hellenic religious contacts in the Reformation era comprised, essentially, a series of interesting encounters between individuals with little lasting impact. However, looking at how these encounters were memorialized in manuscripts and published books, and considering who collected these texts, demonstrates that these episodes of direct contact had longer-lasting and unexpected repercussions.

The article focuses on case studies of two individuals: Andronikos Noukios, alias Nikandros (c.1500–c.1556), and Kyrillos Loukaris (1572–1638). Both were unusual among their Greek contemporaries in the extent of their contacts with England and in the degree of their appreciation of English Christianity, which was probably shaped by their cosmopolitan experiences in Venice. More documentary evidence survives concerning Nikandros’s and Loukaris’s contacts with England than for most other Venetian Greeks of the period, and yet both remain enigmatic and contradictory figures. Scholars have struggled to discern exactly what the two men really thought of the English church, or of Protestantism more generally. Nikandros and Loukaris are also significant because of their textual legacy, which resulted in a long afterlife in Anglo-Greek religious relations. The two figures have not hitherto been directly compared. There is a wealth of scholarship on Loukaris, the most prominent figure in Anglophone scholarship on the early modern Greek church. ⁵ In contrast, Nikandros has received more limited scholarly attention, generally within the field of Venetian bibliographical history, ⁶ although John Muir’s recent translation of Nikandros’s autobiography into English will doubtless introduce him to a wider scholarly audience. ⁷ A direct comparison between the two figures, standing respectively at the beginning and end of the Reformation period, highlights the impact of the Reformations and of Northern European proto-imperialism upon Greek individuals’ religious identity, textual outputs and – above all – the nature of their contacts with the West.

Beginning with Boundaries

An analysis of Greek Christianity calls into question many unconscious assumptions in early modern studies about boundaries, identities and peripheries. While scholarship has recognized the importance of the protracted Venetian-Ottoman conflict over Mediterranean territory in defining the shifting boundaries of Europe and ‘the East’ from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, the experiences of the inhabitants of the Greek islands and mainland coastal settlements, who suffered extended periods of violence, and the protracted refugee and migrant crisis across Europe have largely been overlooked. Similarly, although there are many works on English relations with the Ottoman empire, ⁸ no full-length study has explored English contacts with one of the empire’s largest ethno-religious minority groups, the Ottoman Greek population. Similarly, among the many Anglophone works on Venice, only a handful focus on the Venetian empire’s largest ethno-religious minority, ⁹ and none specifically on English contacts with the Venetian Greek community.

We need to recognize at the outset that Greek individuals’ religious identity could be nuanced, and historians must be wary of drawing too firm a line between Catholic and Orthodox: intermarriage and even inter-communion were not uncommon, and confessional identity could be mutable. ¹⁰ The Greek population in the Ottoman empire was nominally almost entirely Orthodox, but Catholic missionaries sought – and sometimes found – opportunities to persuade Greek individuals and communities to enter into some degree of union with Rome, and many Ottoman Greek clergy benefitted from a Catholic education in Italy. ¹¹ The confessional status of the Greek community in the Venetian empire was complex and contentious throughout the early modern period. Contemporaries and historians alike have disagreed over where to place the emphasis. ¹² Were the Venetian Greeks essentially Eastern-rite Roman Catholics, or (sometimes-Nicodemite) Greek Orthodox? The answer depends on the region, period and individual in question.

In Venice itself, in the early sixteenth century, the state gave the city’s Greek population permission to construct their own church in which they would worship according to the Greek rite; in accordance with the terms of the union of the Council of Florence (1439), this was under the pope’s direct jurisdiction. ¹³ In the later sixteenth century, growing tensions between the papacy and Venice (including its Greek population) led to the state’s creation of the Greek Metropolitanate of Venice: the Metropolitan of Philadelphia was responsible for most Greek Orthodox Christians in the Venetian empire and was ordained by the ecumenical patriarch. This gave the Greek population in the Venetian empire a greater degree of independence from the Roman Catholic Church, though close cooperation with the Venetian Catholic and state authorities remained necessary. ¹⁴ The Interdict crisis of 1606–7 raised the fleeting possibility of some form of union between a Venetian Catholic church separated from the papacy and the Venetian Greek church; indeed, reformist theologian Paolo Sarpi opened discussions with the Greek archbishop, Gabriel Severos, to that end. With the resolution of the Interdict crisis, however, such hopes largely faded away. ¹⁵

Venetian Greek Christians, uniquely located on the boundary between East and West, possessed a particular ability to navigate confessional divides and to forge transcultural and even diplomatic networks. Their political marginality made them seem relatively unthreatening, and their tales of sufferings at the hands of both Muslim and Catholic states engendered Protestant sympathies; meanwhile, their extensive mercantile networks meant that they operated within a vast web of Greek trading relationships stretching from the Ottoman empire to Britain. Diego Pirillo has argued that religious refugees ‘functioned as …[an] alternative diplomatic network outside of formal channels’; ¹⁶ as we shall see, this is particularly true of Venetian Greek relations with Protestant Europe. In the case of Greek travellers to early modern Britain, many came as refugees and émigrés in search of patronage from the English state and church, and most left Britain within a few years to seek further opportunities elsewhere. This might lead to the assumption that these Greek figures played only a passive role in domestic affairs and were fairly marginal to international religio-political currents; in fact, Venetian Greek travellers to Britain had a significant, long-term impact upon the religio-political history of the English and Greek-Orthodox churches, and upon intellectual life in Britain and the Ottoman empire.

