‘Men made of paper: Eastern Christians in the Early Modern Mediterranean World’

Dr John-Paul Ghobrial Churchill College, Cambridge

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Note to workshop: The following is taken from my current and ongoing research for a book I am writing: a microhistory called The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon. What follows is not material from the book itself but rather my attempt to think through several issues that have emerged in the process of thinking and writing about Elias of Babylon. Here, I consider (among other things) what we might call the ‘mechanics’ of mediation, that is to say, basic ‘nuts and bolts’ questions about the actual strategies, practices, and fictions used by some Eastern Christians to create roles for themselves as intermediaries between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. (I use the word ‘create’ deliberately.) In this article, I emphasise the extent to which practical matters related to bureaucracy, mobility, and identification play a role in wider, conceptual issues related to mediation in the early modern Mediterranean.

Let me begin with a curious scrap of paper preserved today in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville. In this graveyard of imperial paperwork—a a testament to the administrative reach of the Spanish empire—there lies a royal decree issued by King Carlos II in 1672 granting permission to one ‘Don Elias, a Chaldean and cleric of the church of Babylon, to travel to the Indies to collect alms (a pedir limosna) for a period of four years’.1 Like so many other references to this man from Mosul, these few lines provoke more questions than answers. What was he doing in , for a start? Why had he travelled so far from his home to collect alms? Indeed, what exactly was he collecting money for? Such questions were apparently of little interest to the scribe who drew up the document, almost as if the presence of an Ottoman subject in Spain was an unremarkable and incidental occurrence in the early modern world. For the story behind why this document was issued in the first place, we must turn to an manuscript that lay thousands of miles from Seville, long forgotten in the library of a monastery in Aleppo until it was rediscovered in the opening years of the twentieth century. In this manuscript, Don Elias—or ‘Ilyās ibn Hanna al-Mawsuli’ as he referred to himself—told the story of the day on which he obtained a special licence to travel to the New World. As he told it, the mother of Carlos II had granted the license to Elias as a gift after he had celebrated mass in the royal chapel in Madrid. Only those who had obtained such a permission, he boasted, could travel to the Americas—a reminder of the power of passports, official documents, and letters of recommendation as objects that enabled travel and mobility in the early modern world. For all its

1 See, ‘Real Cédula dando licencia a Don Elías, de nacionalidad Caldea, Canónigo de la iglesia de Babilonia, para pasar a Indias a pedir limosna por triempo de 4 años’ in the Archivo General de las Indias, Indiferente General, 430, 41, f. 361v-362v. 1 mysteries and silences, therefore, the royal decree that sits in Seville today remains an important scrap of paper: it enabled a man from Baghdad to start a new life for himself in Europe and the Americas. It is probably best if we start at the very beginning. In 1668, a man named Elias left his home and family in Baghdad for good. His reasons for leaving are a mystery, and it is unclear whether he ever intended to return home. 2 What is certain is that by the time of his death, Elias had travelled across Europe and as far away as the Spanish colonies of Latin America—a part of the world, Elias would write years later, that had been ‘unknown even to the great St Augustine’.3 As he travelled the world over, Elias left traces of himself scattered across archives and chanceries in the Middle East, Europe, and South America. And while he walked across the world, he also walked across the boundaries of fact and fiction. For when Elias emerges out of the dust of archives, long enough for us to capture a glimpse of him, he usually does so not under his Arabic name, Ilyās ibn Hanna al-Mawsulī, but rather under that of a new persona. Sometimes it is ‘Don Elias di San Giovanni’, other times ‘Don Elias de San Juan’, but most often simply ‘Elias de Babilonia’—or Elias of Babylon.4

2 In fact, this was not Elias’ first journey to Europe. He had made two earlier trips in 1656 and in 1662. That Elias’ intentions were shrouded in mystery from the very start is suggested by the earliest description of Elias that I have been able to find in any European or Middle Eastern source. In a travelogue written by a Carmelite missionary passing through Baghdad on his return from India, Girolamo Sebastiani describes how ‘il Casis Elias’ (i.e. Italianized form of the Arabic ‘al qasīs Ilyās’, or ‘the priest Elias’) desired to travel with him to Rome ‘per qualche interesse’ unknown to Sebastiani. For Sebastiani’s journey to Aleppo with Elias—and the tears of Elias’ mother upon his departure in 1656—see Girolamo Sebastiani (Fr Giuseppe di Santa Maria), Prima speditione all’Indie Orientali del P.F. Giuseppe di Santa Maria, Carmelitano Scalzo, Delegato Apostolico Ne’Regni de’Malavari (Rome, 1666), 241-242. Another account of this same journey was made by Sebastiani’s companion, Vincenzo Maria di S. Caterina da Siena, Il viaggio all’Indie Orientali del P.F. Vincenzo Maria di S. Caterina da Siena, Procuratore Generale de’ Carmelitani Scalzi (Rome 1672), where the ‘sacerdote nestoriano’ is almost certainly a reference to Elias. 3 See f. 3r in Ilyās ibn Hanna al-Mawsulī, ‘Kitāb siyāhat al-khūri Ilyās ibn Hanna al-Mawsulī . . . ‘an bilād hind al-gharb’ (hereafter: Kitāb siyāhat). Elias’ journal survives today in only two copies, and scribal colophons provide limited clues to the circulation of the text. The autograph manuscript was probably among Elias’ possessions in Spain at the time of his death, from which an early copy of the manuscript was made in 1699 in Puerto de Santa Maria by another Eastern Christian named Andrew (‘Andrawūs’, possibly Elias’ nephew). The two men had collaborated years earlier on the printing of an Arabic prayer book in Rome. Andrew’s copy of the manuscript was itself copied, this time in 1751 by one Makdisi Shammas Hanna, and it is this 1751 manuscript that remains the earliest surviving copy. (All references are to this manuscript, and all translation are my own unless otherwise stated. Unfortunately, none of the existing translations of the manuscript include more than about 60 of the full 130 folios.) In addition, there is one other extant copy of this text: it was made in 1817 by one Jibrail Yusuf Qirmiz. From my comparison of the manuscripts, it seems almost certain that the two extant copies are based on the same manuscript, most likely the 1699 version copied by Andrew at the time of Elias’ death. The 1699 manuscript has never been found. 4 Elias’ full name in Arabic can be found on Kitāb siyāhat, f. 3v. For the use of ‘Elias de Babilonia’, see the Catálogo des pasajeros a Indias, vol. 13, p. 825; cf., Casa de Contratación, 5440, 1, f. 341v. In the few instances when it is used, ‘Don Elias de San Juan’ is almost certainly a garbled echo of the Arabic patronym Ilyās ibn Hanna, i.e., Elias son of John. See, for example, the comment by Archbishop Melchor de Liñan y Cisneros in Lewis Hanke, ed., Los virreyes españoles en America durante el gobierno de la Casa de , (Madrid, 1979), vol. V, p. 205. More interesting is the regular use of ‘Don Elias di San Giovanni’ in Rome, which was questioned by at least one missionary, François de Romorantin, in 1692, in Ignazio da Seggiano, L'opera dei Cappuccini per l'unione dei Cristiani nel Vicino Oriente durante il secolo XVII (Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 1962), p. 482. For Elias’ clumsy signature in Roman script, see Indiferente General, 430, 41, f. 361-362. More generally, my use of these remarkable signatures by Eastern Christians in Europe has been influenced a great deal by Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. 2