Nikandros

While recent scholarship has highlighted the relative marginality of the Henrician Reformation to religious and intellectual currents on the European continent, ¹⁷ works on the English Reformations remain more numerous and better known than those on Eastern Christianity in the sixteenth century, creating in the minds of students and scholars alike an enduringly skewed impression of the English Reformations as central to early modern religious history, and of Eastern Christianity as an obscure and peripheral topic. Given this fact, consideration of Nikandros’s autobiographical account of his visit to Britain is important, as it undercuts Anglophone assumptions about the ‘marginal’, highlighting how concepts of ‘peripheries’ are inevitably subjective. John Muir’s recent translation of Nikandros’s work is engagingly, and aptly, titled Greek Eyes on Europe. This article goes further in asking how Nikandros’s particular identity as a Venetian Greek might have shaped his view of the Reformations, especially with regards to England.

Some information about Nikandros’s life as a Venetian Greek is essential for understanding his worldview, and for assessing his portrayal of England and its Reformation, and how this was both shaped and limited by mutual perceptions of the other ethnicity and religion as peripheral and alien. Andronikos Noukios, alias Nikandros, was born on Corfu (in the Venetian empire), around the turn of the sixteenth century. He emigrated to Venice in 1537, during the Turkish siege of Corfu, and remained there working as a copyist and in the printing trade. ¹⁸ Situated as it was on the cusp between East and West, Venice was not only central to the European trade in Greek manuscripts ¹⁹ but was itself ‘the European capital of Greek printing’. ²⁰ From 1542 until 1545, Nikandros was the leading editor and proof-reader for the Greek publishing house of Damiano di Santa Maria, whose works were printed by the Nicolini da Sabbio printers. ²¹ The works he produced included two Greek Orthodox liturgical books – an Apostolos in 1542, and a Typikon in 1545 – and the first translation of Aesop’s fables into modern Greek, in 1543. ²² By 1541, Nikandros was also working in the scriptorium of the Spanish ambassador, Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. ²³ Don Diego employed around eight Greek scribes, but had a particularly close relationship with Nikandros, whom he housed in the Spanish imperial embassy. ²⁴ Within the city’s Greek community, Nikandros played an active role. He was a member of Venice’s Greek Brotherhood (Scuola di San Nicolò dei Greci) from 1541 to 1547, serving as its secretary in 1543 and 1547. ²⁵ By 1541, Nikandros had also received the lowest rank of ecclesiastical ordination as a reader for San Giorgio dei Greci. ²⁶

In 1545, Nikandros encountered an old acquaintance, Gerhard Veltwyck of Revenstein, ambassador to Emperor Charles V, who was on his way to the Ottoman empire to negotiate a truce. ²⁷ Nikandros offered his services to Veltwyck, and, as part of the embassy, travelled first from Venice to Constantinople, and then to the Netherlands, via Germany. Nikandros then joined Veltwyck’s embassy to England. When the rest of the embassy left England in 1546, Nikandros remained for a short while, entering into service in a civilian capacity under Thomas of Argos, the commander of a unit of four-hundred Greek mercenaries fighting in Henry VIII’s wars against Scotland and France, before travelling back to Italy in 1547. Nikandros subsequently produced a three-volume account of his journey, written in Neo-Greek, which included an account of the Henrician Reformation. ²⁸

Nikandros’s choice of subject matter underlines that, to a Venetian audience of the earlier sixteenth century, England was an intriguingly peripheral place. Nikandros does not describe his travels in the Ottoman empire, claiming that the country is ‘known to practically everyone and it is easy to find out about’. ²⁹ In contrast, he promises his friend Cornelius (the dedicatee of Book II) ‘a taste of the north and of what lies on the shores of Ocean’ (46). For Nikandros, coming from one of Europe’s Renaissance capitals, England was intriguingly alien and rather backward. The English are ‘barbarians’ (50), governed by irrational passions rather than civilised rationality, being greedy and ‘given to silly impulses which they cannot restrain and full of suspicion’ (51). Even the geography of Britain is strange, the sea surrounding the islands having ‘no bounds’ and being ‘barely known’, while the night ‘is not as dark as it is with us’ (54, 52).