It was under these names that a priest from Baghdad made his way across Europe and all the way to the Spanish empire of the Atlantic world. But if his names seemed an act of dissimulation, when it came to his appearance, Elias played up his origins in the ancient world of the East. When he was spotted in Mexico City in 1685, for example, a Spanish chronicler wrote in his diary that Elias had been dressed ‘like a Turk’ with a magnificent beard, a long black cassock, and the white collar of a priest.5 This description of Elias was repeated by many of the people he encountered, along with a common refrain about the objects he carried with him: sacred relics from Jerusalem, an arsenal of medicines and potions, and, most importantly, a letter of recommendation from none other than Pope Clement IX. In the ‘connected world’ of the seventeenth century, these objects went a long way in confirming Elias’ identity as he walked across the boundaries of empires, languages, and religions. Every so often, we capture a glimpse of Elias as he pokes his head up out of the archives under these various names. Thus we spot him, in 1675, boarding a ship in Cadiz. Two years later, in 1677, he appears, this time in the chancery register of the Cathedral of Lima as the recipient of a donation of 1,000 pesos. Here again in 1681, we find him the subject of murmurs and anxieties in the memoires of the Archbishop of Lima.6 Taking these cameo appearances alongside Elias’ own writings, we can walk in Elias’ footsteps as he travelled from the Middle East to South America, via Europe, on a journey that lasted some eighteen years. During this period, Elias lived the life of a rolling stone, setting up shop for himself in such places as Rome, Naples, , Portugal, Madrid, Lima, and Mexico City, before he ultimately returned from the New World to Spain where he probably spent the last years of his life. As strange as Elias’ story might sound, he was not in fact the only Eastern Christian to venture so far beyond the frontiers of the Ottoman world in this period. A few years after Elias had returned to Europe, for example, among the passengers boarding a ship in Spain headed to Mexico in June 1689, we find one ‘Don Atanasio Saffar’ and his servant ‘Juan Jose’—garbled references to their original Arabic names, Safar al-‘Attar al-Mardīnī and Hanna Yusuf.7 The

John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), chapter 2; Valentin Groebner, Who are you? Identification, Surveillance, and Deception in Early Modern Europe, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (Boston, 2007); and, more recently, see the reflection on Ginzburg’s approach in Ulinka Rublack, ‘The Status of Historical Knowledge’, in Ulinka Rublack, ed., A Concise Companion to History (Oxford, 2011), 57-78. 5 For example, see Antonio Castro Leal, ed., Diario de sucesos notables, 1665-1703 (Mexico City: Porrua, 1946), 2:21. 6 Elias’ ship left Cadiz on February 12, 1672 (Kitāb siyāhat, f. 9v); for the donation in January 1677, see José Manuel Bermudez, Anales de la catedral de lima: 1534 a 1824 (Lima: Imprenta del estato, 1903), 146. Of the various references to Elias by Liñan y Cisneros, see, e.g., Manuel Atanacio Fuentes, ed., Memorias de los vireyes que han governado el perú, durante el tiempo del coloniaje español (Lima: F. Bailly, 1859), 1: 281. What appears to be a petition from Elias is in Alberto Carreño, Efemérides de la real y pontificia universidad de méxico, según sus libros de claustros (Mexico City, 1963), 1: 298. 7 Unlike Elias, alms-collecting was not included in the description of Athanasius, who is mentioned in the Catálogo des pasajeros a Indias only as ‘Don Atanasio Saffar, Obispo de Mardini y Nisibi, en Mesopotamia, al Perú y 3 extent of this phenomenon becomes clearer if we sift through the records of the ‘Catalogue of passengers to the Indies’ (Catàlogo des pasajeros a las Indias), the official register kept by the Spanish Board of Trade in which the names of all passengers travelling to the Americas were recorded from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. What are we to make, for example, of one ‘Jose Capelan’, described as a ‘natural de Armenia’, who set off in March 1667 to America for four years? Or what of two other , described in the register as the ‘Dominican friars Benito Paron and Esteban Siran’, both of whom received permission to collect alms and set out for the New World in December 1680. (‘Benito’, more likely Benedict, even signed his name in Armenian in the register.) Still others go completely unmentioned in the Catàlogo, and we only happen to stumble upon them later at other critical junctures in their lives and deaths. Consider, for example, the poor fate of a man referred to only as ‘Juan de Amiciensi’, an Armenian cleric (‘clerigo Armenio’) from Jerusalem, who died ab intestate in the village of Santa Fe in 1668. In another case, among the survivors who made it safely to land after a shipwreck near Buenos Aires in 1699, we find a Greek man claiming to be the Archbishop of Samos. He, his servants, and two unidentified men from Naples found themselves at the mercy of local, suspicious bureaucrats, setting off a flurry of paperwork between imperial officials anxious to figure out who this man was, how he got there, and what was his story.8 The small trickle of Ottoman subjects to the New World pales in comparison, of course, to the much more significant movement of Eastern Christians between the Ottoman Empire and early modern Europe. Some of these individuals had an important, if underappreciated, impact on literary and cultural developments in Europe. In 1709, for example, the orientalist Antoine Galland stumbled upon a Maronite in Paris: the young man was called Hanna Diyāb and he came from Aleppo. Hanna shared several old stories with Galland, a few of which would appear later in Galland’s best-selling collection, Les mille et un nuits.9 Nor was this phenomenon restricted to

Nueva España’, Casa de Contratación, 5540A, 3, f. 375v-376v. Juan Jose (Spanish version of Hanna Yusuf or ‘John Joseph’), ‘natural de Mesopotamia’, is described as Athanasius’ servant (‘criado’), Casa de Contratación, 5540A, 3, f. 162v. Unlike Elias, neither Athanasius or Hanna Yusuf left any written accounts of their journeys to Mexico, where they spent some 6 years. However, an echo of Athanasius’ oral storytelling about his journey to the New World can be found in the diary of Khidr of Mosul, ‘Rihla al-qas Khidr al-Kaldānī ila Rumia’, p. 832. 8 The records of these men’s lives lie scattered across the vast bureaucratic corpse of the early modern Spanish empire, including the Catálogos des pasajeros a Indias, the records of the Casa de Contración, and the collection of royal decrees (‘reál cedula’) issued in Spain. In these records, Ottoman subjects are notoriously difficult to identify because their names are routinely and arbitrarily Latinized, for example ‘Juan Jose’ for Hanna Yusuf, a ‘natural de Mesopotamia’, on a ship bound from Cadiz to Mexico in June 1689 in Casa de Contratacion, 5540A, l. 3, f. 162v. 9 Hanna had met the French antiquary Paul Lucas during Lucas’ travels to the Levant to collect manuscripts and antiquities. For Lucas’ version of the journey, see Voyage du Sieur P. Lucas au Levant (La Haye, 1705). Lucas brought Hanna back to Paris in the spring of 1709, where Hanna was introduced to Galland. Although a few scattered references to the encounter are made in Galland’s diaries, the story behind Galland’s relationship with Hanna Diyāb—and his efforts to get Hanna out of —have yet to be told. Nearly fifty years after he returned to Aleppo, Hanna Diyāb penned his own account of his journey to France, preserved today in an unpublished Arabic manuscript. I read Hanna’s manuscript as the sad story of a failed attempt by an Eastern Christian to create a new life for himself in Paris. As this same man was also an important story-teller for the transmission of 1,001 Nights 4