Much of Nikandros’ description of Britain, which comprises Book II of his autobiography, is taken up with the Henrician Reformation. This includes an extended, rather sensationalist account of Henry’s marriages, exaggerated tales of monastic corruption prior to the dissolution of the monasteries, and the report of the suppression of the cult of the ‘rebel’ Thomas Becket, all of which suggest that he received his information second-hand from highly partisan sources, and in a rather garbled fashion. Since Nikandros probably spoke no English, and would have spent his time at court with Gerard Veltwyck’s embassy, the likely sources for his material would have been educated, Italian-speaking, evangelical-leaning courtiers. These probably included former protégés of Thomas Cromwell, given the number of propaganda tales about England’s monasteries and the similarities between Nikandros’s justification of the Henrician Reformation and those found in apologetical literature of the 1530s (55–8, 61–6). ³⁰ Nikandros’s sympathies clearly lie with the English king: he portrays the pope as unreasonable (57), while Henry – ‘an energetic man of noble birth’ (57) – is given two lyrical speeches, the first defending the break with Rome (57–8), and the second dissolving the monasteries in the light of their shocking corruption (65–7).

Nikandros’s autobiography reveals a broad knowledge of Western Christian confessions, distinguishing between Lutheranism and Anabaptism – and disapproving of both (24, 29) – and noting how they differ from the Henrician Reformation. He also shows an interest in other cultures and faiths, including Judaism (24, 27–8). His worldview was probably influenced by the religiously diverse and highly intellectual circles in which he moved in the Venetian empire. It has been suggested that Nikandros’s father, Menandros Noukios, had been the financial patron of an edition of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy directed at Western Christian humanists and intellectuals. ³¹ Moreover, Nikandros’s Venetian employer, Don Diego, was a man of extensive interreligious and intercultural contacts, having excellent Arabic and amassing 153 Arabic manuscripts during his time in Venice, as well as collecting Lutheran books. ³²

While Nikandros’s cosmopolitan Venetian background may have made him more interested in other faiths and cultures, his lifelong experience of living as a member of a religious minority within a Catholic empire no doubt shaped his cautious treatment of Catholicism in his writing. Despite the admiration he expressed for Henry VIII’s religious reforms, his text is not, overall, anti-papal or anti-Catholic; for example he shows a certain sympathy for the papacy when discussing the sack of Rome (1527), and he describes the Greeks and Italians as sharing the same religion and faith. ³³ Nikandros would have been well aware that the Venetian Greek church depended on the papacy. Moreover, Muir argues that Nikandros’s formal dedications of his books to particular people suggests that ‘he intended publication at some point and was looking for financial backing and support’. ³⁴ If Nikandros did originally aim to publish his work, this would have necessitated particular care in what he said about the Catholic Church. He would probably have been aware, both through his father and his own work with the da Sabbio printing firm that, in 1527, Stefano da Sabbio had been summoned before the Catholic authorities of Venice for printing a Horologion, an Orthodox liturgical text, which allegedly contained verses criticizing the Catholic Church. Stefano had, in turn, blamed the work’s editor, the Greek Demetrios Zenos. ³⁵ Those involved seem to have escaped lightly, but the episode showed that, although Venice permitted its citizens a remarkable degree of religious liberty compared to most other European states of the period, Greek Orthodox printing in Venice was nonetheless under surveillance from the Catholic Church and that producing material criticizing Catholicism was dangerous.

While Nikandros’s visit to England is an unusual episode in sixteenth-century Anglo-Hellenic relations, can it be said to be anything more than a curiosity? It left no apparent impression on English religious life, despite the interest in Greek Christian history and religion displayed by the Henrician apologists of the late 1520s and early 1530s. The Henrician reformers’ interest was in the glorious precedent of Byzantium, a caesaropapist empire that had stood in opposition to Rome; ³⁶ contemporary Greek Venetians served no apologetical purpose, seeming in almost every way Italian, and often having sad tales to tell of living out their lives as refugees or émigrés (36), in awkward cooperation with the Venetian Catholic regime.

Equally, Nikandros’s visit to England seems to have had limited direct impact on his own religious beliefs, and no obvious impact on the Venetian Greek community more widely. In 1547, the Greek brotherhood sent Nikandros as their representative to intercede with Pope Paul III in an attempt to lift the bull of 6 March 1543 that restricted the religious freedoms granted to the Venetian Greeks. Nikandros, for all his praise of England’s break with Rome, was highly successful in his mission to restore a peaceable relationship between the papacy and the Venetian Greek church. ³⁷ His final literary effort, Τραγωδία εἰς τήν τοῦ Αὐτεξουσἰου ἀναίρεσιν (Tragōdia eis tēn tou Autexousiou anairesin), in 1551, ³⁸ was a Greek translation and adaptation of a 1546 anti-papal satire, A Tragedy on the Refutation of Free Will, by the Italian Protestant Francesco Negri of Bassano. ³⁹ This contrasts strangely with his 1547 mission to Rome, but it may be that he was primarily interested in the topic of free will. It perhaps suggests that his time in England sparked an interest in Reformation thought. His translation seems, however, to have remained unpublished. ⁴⁰