Catholic Europe. Indeed, when we cast our eyes across the horizons of the early modern world, we begin to find such men—and they usually are single men—scattered about everywhere, in France, Italy, England, Russia, India, and the Americas. In major port cities and urban centres in Europe, Eastern Christians eked out a living for themselves as library cataloguers, print-shop correctors, ad hoc translators, and much more. They lived under westernized names that obscured their origins, and they were armed with stacks of passports and official documents—or documents that looked official. We still know very little about the lives of these men, not least because scholars are only beginning to discover their ghosts in the archives. But to give an idea of the scope of this phenomenon, we might consider one estimate based on the finest work on the subject, which has been carried out for years now by Bernard Heyberger. In his meticulous exploration of the archives of the Propaganda Fide, for example, Heyberger identified no fewer than 178 Eastern Christians in Rome between 1690 and 1779.10 This is simply one archive, and Heyberger’s estimate includes only those individuals who addressed themselves specifically to the Propaganda Fide. Nor does this estimate include the wide assortment of Greek priests, merchants, and scholars—all of them Ottoman subjects—who also approached the Vatican in Rome.11 When we begin to sift as well through the papers of European embassies, consulates, and merchants in the Ottoman world, not to mention local and national archives in Europe—from charity registers to vagabond laws to petitions for poor relief—we begin to encounter many more Eastern Christians milling about the early modern world. What we are dealing with, then, is best understood as a systemic phenomenon—and not simply the case of a few exceptional individuals like Elias of Babylon. With that said, this article is not about Elias of Babylon per se. For several years now, I have been piecing together the clues left behind by Elias during his journeys, the product of which is a book called The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon. In the course of this research, I have returned again and again to rather basic questions about intermediaries: for example, what is someone living in Baghdad actually doing in Europe? What sustains the presence of Eastern Christians, in practice, in early modern Europe? How did documents, objects, and stories play a

into Europe, it is not surprising that his account of his journey to France offers an incredibly creative and entertaining blurring of fact and fiction—an example of early modern life-writing at its very best. 10 The reckoning is from Bernard Heyberger, ‘Chrétiens orientaux dans l’europe catholique (XVIIe- XVIIIe siècles),’ in Hommes de l’entre-deux: Parcours individuels et portraits de groupes sur la frontière de la méditerranée (XVIe- XXe siècle), ed. Bernard Heyberger and Chantal Verdeil (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2009). More generally, see Bernard Heyberger, Les chrétiens du proche-orient au temps de la réforme catholique : Syrie, liban, palestine, XVIIIe siècles (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1994). 11 See, for one example, the discussion of Greek merchants attempting to secure their possessions from prize courts in Malta in Molly Greene, Catholic pirates and Greek merchants: A maritime history of the Mediterranean (Princeton, 2010). 5 role in establishing the authority of Eastern Christians as informants? These questions do not simply reflect the concerns of modern historians; indeed, they are questions that Eastern Christians themselves reflected on and problems for which they searched for solutions. To this end, this article scratches the surface of a wider set of themes that I am thinking through as I complete the microhistory on Elias. Specifically, in what follows, I explore the role played by objects, documents, and clothing in the strategies used by Eastern Christians like Elias to establish new identities for themselves in early modern Europe and beyond. This paper also speaks to the growing body of scholarship that explores the crafting of individual identity—that is to say, how individuals created narratives of their lives through the use of texts, objects, and images—within the wider framework of early modern global history.12 As such, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the variety of problems historians face when writing global lives in this period, which are magnified, in a sense, when we come face to face with master story- tellers like Elias of Babylon.

1. Writing Lives and Telling Stories : A Word about Sources

In the world Elias left behind, autobiography usually took the form of inscriptions, colophons, and surprising notes and passages scribbled into the margins of manuscripts. These first-person accounts are usually short, formulaic anecdotes that often reveal only the most basic information about the individuals who actually wrote them. In some cases, European sources about such men could complement the silences left by the paucity of Arabic self-narratives. Yet even here, Eastern Christians flicker in and out of the European archival record like apparitions, and they leave us struggling to capture another glimpse of them. Sometimes, we have no idea of how they ended up in Europe in the first place. In November 1695, for example, we spot an aged man named Domenico Baroco, apparently a Syrian priest, among a group of prisoners in the Castello de Leone in Umbria.13 The gaoler reports in a letter that Baroco is over 70 years old, cannot understand Italian or Latin, and is muttering incoherently about some mistreatment he has experienced at the hands of his patriarch. Ultimately, Baroco is entrusted to the care of a local friar, who apparently knows some Arabic—(who is this Arabic-speaking friar in Umbria?)—

12 The examples are many, but I am most inspired by Natalie Zemon Davis’ Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Harvard, 1995), and more recently, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (London, 2007), as well as the thought-provoking series of panels at a conference on ‘Writing the History of the Global’ at the British Academy, 21-22 May 2009. See, also, Davis’ comments at the recent ‘Storytelling and the Global Past: A Conversation with Natalie Zemon Davis and Amitav Ghosh’, Cambridge, 2 March 2012. For other examples of this approach, see Mercedes Garcia-Arenal and Gerard Weigers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe (Baltimore, 2003); R.D. Crewe, ‘Brave New Spain: An Irishman’s Independence Plot in Seventeenth-Century Mexico’, Past & Present 207.1 (2010), 53-87; or Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (London, 2007). 13 Baroco, most likely, for the Arabic baraka. 6 and that is the last we ever hear about poor Domenico.14 Similarly, in merely a few lines of an Arabic chronicle, we get the whole life of a young boy named George who came to Rome from Mosul to study at the Propaganda Fide in 1725: after two years of study, ‘he lost his mind’. His friends wondered whether it was the of God, or whether he had been poisoned.15 Obviously with individuals like Domenico or George, we can string together only a small narrative of these peoples’ lives. But in a handful of cases, Eastern Christians opted to write accounts of the lives they lived abroad, and they left records of their experiences in Europe that are fuller than the usual pithy notes left by writers in the Ottoman world. Some, for example, carried journals with them wherever they went, as was the case with a man named Khidr, who left Mosul in 1724 and spent the remaining thirty years of his life living in Rome. These autobiographical accounts are sometimes revealing. Khidr, for example, writes a great deal about how he passed his time during the Jubilee year in Rome as well as the sadness he felt at the death of new friends—European priests for whom he wrote moving Arabic and Syriac poetry.16 But at other times, the stories these men told only confuse matters. What are we to make, for example, of Elias’ claims to have rubbed shoulders with Louis XIV, the King of Spain, and Pope Clement IX? For people who spent their lives in a new world, far from their homes, the lines between fact and fiction were constantly blurred, and so we need to be cautious even with those accounts that seem entirely transparent. Making sense of first-hand autobiographical accounts requires us to place these texts in conversation with a wide spectrum of archival, literary, and even material evidence, anything from inscriptions to colophons to marginalia and much more beyond. Most importantly, such texts need to be read always with an eye towards the larger circle of genres, audiences, and purposes embedded in the production of these texts.17 This is especially the case, for example, with the ‘book of travels’ written by Elias of Babylon. As a record of Elias’ wondrous journey, the text also offered its readers a story inscribed on a palimpsest of genres—both oral and written, European and Arabic, from the Latin West and the Christian East. For it was in Peru around 1681 that Elias began to write what would be the first Arabic account of the New World. That he wrote in Arabic is significant, for he just as well could have written it in Spanish, and perhaps even Italian—he knew both—and he