It is through the textual afterlives of his (also unpublished) autobiographical account of his European travels that Nikandros’s encounter with proto-Protestantism had longer-lasting cross-confessional influence. One copy belonged to Don Diego. ⁴¹ Given that it contains only Books I and II, it may have been copied before Nikandros had finished writing Book III. This suggests the intriguing possibility that Nikandros gave the manuscript to Don Diego during his 1547 embassy to Rome. If so, the manuscript’s up-to-date survey of the Reformations in Germany and England, and the reasons for England’s break with Rome, may have been of particular interest to Don Diego, who had become Spanish ambassador to Rome that year. ⁴² The work, perhaps because of its carefully ambiguous treatment of Roman Catholicism, subsequently survived the Spanish Inquisition’s censorship of Don Diego’s library in the 1570s, and was later bequeathed – along with the bulk of Don Diego’s books – to Philip II’s library at the El Escorial. ⁴³ Thus, one copy of the only work by a sixteenth-century Greek Orthodox author to describe the early Reformations in Germany and England found its way into the library of ‘the Most Catholic King of Spain’.

Meanwhile, another copy of Books I and II found its way into very different hands, belonging by 1637 to Archbishop William Laud. ⁴⁴ We know that Laud had a strong interest in Greek Christianity, collecting Greek manuscripts, dispensing patronage for the printing of Greek texts, and engaging in correspondence with leading figures in the Greek Orthodox Church. ⁴⁵ However, paradoxically, Laud’s marginal notes in Nikandros’s text are suggestive of the limits of English interest in Greek Christianity. Laud seems to have read Nikandros simply as an eyewitness source for sixteenth-century British and German religious history, rather than engaging with the text as a Greek Orthodox perspective on the events of the Reformation. Laud’s marginal notes are limited, either functioning as place-markers or taking Nikandros’s narrative at face value. ⁴⁶

Loukaris

While Nikandros’s role in Reformation history has been largely overlooked, his Venetian-Greek compatriot Kyrillos Loukaris has received rather more scholarly attention. Yet, as with the case of Nikandros, examining Loukaris’s life and legacy through the analytical lenses of marginality and bibliographical history sheds important new light on early modern Anglo-Hellenic religious contacts. Scholarship on Kyrillos Loukaris has long been dominated by two related questions: first, did Loukaris actually write ‘his’ confession; secondly, was he a ‘Protestant patriarch’? ⁴⁷ Contemporaries in both East and West hotly debated these questions during Loukaris’s lifetime and after his death. This article takes a different approach, assessing the broader impact of Loukaris’s contacts with the English church, and asking how far this episode of closer collaboration between the Greek and English churches had a lasting impact on the religious history of either or both nations. It argues that the attempted co-operation stemmed partly from shared fears of being marginalized, yet foundered precisely because the two confessions were, in different sense, operating on the peripheries of power.

The relationship which developed between Loukaris and the Church of England was shaped both by Loukaris’s own Venetian background and by the fact that many of his protégés were Venetian Greeks. Although Loukaris spent his ecclesiastical career in the Ottoman empire, he was by birth and upbringing a Venetian Greek: born on Crete in 1572, at the age of twelve he travelled to Italy, where he studied for four years in Venice under the famous Greek scholar and cleric Maximos Margounios, and from 1589 for six years at the University of Padua. Loukaris’s Venetian education had a lifelong impact on him. Most obviously, it equipped him with the languages to forge collaborative networks with the Western Protestant powers and to read both Protestant and Catholic texts. Under Margounios’s tuition, Loukaris improved not only his Greek but also his Italian and Latin. ⁴⁸ Additionally, the young Loukaris was probably influenced in his theological worldview by Margounios, who was a leading apologist for Orthodoxy against Catholicism. ⁴⁹ Loukaris’s time at the ethnically diverse University of Padua also would have brought him into direct contact with northern European Protestants, possibly even English students. ⁵⁰

Loukaris’s eventual election, first to the see of Alexandria and then to that of Constantinople, strengthened ties between the Venetian and Ottoman Greek worlds. ⁵¹ Loukaris patronized fellow Venetian Greeks and those with whom he had forged ties while in the Venetian empire. For example, in order to revitalize the Patriarchal Academy of Constantinople, he invited his former classmate at the University of Padua, the leading neo-Aristotelian thinker Theophilos Korydalleus, to take charge of the school. ⁵² Similarly, his protégé Nikodemos Metaxas, who attempted to establish a Greek printing press in Constantinople, was from the Venetian-ruled island of Cephalonia, while the second student whom Loukaris sent to study at Oxford – Nathaniel Konopios – was a fellow Cretan.

Loukaris was elected patriarch of Alexandria in 1601, ⁵³ and ecumenical patriarch in 1621, ⁵⁴ occupying the ecumenical throne until his execution in 1638, nearly seventeen years later. The Ottoman Greek Church faced political, economic and educational limitations and challenges, particularly in comparison both to the status of Islam in the Ottoman empire and to the global power of Roman Catholicism, and Loukaris’s chief concern during his patriarchate was the recent arrival among his flock of well-funded and highly-educated Catholic missionaries. In attempting to remedy the risk of religious marginalization, Loukaris looked to Protestant northern Europe for support. ⁵⁵ By the early 1610s, Loukaris was in correspondence with George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury from 1611 to 1633. ⁵⁶

Through Abbot, King James I communicated an offer to fund four scholarships for the education of Greek students in England. However, this attempted Anglo-Hellenic educational collaboration bore limited fruit: Loukaris seems to have sent just two students, the first, Metrophanes Kritopoulos, studying in Oxford from 1617 until 1622 and then spending a further two years in London under the patronage of Archbishop Abbot; and the second, Nathaniel Konopios, only arriving in England after Loukaris’s death. ⁵⁷ The educational initiative was undermined by differing English and Greek aims. Abbot wished Kritopoulos to socialize almost exclusively with English scholars and clerics to their mutual benefit, and then to return promptly to the Ottoman empire, benefitting the Ottoman Greek Church by his enhanced education and furthering Anglo-Greek relations. Instead, to Abbot’s disappointment, Kritopoulos spent considerable time and money on helping fellow Greek émigrés in London, including Metaxas’s printing ventures. ⁵⁸ Moreover, Kritopoulos clearly felt that an alliance with the Church of England alone would be insufficient: with Loukaris’s support, he travelled home overland through Europe in order to forge connections with other European Protestant churches and with the Greek community in Venice. ⁵⁹ Kritopoulos’s actions led Abbot to conclude that the Greeks were a ‘base’ nation, and he would ‘entreat so well no more of his [Kritopoulos’] fashion’. ⁶⁰ The educational alliance was hindered by an English belief in the sufficiency of their support, a Greek awareness of the actual limits to English power, and English stereotyping of Greek national character.

Loukaris also tried to use the Anglo-Hellenic alliance to have Greek Orthodox apologetic works printed in London and to establish a Greek printing press in Constantinople. His pro-Catholic Greek opponents had access to printing by exporting texts to Catholic Italy and then importing the printed books, and in 1626 the papacy’s global missionary arm, the Congregatio Propaganda Fide, also founded a printing press in Rome to publish material for the proselytizing of Eastern Christians. ⁶¹ In 1623, under Loukaris’s patronage, the Venetian-Greek monk Nikodemos Metaxas travelled to London to learn the art of printing, and Loukaris sent him (via Kritopoulos) various manuscripts to publish. ⁶² In 1627, Metaxas took back to Constantinople the printing press that he had purchased, along with copies of his published books. Metaxas profited from the protection of the English, travelling to Constantinople on a vessel belonging to the Levant Company, unloading his cargo under the privileges of the English ambassador Sir Thomas Roe, ⁶³ and living in the English ambassador’s household. ⁶⁴ Metaxas’s printing press was, however, short lived. In 1628, it was closed by the Ottoman authorities at the instigation of the French Jesuits, who alleged that Metaxas was printing material that contained blasphemy against Islam. Although this accusation was found to be false, Metaxas (a Venetian subject) was encouraged by Venice to stop his printing activities and leave Constantinople in order to calm relations between the Orthodox and Catholics there. ⁶⁵ This was a significant blow to the anti-Catholic faction in the Greek church: once again, no material could be printed by Greeks in the Ottoman empire, while Venetian Greeks were subject to Venetian censorship, meaning that they could not print anti-Catholic apologetics. ⁶⁶ The fate of Metaxas’s printing press highlights the increased religio-political agency available to the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople through collaboration with the English, but also the limits of English power in the Ottoman empire.

In 1629, a Latin ‘Confession of Christian Faith’ was published in Geneva, purportedly authored by Loukaris. The work was heavily Calvinist. ⁶⁷ In the very same year, an English translation was printed in London by the printer and bookseller Nicholas Bourne. ⁶⁸ Whether or not Loukaris actually wrote it, the work was certainly a triumph for Loukaris’s Protestant supporters. It seemed that the Orthodox Church had finally responded decisively to the Reformations, coming down on the side of the Protestants. However, publication of the confession (whoever its author) backfired: in the short term, it isolated Loukaris from many of his previous supporters, and increased Catholic opposition to him; in the longer term, it pushed the wider Orthodox Church into careful examination of Reformation theology and towards an emphatic rejection of Calvinism in particular, and much Protestant theology more generally. ⁶⁹