14 Cf., Heyberger, ‘Chrétiens orientaux dans l’Europe catholique’, p. 7. 15 See the Mingana Christian Arabic no. 72. Interestingly enough, in a 1930s Arabic edition of this manuscript, the editor writes in a footnote: ‘The explanation need not lie with God or poison. These sorts of things regularly happen to people who study too much’. See, also, the diary of Khidr of Mosul, ‘Rihla al-qas Khidr’, p. 820. 16 On the wider tradition of Syriac vernacular poetry, see Alessandro Mengozzi, Israel of Alqosh and Joseph of Telkepe: A Story in a Truthful Language, Religious Poems in Vernacular Syriac (North Iraq, 17th Century), 2 vols. (Louvain, 2002). 17 For a sense of the world of information to be obtained in colophons and inscriptions, see David Wilmshurst, The Ecclesiastical Organization of the Church of the East, 1318-1913, 2 vols. (Louvain, 2000), and Amir Harrak, ed., Recueil des inscriptions syriaques, especially vol. 2 on Syriac and Karshuni inscriptions in Iraq (2008-2010). 7 likely could struggle through his Latin. Given his origins near Mosul in modern-day Iraq, we would also expect that he would have spoken Syriac, Turkish, and perhaps even some Kurdish. But ultimately when Elias put pen to paper, he wrote in Arabic, and for an audience that included local Christians in Baghdad, French missionaries in Aleppo (who dabbled in Arabic), and even Vatican officials at the Propaganda Fide in Rome. His use of sources betrays a similar ecumenical spirit. From a hodgepodge of oral, scribal, and printed sources in Spanish, Italian, and Latin, Elias constructed a new story of the Spanish conquest that resonated with Ottoman readers. To do so, he drew on an unruly assortment of traditions including Late Antique miracle tales and saints’ lives, the teachings of Catholic missionaries, and even ethnographic allusions to local Jewish and Yezidi communities in Baghad. In his writing, therefore, Elias danced wildly across the boundaries of genre, combining autobiography, sacred history, ethnography, and Catholic propaganda, often to bewildering effect. Consider, for example, one particular anecdote in Elias’ account of his travels in the New World, where he describes his adventures in the port of Santa Elena. In that port, they told me about a man from among the Indians who was 150 years old. I decided to go and visit him, and I found him healthy of body and ancient in years. He began to tell us about the old times, and he said to us, ‘Near this port, about one league away, there is a big cave where giants (al-jabābra) are buried’. When I heard this information and about the giants buried there, I wanted to see it with my own eyes. So I took with me twelve men from among the Indians, all armed with swords, and we headed to the cave to witness what we had heard about. Upon our arrival there, we lit the candles we had with us, out of fear that we might get lost in the cave. We walked into the cave with the candles in our hands, and at every ten steps, we left a man standing with a light in his hand so that we would not lose our way back to the door. I led them myself with my sword drawn in hand. I arrived at the spot where the bones were, and examined them, and found them to be thick. As for the skulls, they were very big. I pulled a tooth out of one of the skulls—a molar—and it was so big that it weighed 100 mithkals [about 13 ounces]. I also examined the leg bones, and measured one of them. It was 5 spans long.18

Elias left the cave and took the molar with him. But later in the manuscript, he reported to his readers why he no longer had the wondrous molar in his possession: As for the aforementioned molar that I had taken from among the bones of the giants in that cave in Santa Elena, I had a friend who had a daughter in a monastery of nuns. He came to me, and he wanted me to show it to his daughter. I handed it over to him as any friend would do. When the nuns looked at it, they passed it from one hand to the next until they had lost it. I couldn’t get it back again. The bishop of the town excommunicated the nuns until the molar could be found—but it was gone for good.19

In principle, there is no reason to doubt that Elias could have experienced something very much along these lines, perhaps an encounter with the remains of mega-fauna such as giant sloths or

18 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 16r-16v. 19 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 19v. 8 mastodons. Yet, given the ‘fictive’ elements in Elias’ story—that is to say, the literary quality of story-telling in this anecdote—we might conclude that this story was nothing more than the product of Elias’ fanciful imagination.20 But was it in fact as simple as sheer invention on the part of Elias? From other clues in the manuscript, we can obtain a sense of the raw materials that Elias used to construct his account of the New World. For example, this was how Elias described a council held by Francisco Pizarro in 1531. Pizarro held a council, and he gathered the grandees among the Indians of Tumbez. He asked them what had happened to those two soldiers that he had left with them in order to learn the language. Pizarro said, ‘What happened to those two men named Don Alonso Molina along with his companion Don Pedro Khinis, whom I left with you here in Tumbez?’. The Indians responded, ‘Ghuwanha nafuadur tabanfu yoyo wa dirnakan wakstun’. All the notables from among the Indians were present, and in between them [i.e. the Indians and the Europeans] was a dragoman, who understood them perfectly and responded, ‘Kazikus wa ipaya wa sulikala wa khapapan wakuti’. These words mean that they had killed the men by striking them with a stick even though these Christians had not committed any crimes.21

When Elias quotes words spoken by Incas in the sixteenth century, we can certainly conclude he is obtaining this information from somewhere, perhaps an informant or a book. Drawing on similar clues scattered throughout the text, I have been able to identify several of Elias’ sources, some with more certainty than others. Put simply, Elias drew information like a sponge from a world of oral, scribal, and printed sources around him in the New World. Everything that he reported about the Philippines, Elias admits, had been told to him by a ship captain who had lived there for seventeen years.22 Other sources included scribal reports, such as the copy of a memorandum written by an Augustinian missionary named Francisco Romero on Elias’ outbound voyage.23 But more important than anything, Elias’ account of the New World relied on printed European sources—mainly Spanish chronicles and books—some of which can even be identified down to specific editions by copies of engravings that Elias included in his manuscript.24 In other words, when Elias reported his travels in the New World, he drew as much on his own experiences as the stories he encountered in books—and, in particular, the