In 1638, Loukaris’s rivals accused him of plotting treason; he was imprisoned by the Ottoman authorities, secretly executed, and replaced by his Catholic-backed rival, Kyrillos Kontaris. ⁷⁰ The English ambassador was outraged, but found himself powerless. ⁷¹ The demise of Loukaris highlights the limits of English power and of the Anglo-Hellenic alliance. His death marked the end of a period of unprecedently close relations between the Greek Orthodox Church and the English church. A synod of the Greek church in Constantinople in 1638 deemed the confession heretical and Loukaris a heretic. Subsequent synods of the Orthodox Church in Constantinople (1638, 1642, 1672, 1691), Iași (1642), and Jerusalem (1672) did not proclaim Loukaris a heretic, as they did not believe him to have been the confession’s true author, but they all condemned the confession itself as heretical. Moreover, two widely accepted Orthodox confessions were produced by Peter Moghila (1640) and Dosietheos, patriarch of Jerusalem (1672), both of which favoured Catholicism in their evaluation of the Western Reformation debates. ⁷² The English – and Dutch – efforts of the earlier seventeenth century had failed to secure a Protestant-leaning Greek church. The later seventeenth century saw a short-lived rapprochement between the Orthodox and Catholic churches, and a cooler relationship between the English and the Greek Orthodox ones. ⁷³

A consideration of bibliographical history, however, suggests that the closer religious contacts forged between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Church of England during Loukaris’s patriarchate were not entirely transitory. While the high hopes of an enduringly warm relationship between the two confessions were not realized, the period of collaboration had an impact on both churches for the remainder of the seventeenth century, and each kept an increased interest in and knowledge of the other’s history and theology. This is revealed by close analysis of the bibliographical impact of the mutual patronage relationships forged between Loukaris and leading English ecclesiastical and diplomatic figures.

The most obvious sustained benefit which the Church of England derived from the close relationship between Loukaris and the English embassy in Constantinople was intellectual. The Stuart period saw a new-found English interest in collecting Ottoman-Greek texts and antiquities. While not generally to the benefit of the Ottoman Greek population, it transformed English libraries, and is an important theme in early modern bibliographical history. During his time in Constantinople, the English ambassador Thomas Roe acquired manuscripts and antiquities for the duke of Buckingham, the earl of Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury, and for his own private collection. ⁷⁴ Loukaris proved a particularly useful source of items and information. Roe aimed to export as many rare patristic Greek manuscripts as possible, for publication in England and for the use of English Protestant scholars in their anti-Catholic apologetics. This aim was in line with Loukaris’s own goals, and he advised Roe on the choice of manuscripts to send to Archbishop Abbot. ⁷⁵ Many, such as the now famous Codex Alexandrinus, were given by Loukaris as gifts to the English Crown and church. ⁷⁶

To show his gratitude to Oxford, his alma mater, in 1628, Roe donated to the Bodleian Library a collection of twenty-seven Greek manuscripts that he had acquired during his time in Constantinople. ⁷⁷ Marking a turning point in the library’s curation of Greek manuscripts, this was the first collection to be kept separately and numbered as a collection. ⁷⁸ It includes a wide range of religious texts by both early church and later Byzantine writers, and provided English scholars with rare source material by lesser-known authors such as the twelfth-century theologian Euthymius Zigabenus ⁷⁹ and the fourteenth-century ecclesiastical historian Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopooulos. ⁸⁰ Roe’s collection also reveals the close link between the early modern Venetian and Ottoman Greek worlds, and the overlapping nature of English encounters with the two; for example, the Venetian-Greek scribe Georgios Kontis of Cephalonia was commissioned by Roe to produce two compilations of patristic texts. ⁸¹

Just as Roe’s close relations with Loukaris and the wider Ottoman Greek Church had a significant impact upon the development of English libraries, so too English royal and ecclesiastical patronage of Loukaris’s protégé Metrophanes Kritopoulos transformed the library of the patriarchate of Alexandria. Kritopoulos had explained to Abbot that ‘in poor, suffering Greece, books are rare’; thus, in the period when their relationship was cordial, Abbot bought him ‘out of the shop many of the best Greek authors, and among them Chrysostom’s eight tomes … [and] furnished him also with other books of worth, in Latin and in English.’ ⁸² Other friends also gifted printed books: for example, the Royal Librarian Patrick Young presented Kritopoulos with the works of John of Damascus and John Cassian as a mark of friendship. ⁸³ By the end of his time in England, Kritopoulos had amassed enough books to fill four large crates, shipped first from London to Venice, and later to the Ottoman empire. ⁸⁴ Given the lack of access to printing in the Ottoman empire, these books would have been highly valued. While Kritopoulos collected many further books on his travels home through Western Europe, the impact of the Anglo-Hellenic alliance cannot be overstated, as English royal sponsorship had enabled Kritopoulos to travel to the West to study at Oxford, and his large collection of Western printed works had its origins in his time in England. Kritopoulos’s collection equipped the Patriarchal Library of Alexandria and the scholars who used it to evaluate and respond to Reformation controversies and contemporary Western theology. To this day, 265 volumes bearing Kritopoulos’s name remain in the library; of these fifty-eight relate to Protestant theology and seventeen to Roman Catholic theology. ⁸⁵