20 My use of the term ‘fictive’ here draws on Natalie Zemon Davis’ discussion in Fiction in the Archives: Pardon-Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1990), 3-4. 21 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 80r. 22 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 61-62. 23 Cf., chapter 17 of Elias’ history of the Indies, in which he summarizes the arguments made in Romero’s petition, Kitāb siyāhat, f. 132v-137v. 24 These sources included Francisco López de Gómara, La historia general de las Indias y conquista de México (Saragosa, 1552); ‘El Inca’ Garcilaso de la Vega, Los comentarios reales de los Incas (Lisbon, 1609-1617); Agustín de Zárate, Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Perú (first published in 1555; Seville edition in 1577); Gregorio Garciá, Origen de los Indios del Nuevo Mundo (1607); José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Seville, 1590); Rodrigo de Loaisa, Memorial de las cosas del Perú tocantes a los indios (1586). This list is not exhaustive, nor does it include Elias’ sources among classical and patristic authorities. 9 books that sat in the library of the Inquisitor in Lima, a man named Juan de la Cantera, who Elias had lived with for over a year of his journey to Peru.25 Knowing that Elias drew on Spanish sources, then, let us return to his discovery of the bones of giants. Perhaps the passage makes more sense if we read it alongside an anecdote found in the pages of one of the books that Elias was able to access at the residence of his friend, the Inquisitor of Lima. Here we find the Royal Commentaries of the Incas, a history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas written in the sixteenth-century by a mestizo chronicler named Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. In this book, Garcilaso de la Vega mentions: …a very remarkable story which the natives have received as a tradition handed down by their ancestors for many centuries. It refers to some giants who they say arrived in their country from over the sea and landed at the point now called Santa Elena. [Garcilaso then cites a report from 1553:] This is the account [the Indians] give of the giants, and we believe that it happened, for it is said that very large bones have been found and still are found thereabouts and I have heard Spaniards say they have seen pieces of teeth which they thought must have weighed half a pound when whole, and who had also seen a piece of shin-bone of wonderful size, all of which bears witness to the truth of the incident.26

If this anecdote sounds familiar, it is emblematic of the challenges of working with ‘first-hand’ accounts, even when they are written about true voyages that really took place. In this single example, Elias has poached an anecdote from a book that he read, and he has made it his own. From his encounters with vampire bats and deadly insects, to his discovery of a dead boy in the stomach of a crocodile, to vines that stretched out from the ground to capture him, Elias roamed wildly in a garden of stories, many of which had first been told by Spanish writers. This was a true voyage, to be sure, but when Elias narrated the story of this journey, he lived, like Don Quixote, as much through the stories he encountered in the pages of books as the real world he encountered in the Americas. Notwithstanding the murkiness of these texts—or perhaps because of it—I remain fascinated by these narratives of lives lived between Europe and the Middle East for one further reason. As I have suggested, in the early modern period, very little exists by way of what we might call ‘autobiography’ in the Arabic tradition. For far too long, this silence has been the basis for sweeping generalizations about the ‘absence of the individual’ in Middle Eastern societies before the nineteenth century. This facile, but persistent, notion has increasingly come under attack by scholars who have highlighted the variety of forms that autobiography could and did

25 One of the advantages of Juan de la Cantera’s residence, Elias writes, was that it had ‘a beautiful house and garden’, Kitāb siyāhat, f. 49v. 26 Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, ed. Harold V. Livermore (Austin, 1966), 2: 561-563 (book 9, chapter 9, on ‘the giants of those parts’). 10 take in the Ottoman world.27 At the same time, historians of early modern Europe have been engaged in an exciting reconsideration of life-writing, autobiography, and self-narratives in the early modern world. In this context, the fact that Eastern Christians in early modern Europe sought to write stories of their own lives—not just in Arabic, but also in Italian, Latin, and Syriac—offers an intriguing prism through which to view the consequences of ‘connectedness’ in the seventeenth century. By listening carefully to what Eastern Christians said and how they said it, cultural historians can better understand how processes of connectedness impacted on cultural production, as individuals like Elias navigated multiple traditions of writing in their attempts to tell the stories of their lives in new, surprising, and often quite poignant ways.

2. The World Left Behind

Long before Elias began to write, he began to travel. This section addresses a basic, but important question: how did Eastern Christians even manage to get to Europe in the first place? One way to begin is by looking closer at the Ottoman world that they left behind. It has become commonplace to view the Mediterranean the way Braudel saw it from the coasts of Algeria: a great sea of connections linking Christian Europe to the Islamic East.28 But the world of Phillip II looks much different when glimpsed from the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean. If we gaze out from the Levantine coast in the seventeenth century, we are reminded that the Mediterranean brought together not just two, but rather three, civilizations: Latin Christianity and , to be sure, but also the sometimes forgotten world of .29 From the fifteenth century, the Vatican increased its efforts to win the hearts and minds of Eastern Christians. These efforts gained momentum in the sixteenth century when two major ‘hubs’ of the East were established right in the heart of Rome. At the Greek and Maronite Colleges founded by Pope Gregory XIII, Eastern Christians were housed, received instruction, and welcomed to the Catholic world. With the founding of the Propaganda Fide in 1622, the Vatican took its efforts to the streets, so to speak, sending a stream of Jesuit, Carmelite, and especially Capuchin missionaries to a network of outposts scattered across the Ottoman world in such places as Aleppo, Baghdad, and Isfahan. These efforts seemed to bear fruit in the late seventeenth century, as some Eastern Christian patriarchs, bishops, and priests appeared to turn their loyalties to Rome.

27 For one example, see Dwight F. Reynolds, Interpreting the Self: Arabic Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (California, 2001). 28 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York, 1972-1973). 29 See, e.g., the introduction to Molly Greene, A Shared World : Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 11

Here is not the place to get too bogged down in the complicated details of the ecclesiastical history of the Eastern churches. In modern historiography, Eastern Christians who established relationships with the Catholic Church are referred to as Uniates. Looking back from the twenty-first century, scholars have too quickly accepted a rather teleological vision of the processes that led to Eastern Christian communities submitting to Rome. In fact, as it occurred, these processes were always fraught with all sorts of problems and contingencies. Usually, the exchange began when an Eastern bishop (encouraged by local Catholic missionaries) sent a letter, creed, or testament to the Vatican. This initial correspondence would be scrutinized by theologians in Rome for proof that the writers accepted all the doctrines of Catholic belief. When one looks at these early exchanges, one cannot help but sense that the two sides are rarely talking about the same thing. When Eastern Christians wrote to the Vatican, for example, they adopted a formulaic language of submission and, specifically, they requested the Pope’s ‘himāya’, an Arabic word that has the connotation of ‘protection’ or ‘patronage’. For their part, Catholic authorities in Rome read these letters of submission as clear-cut expressions of a desire for union with Rome. In practice though, the Pope in Rome was only one of several recipients of letters from Eastern Christians requesting ‘himāya’. Indeed, Eastern Christians doled out similar letters to local Ottoman governors, Muslim judges, and even the Ottoman sultan himself—virtually anyone who might act as a powerful patron. What we are dealing with then is a problem of translation—not in the literal sense because the contemporary translations are effective enough—but rather in the sense that there is a fundamental miscommunication taking place in these early exchanges between the Vatican and the Eastern churches. In many cases, it seems that this space for ambiguity was recognized by Eastern Christian leaders. Many of them in fact used it to their benefit, for example by securing temporary alliances with Rome in order to increase their power against Christian rivals within their own community. Reading through these exchanges, one cannot help but feel an almost Cold War-like environment of constant defections, mutual suspicions, and a persistent and deep- seated incommensurability between the Eastern and Western churches. In practice then, one of the main consequences of the Catholic presence in the Middle East was growing internal rivalries within Eastern Christian churches between pro-Catholic factions and traditional (e.g., Orthodox) ones. These disputes frequently turned violent, and it is clear, for example, that Orthodox Christians even called on the support of local Muslim leaders to help rid them of their enemies. The case of Khidr of Mosul is typical in this respect. For over thirty years, Khidr had been the director of the local school, with over fifty students under his

12 watch including the nephews of the Chaldean Patriarch.30 But in 1723, Khidr earned the scorn of some of his neighbours when he assisted a Vatican agent, Andrew Iskander, who had come to Baghdad in search of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts. Soon after, Khidr became the target of violent attacks when rumours began to circulate that he was to be elevated to the rank of archbishop. In other words, some within the Chaldean community were incensed at the prospects of someone reputed to have Catholic sympathies might become archbishop. Khidr’s enemies enlisted the aid of the local Ottoman governor, and as a result, Khidr fled first to and then onwards to Aleppo. There, he shared his story with the local Capuchin missionaries, who encouraged him to travel and seek refuge at the Vatican in Rome. And so, they provided him with the documents he needed, and Khidr left for Rome in 1724, where he remained for the rest of his life.31 What I want to suggest, then, is that the intersection of Catholicism, Islam, and Eastern Christianity in the Ottoman Empire created a unique space for Eastern Christians to tell stories about persecution to a captive audience of Europeans. Throughout the early modern period, Eastern Christians sought refuge in Europe by claiming that they were being persecuted—either by Muslims but, more often, by their own Christian brothers. Doubtless, some of these people, like Khidr, were truly victims. But for others, like Elias, the story of having been persecuted may have been invoked merely as a clever strategy for securing passage to the West. The global connections that carried Eastern Christians to the shores of Europe, therefore, relied on acts of story-telling—and this was not just any story, but the most poignant, timeless story of all: the biblical tale of a Christian falling victim to persecution from his enemies. This was the world that gave life to people like Elias of Babylon. This is also the backdrop to understanding the actual strategies used by Eastern Christians to start new lives abroad. Today, we are likely to think of ‘identity’ in an almost metaphysical sense. But as the work of Valentin Groebner has shown us, the actual process of identification in the early modern world had more to do with visual signs and material objects: for example, the style of a hat, the length of a beard, a piece of jewellery, and even a person’s handwriting.32 When it came to

30 This is relevant because in the Church of the East, the Patriarchate was passed down within a single family, usually inherited from uncle to nephew. Even decades later, Khidr still held on to the memory of his students, whose 54 names he had inscribed in the pages of his journal, along with a list of the books that he was forced to leave behind when he fled from Mosul, in Mingana Christian Arabic ms. 72, ff. 27-29. For a classic nineteenth-century ethnography of the Chaldean Church, see George Percy Badger, The Nestorians and their Rituals, 2 vols. (London, 1852). 31 My account of Khidr’s experiences relies on the only existing copy of his diary, which exists in a few manuscript copies today. Extracts from one of these manuscripts were published in Arabic in Louis Cheikho, ‘Voyage du prêtre Chaldéen Khidr (XVIIIe siècle) de Mossoul à Rome,’ al-Machriq 1910. 32 See Valentin Groebner, Who are you? : Identification, deception, and surveillance in early modern Europe, trans. by Mark Kyburz and John Peck (New York, 2007). Archives are littered with examples of someone being identified by their handwriting, for example the arrest of a Greek, Francesco Aspergi, in Chios in 1688 in my A world of stories: 13

Eastern Christians trying their luck in Europe, perhaps the most important repository of identity remained the official document, much like the royal decree with which I began this paper. Whether it was passports, letters of recommendation, certificates of identity, or official seals, such objects went a long way in answering a simple question: who are you? Without a paper trail, you were nobody. Mediation, in the early modern world as today, was often mapped out on a web of bureaucracy. This was something that Eastern Christians understood very well, and it was another reason why their contacts with Europeans were so important. For the only place that Eastern Christians could obtain the identity documents that they needed was from Europeans. Here European embassies, for example, were crucial, because they had chanceries that also carried out the functions of a notary: they took oaths, registered documents, and produced new ones. In principle, these were the only places in the Ottoman Empire where an Ottoman subject could obtain an official document that would be recognized as legitimate in Europe.33 It is no surprise then that the first step in the process that carried Eastern Christians to Europe was that of securing an official document with a clear statement of who they were. Such a document could take several forms, one of which was called by contemporaries a ‘corrato’. (The use of this term deserves further comment, which I would be happy to detail in conversation at the workshop.) While I have yet to find the initial document that carried Elias to Europe, we can better understand how such documents functioned by looking at the corrato kept by another man, Solomon Negri. When Solomon died in London in 1727, his ‘friends’ squabbled over his belongings. (This was a common, if sad, end to most of these men’s lives because they rarely had families to inherit their goods.) Among Solomon’s possessions, they found a corrato, which revealed that Solomon Negri was, in fact, Sulaymān al-Salahani of Damascus, the son of Yāqub and Sulalah. There was a more specific function to the document. First, the corrato confirmed that Solomon had received a proper baptism upon his birth in 1665—in other words, the document attested to the fact that he was a Catholic. But the document also told a story about why Solomon had left the Ottoman Empire in the first place: it stated that in ‘the month of April 1688, under fear of being forced to turn Turk & renounce Christianity,’ Solomon had decided to seek refuge in Rome. Was this true? Who knows. We can be no more sure of this today than were the missionaries that Solomon encountered in 1688. Nevertheless, by certifying his story, the corrato

Information in Constantinople and Beyond, 114-117. On the power of such artefacts, see Ulinka Rublack, ‘Grapho-Relics: Lutheranism and the Materialization of the Word’, Past & Present 206 (2010, supplement 5), 144-166. 33 See Molly Greene, Catholic pirates and Greek merchants : A maritime history of the Mediterranean, 150. Also, Maurits H. van den Boogert, The capitulations and the Ottoman legal system : Qadis, consuls, and beratlis in the 18th century (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 40. 14 infused Solomon’s claims (or his lies?) with the authority of officialdom. The document had been signed by Solomon as well as the head of the Capuchins in Aleppo. Furthermore, it was written in Latin and certified with the seal of the French ambassador. This simple piece of paper provided Solomon with a legitimate justification for travelling, and it opened the door to a new life in Europe. No wonder then that he held on to it as a cherished possession until the day he died.34 This was the sort of document that would have carried Elias all the way to Rome. But the collection of official documents need not stop with the corrato. In Elias’ case, once he arrived in Rome, he managed to ‘upgrade’ his corrato to a more impressive identity document: a letter of recommendation signed by Pope Clement IX. The Pope’s letter confirmed the identity of Ilyās ibn Hanna al-Mawsulī as Don Elias de Babilonia, and the letter itself became almost synonymous with Elias’ identity. Nearly everyone who described meeting Elias in the New World mentioned that he carried a letter from the Pope.35 Eastern Christians in Europe, therefore, were ‘men made of paper’, and their identities relied on the stash of official documents that they managed to collect for themselves over time. In these documents, they were usually described under westernized names, and the effect was to obscure the Eastern origins of these doubles—as much to their contemporaries as to historians today. When we reflect on the names of people like Francesco di Paolo, Tommaso Eva, and Giorgio Sasi, we might conjure up images of early modern Italians. But in fact, these were all the names of men whose lives began as Ottoman subjects of the Sultan. We know too that these men themselves recognized the importance of documentation. As Heyberger has described it, when a man from Jerusalem named Giovanni Shahīn (Italian name: Sciaini) was arrested in Spain in 1732, he was found to be carrying with him no fewer than 46 different passports, patents, and letters of recommendation, as well as a young French woman named Madeleine who Giovanni had picked up near Aix. Shahīn had been accused of simony, and he was reported to have promised several Turkish captives that he would arrange for their ransom. Armed with such a range of documents, someone like Shahīn might live not only a double life, but even multiple lives, depending on what paperwork he carried.36 I think this image of Shahīn with his 46 passports tells us something about the potential fortunes and fantasies of