The English printing ventures of another of Loukaris’s protégés, the Venetian monk Nikodemos Metaxas, also had important consequences for libraries in both England and the Ottoman empire. Metaxas published at least three works during his time in England. ⁸⁶ These were compendia of writings by later Byzantine and contemporary Greek Orthodox theologians and apologists. His primary aim was to make these texts available to Greeks in the Ottoman empire and he exported many copies to Constantinople when he travelled there in 1627. ⁸⁷ However, my analysis of the ownership marks in copies that can be found today in the libraries of the University of Cambridge highlights that some copies were sold in England, perhaps to cover publishing costs and fund the purchase of the second-hand printing press that Metaxas then took to Constantinople. My research also provides new insights into the circulation of these works in seventeenth-century England, suggesting that Loukaris and Metaxas’s printing venture had a long-term impact on English intellectual and religious life, albeit probably an unintended one.

The second work which Metaxas published comprises a collection of tracts by three Orthodox apologists famed for their critical evaluation of Catholicism, namely the fourteenth-century Byzantine theologian Gregory Palamas; the fifteenth-century Ecumenical Patriarch Gennadius Scholarios; and the Venetian Greek humanist (and former teacher of Loukaris) Maximos Margounios. ⁸⁸ All the tracts in this volume were written in vernacular Greek, and formed part of Loukaris’s attempt to improve the religious education of a broader swathe of the Ottoman Greek population. The tracts have separate title pages and pagination, but were intended to be bound together as a single volume. ⁸⁹ A copy of this printed volume survives in the library of St John’s College, Cambridge. ⁹⁰ The note inside the front cover states that the book was part of the bequest of Thomas Morton. Morton, an alumnus of St John’s who went on to hold the bishoprics of Chester, Coventry and Lichfield, and Durham, donated £100 to St John’s for the purchase of books in 1628, 1634, 1637 and 1639, along with books from his own library. He was a moderate Calvinist and the author of anti-papal polemic pamphlets, and is it is tempting to wonder whether this Metaxas volume either came from his own library or whether he had a direct hand in its selection. Certainly, by the end of the 1630s at the latest, through the printing ventures of Metaxas and Loukaris, the academics and students of a leading Cambridge college had access to a collection of tracts by key Greek Orthodox apologists.

By the early eighteenth century, another of Metaxas’s works had also entered into the possession of the University of Cambridge. ⁹¹ The work was primarily one of anti-papal apologetics, and contained texts by the Byzantine mystic, Neilos Cabasilas; the fourteenth-century Italian-Greek theologian, Barlaam of Calabria; the sixteenth-century Venetian-Greek theologian, Giorgios Koressios; the recently-deceased patriarch of Alexandria and relative of Loukaris, Meletios Pegas; and the recently-deceased Greek metropolitan of Venice, Gabriel Severos. ⁹² The copy in question had originally been part of the library of John Moore (1646–1714), bishop of Norwich, the most prolific English book collector of his age. As commemorated in the bookplate at the bottom of the title page, upon Moore’s death, together with the rest of his library, it passed to King George I, who bequeathed it to Cambridge University Library in 1715. ⁹³

Finally, texts relating to Loukaris himself found a ready audience in England for the remainder of the seventeenth century. In northern Europe, he was the best-known Orthodox primate of the early modern period. He also quickly became seen as a martyr and proto-Protestant reformer. In 1680, Thomas Smith, fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, published An Account of the Greek Church … To Which is Added an Account of the State of the Greek Church under Cyrillus Lucaris … with a Relation of his Sufferings and Death. This work coincided with an important, but again short-lived, Anglo-Hellenic initiative, in which a Greek church was established in London between c.1676 and 1681, under the patronage of the bishop of London, Dr Henry Compton. ⁹⁴ By the time Smith’s text was completed, the project was foundering, and Smith’s preface awkwardly tries to commend the bishop for his pious initiative, while lamenting the likely failure of the project due to the Greeks’ ingratitude. ⁹⁵ The work is interesting as an English revisionist history of Loukaris’s reign as ecumenical patriarch, and in revealing a strong deprecating strain in English sentiments towards Greek Orthodoxy by the later seventeenth century. Smith depicts the Greeks as sadly beset not only by Ottoman persecution, but also by ‘corruptions and errours … to the great … dishonour of our Holy Religion’, in that these ‘superstitious rites’ have exposed Ottoman Christians to the ‘censure and contempt’ of their Muslim neighbours. ⁹⁶ He describes Loukaris as a ‘great man’ who tried to bring a about ‘a Reformation’; ⁹⁷ however, since Loukaris’s death, he sees little hope of the Greeks themselves initiating one: the recent synods in the Greek church and their condemnation of Loukaris’s confession show that the Greeks ‘have of late more than ever been wrought upon by the sly artifices … of the subtile Emissaries of Rome.’ ⁹⁸ The project to found a Greek church in London under Anglican patronage is presented by Smith as an alternative means by which to bring the Greeks closer to the doctrine and worship of the Church of England, ⁹⁹ which Smith clearly sees as in harmony with the original objectives of the ultimately unsuccessful alliance between Loukaris and the English church in the earlier seventeenth century.