34 I have written elsewhere in greater depth about Negri (‘Solomon Negri: The Eastern Christian behind the Arabic Bible and the English Qur’an’, forthcoming). Unfortunately, I have yet to locate the actual ‘corrato’, although it was with his possessions at the time of his death as attested by several witnesses in the case. 35 See, for example, the comment by Antonio Castro Leal in Leal, ed., Diario de sucesos notables, 1665-1703, 2: 21. He writes that Elias ‘viene a pedir limosna para aquella cathedral, con bula de Clemente X [sic.] y cédula real’ [emphasis added]. Elias mentions the Pope’s letter over and over again in his diary, and he seems especially pleased at the positive reactions he receives from Spanish officials when they are shown the letter, Kitāb siyāhat, ff. 26r, 43v, and 54v. 36 This case is discussed in Heyberger ‘Chrétiens orientaux dans l’Europe catholique’. 15 some of these men. We can imagine them constantly engaged in a frenetic pursuit of official documents. Here we find them anxious, perhaps sometimes weak, and lost in a mess of paperwork. In this context, Eastern Christians attempted to create new genealogies for themselves. In Elias’ case, such acts of imagination began when he was in South America, where he started to ride in a coach (litera) and even purchased a few African slaves much like the powerful Spanish officials around him.37 By the time he had returned to Europe, Elias had constructed an elaborate genealogy for himself, which he proudly boasted about in a prayer book that he published in Rome in 1692. In this book, Elias referred to himself as the ‘Archdeacon of the Church of Baghdad, Protonotario Apostoliko, the Knight of Saint Peter, Count of the Palatines, and Head Priest of the Church of the King of Spain’.38 Although these titles were effective in carrying Elias from one patron to another, I should highlight that in fact they were all invented. The same can be said for others like Elias’ contemporary Andrawūs, who styled himself –in Arabic letters—as a ‘cavalieri’ of Rome. Among these globetrotters, we find ‘princes’ of Jerusalem, ‘knights of Mount ’, and, in a later period, even a few self-styled ‘philosophes’. These were more than just acts of creative self-fashioning. Rather, by creating reputations for themselves as nobles, scholars, and distinguished gentlemen, Eastern Christians sought to inscribe themselves into a variety of elite social networks in Europe. Apart from documents and titles, however, an assortment of other objects also played an important role in the lives of Eastern Christians abroad. I have already described the way Elias dressed in traditional, Eastern clothing so as to cultivate the image of his links to the ancient World. But Elias also carried objects of much greater value: in 1669, Elias had been given a gift from Clement IX, a set of vestments to be worn whenever he celebrated mass. He does not reveal how or why he was given this gift, but he does describe how he carried these vestments with him around the world. In Trujillo, for example, Elias made special reference to how these vestments increased his authority in the New World: The Franciscan monks invited me to celebrate mass at their place, and it was the day of the Feast of St Francis. I went and celebrated mass there, and the church was full of people. Many rejoiced in my saying mass, because I had with me the vestments (badla) that had been given to me by our Holy Father the Pope (al-papa). His insignia and seal were inscribed on it, and the people came to me to be blessed by it.39

37 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 29r. Elias alternates between Persian, Arabic, and Turkish words to describe his litera. 38 See Elias’ short note—in effect, a printed colophon—in Horae diurnae et nocturnae ad usum Orientalium (Rome: S. Congr. de Prop. Fide, 1692). 39 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 26r. 16

In other instances, Elias specifically mentioned the link between wearing these vestments and collecting offerings at mass.40 This is a reminder of how images—emblems, seals, badges—could transcend geographic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries in the early modern world. When Elias celebrated mass, even as far away as in the New World, he was wrapped, so to speak, in the trappings of St Peter. Wherever he went, Elias also carried relics, crucifixes, and small crosses that he claimed to have obtained in the holy city of Jerusalem.41 I cannot determine whether or not this was true—Elias had passed through Jerusalem in 1668—but what is certain is that these sacred objects were a crucial element in the persona that Elias created for himself.

3. The Fantasies and Fortunes of Eastern Christians in Europe

So far, I have tried to describe the fantasies that Eastern Christians constructed through the use of stories, documents, and objects as they set out for new worlds abroad. But what was life like for Eastern Christians once they arrived in Europe? It is impossible and undesirable to generalize, but from a handful of examples, we might capture a glimpse of the spectrum of potential lives that were lived by Eastern Christians in early modern Europe. In the first place, there is good reason to think that many of them actually did disappear into the European underworld of vagabonds and beggars. In part, this too goes back to the documents they carried with them. As with Elias, most of these documents described their reasons for being in Europe as related to the collection of alms (‘pour quêter’ or ‘a pedir limosna’). In Heyberger’s study of the Propaganda Fide, he identified a request for permission to beg for alms as one of the main reasons why Eastern Christians came to the Vatican. That these men benefited from European charity is also clear from their own writings. When he passed through Paris, for example, Elias praised the ‘great love of its inhabitants for foreigners’. He was especially moved by an association that he called ‘charité’—most likely the sisters of St Vincent de Paul—who distributed money to the poor every week. Elias writes that they even gave charity to ‘those who preached the religion of God in the countries of the East’—in other words, to people like himself.42 Another man, Hanna Diyāb, described how he was nursed back to health after a fierce storm in Paris in the spring of 1709. Lest we see these men simply as recipients of poor relief, it is worth noting that some of them were also active in helping others. In Rome in the 1730s, for example, Khidr of Mosul described in his journal the day that he registered in the