Meanwhile, St John’s College, Cambridge, acquired in the mid-seventeenth century a copy of the Swiss theologian Johannes Heinrich Hottinger’s Analecta historico-theologica (Zurich, 1652). ¹⁰⁰ This vast tome of Protestant apologetics includes a very lengthy appendix concerning ‘Cyril, celebrated Patriarch of Constantinople, and martyr’. The appendix reproduces Loukaris’s confession, and rebuts Orthodox and Catholic criticism of it by including after each chapter of the confession a substantial analysis of supporting evidence found in the patristic Greek Fathers. The text is in Greek and Latin and – given the editor’s inclusion of abundant supporting references to scriptural and patristic sources, as well as an account of the life, death and posthumous reception of Loukaris – would have been highly informative for students and academics studying Protestant apologetics, Calvinist theology, or Greek Christian history and theology from the Protestant perspective. In 1653, Robert Metcalfe, an alumnus of St John’s and former regius professor of Hebrew at Trinity College, Cambridge, left in his will £100 per year for the purchase of divinity texts by St John’s library. ¹⁰¹ A bookplate on the inside of the front cover of St John’s copy of the Analecta states that it was bought with Metcalfe’s bequest, while the handwritten ‘1653’ under the bookplate suggests that the book was bought in the year that Metcalfe’s fund was established, and only a year after the book had been published in Zurich. The copy is very well-thumbed and ink-spattered throughout, suggesting that this account of Loukaris’s life and martyrdom was well read in subsequent decades.

St John’s neighbour, Trinity College, acquired in 1679 a copy of a 1645 edition of Loukaris’s confession, possibly printed at Amsterdam. ¹⁰² It had come from the private library of one of the college’s fellows, James Duport, an eminent Greek scholar and a bibliophile, who left his collection of 2,144 books to the college library upon his death. Duport was more Laudian than Calvinist by inclination and had preached against puritanism throughout the Interregnum; his ownership of the Confession suggests a cross-confessional interest in the text among English clerics and scholars. ¹⁰³ This is, likewise, indicated by the bequest in 1691 of a copy of Thomas Smith’s An Account of the Greek Church (1680) to Trinity by former Royalist army officer Sir Henry Puckering, who had a strong dislike for Protestant dissenters and was suspected of Catholic sympathies. ¹⁰⁴

Conclusion

‘We are here today at the furthest parts of the inhabited world’: ¹⁰⁵ Nikandros depicts the Greek commander Thomas of Argos as saying these words to his unit of mercenaries fighting for Henry VIII. For Venetian Greeks and the English, each was the ‘Other’: an intriguing but alien Christian people, inhabiting territories on the peripheries of their known worlds. In a turbulent and changing international landscape, each felt an enduring sense of their own unique ethno-religious importance, and yet also faced issues of political and geographical marginalization. A shared curiosity about each other, and a shared fear of being pushed to the peripheries, were motivating factors in attempts at Anglo-Hellenic religious contact and collaboration. Yet, partly because of a sense on each side that the other’s confessional or cultural identity was of secondary importance to their own, such attempts quickly broke down.

This does not mean, however, that such encounters are unimportant to early modern religious and intellectual history. Using bibliographical methodology can unearth new evidence that Anglo-Greek religious contacts in this period had often unexpected but enduring textual legacies. Nikandros’s visit to England led to the only Greek eyewitness description of the Henrician Reformation; this account entered into the libraries of Don Diego, the Spanish ambassador to Rome; of Philip II at the Escorial; and of Archbishop William Laud. Meanwhile, English patronage enabled Loukaris to send Kritopoulos to collect books in England, and Metaxas to print several volumes of Greek Orthodox apologetics, while Thomas Roe’s warm relationship with Loukaris facilitated English acquisition of precious and rare Greek texts for English libraries such as the Bodleian. Moreover, while English backing of Loukaris ended in disappointment, the patriarch was commemorated as a martyr and proto-Greek-reformer. He lived on in English libraries, private and institutional, and of all confessional stripes: his patriarchate was remembered as unusual, and perhaps unhappily peripheral to the ultimate course of Greek Orthodox history, but it was not forgotten.