40 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 54v. 41 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 25r. 42 The intriguing passage is in Kitāb siyāhat, f. 5v. Writing a few decades later, Hanna Diyāb also praised the charitable associations (mujma‘a) that helped the poor, the orphans, and the widows. He writes that he himself was nursed back to health after he had fallen ill during a bitter storm in 1709. Especially interesting is Hanna’s lengthy description of having signed his name in the official register. 17 confraternity of the Holy Trinity so that he could, in his words, ‘wash the feet of the needy pilgrims’.43 Yet, the categories used to describe these men on paper rarely captures the whole truth. The category of beggar, for example, could mask a range of other financial activities. On paper, Elias was given permission to collect alms in the New World for a period of four years. Indeed, from other people’s references to Elias, we can be almost certain that Elias was telling people that he was collecting the money in order to rebuild a church near his home that had been destroyed by Muslims. But when we look at Elias’ Arabic journal, it is clear that he was making money in several different ways: he collected alms from Spaniards and Indians alike; he worked as a merchant; he smuggled mercury and ; and he was even giving out loans to Spanish merchants, officials, and ship captains, sometimes at exorbitant rates of 40%.44 If the man really was intending to build a church in Baghdad, he never actually returned to the East to do so, nor is it clear what he did with all this money. This is a reminder that we cannot always believe the claims made by these people, nor the things said by those who knew them. From a long account written by the Maronite Hanna Diyāb (who visited Paris in 1709), it is clear that begging was often only a first step that allowed Eastern Christians to establish themselves in a secure trade. Hanna had come across several Eastern Christians in Paris, one of whom was named Stephen (Istifan), whose story Hanna wrote down as it was told to him. Stephen explained to Hanna that after he had arrived in Paris, he travelled around visiting one saint’s festival after another to beg for alms. Once Stephen had saved up enough money, he invested in the purchase of a kettle and other things needed to make coffee. He then began to attend various fairs, where he would set up a small temporary booth at which he sold coffee to local revellers. Working in this way, it was only a matter of time before Stephen had saved enough money to open his own café in Paris and, before long, he owned no fewer than 7 cafés. Stephen even claimed to have one of his men working at Versailles.45

43 Khidr of Mosul, ‘Rihla al-qas Khidr’, p. 665. 44 The extent of Elias’ activities as a merchant requires further study. At the time of the sack of Vera Cruz in 1683 by English pirates (in Elias’ words the ‘harātaqa’, or ‘heretics’), Elias had a storehouse and he claims to have been robbed of some crimson he had purchased in Wahaca. On his return voyage, Elias was financially secure enough to make a loan to the captain of his ship for the purchase of a new mast. Among the goods he brought back to Spain, he mentions four parrots and a silver lamp. See Kitāb siyāhat, 60v-65v. 45 Interestingly enough, Hanna never seems surprised that he encountered other Eastern Christians living in Europe. I sometimes wonder what these chance encounters must have looked like, when two such men happened to pass each other on a road in Paris. Fortunately, Hanna described one such incident in detail. One day, when walking to his room on the Pont St Michel, Hanna reports that he was followed by a man who would not stop staring at him. The mysterious man followed Hanna all the way to his front door, and then he tried to follow him up the stairs and into his room, at which point Hanna asked him in French, ‘What do you think you are doing?’. The man continued to stare at him, and all of a sudden, he greeted Hanna in Turkish, and asked where Hanna came from. Hanna replied, ‘I am from Syria, from the city of Aleppo’. Hearing this, the mysterious man was overjoyed, and he introduced himself in Arabic as Yusuf. He told Hanna his own story about how he had used his contacts in 18

The business of coffee, of course, seems ideally suited to Ottoman subjects. But in fact, there was another more important realm where they managed to establish themselves, namely, in the world of oriental scholarship. In the seventeenth century, oriental studies was a flourishing field, one that was motivated as much by an attempt to unlock the mysteries of the Bible as by a military desire to defeat the Ottoman Turks. As such, Eastern Christians that turned up in Europe were valued a great deal for their knowledge of foreign languages. Many found work in libraries, printing houses, and royal courts in Europe. At the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the 1680s and 1690s, for example, the director Louis Picques maintained an entire team of Eastern Christians as cataloguers, librarians, and translators.46 The manuscripts that passed through these men’s hands are still preserved today in the Bibliothèque Nationale, complete with the scribbles, notes, and colophons of countless interlopers from the East. There is good reason to think that these men even competed with European scholars for specific posts in oriental studies. This was the case, for example, for Hanna Diyāb, who described his encounters with a ‘shaykh’ named Antoine Galland, who (Hanna claims) was the mastermind behind a plot to send Hanna back to Aleppo because the two men had their eyes on the same post in the King’s library.47 In 1659, Ibrahim al-Hakilani, a Maronite in Italy, wrote an account of his life in Latin and Italian, and this text was intended to secure Hakilani’s reputation as a scholar in the Republic of Letters. What is striking in the way Hakilani’s tells the story of his life is the emphasis he placed on his ability to always make himself ‘useful’.48 Indeed, Eastern Christians demonstrated an incredible ability to respond to the needs of the world around them. As correctors and proof- readers in printing houses, they had an important impact on the variety of texts printed in oriental languages in the early modern period. As I mentioned before, Elias himself had worked in the printing house of the Propaganda Fide in Rome. His linguistic talents in Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Syriac would have been of great use to the Vatican. Such individuals could be enlisted in the work of the Church, as was the case for Khidr of Mosul. During the three decades he lived in Rome, Khidr was a prolific writer and translator. Before his death, he had produced Arabic and Syriac translations of key Catholic Reformation texts including several catechisms, the works of Bellarmino, the Life of St Francis de Sales, not to mention original compositions

the East to make a living for himself as a diamond merchant in France, where he peddled his goods to the elites of Paris and even Versailles. This episode is recounted on ff. 129-130. 46 Francis Richard, ‘Un érudit à la recherche de textes religieux venus d’orient, le docteur Louis Picques (1637-1699)’, in Les pères de l’eglise au XVIIe siècle, ed. E. Bury and B. Meunier (Paris: Le Cerf, 1993). 47 See ff. 136-137. 48 Both the Italian and Latin edition have been published in M. Issa et J. Moukarzel, ‘Abraham Ecchellensis maronita. Biogaphie faite par Carlo Cartari’, Tempora. Annales d’histoire et archéologie 18 (2007-2009), p. 155 – 195. 19 including a treatise on the unity of the Catholic church, a Muslim-Christian dialogue, and several dictionaries.49 Not only might such people be important assets to the Catholic Reformation in the Middle East, but they were also called upon to act as informants about the Islamic world. This is an important, albeit understudied, element of the ‘connected history’ of Europe, Islam, and Eastern Christianity in the early modern period. Eastern Christians contributed to the translation of Muslim texts, the acquisition of Arabic manuscripts, and even the interpretation of the Qur’ān. This is not to say that these men were always competent to provide this guidance, but it did not stop them from doing so. Ibrahim al-Hakilani, for example, corresponded with many of the leading orientalists of his day including Ludovico Marraci whose 1698 Latin translation of the Qur’ān was a masterpiece of erudition that drew on a range of Islamic sources. At the time of his death, Hakilani was reported to be working on his own refutation of the Qur’ān. But his expertise also stretched far beyond the world of texts. Hakilani had spent a few years in the early 1630s running a small business as a trader in captives. In 1633, Hakilani himself made a voyage to Tunis with several Muslim captives that he had purchased from the bagnio in Naples in hopes of ransoming them to the local Dey for a profit. After falling out with his agent, another Eastern Christian in Tunis, Hakilani returned to Florence. Needless to say, this little venture into the slave trade is not something that is mentioned by Hakilani in any of the stories that he wrote himself about his life.50 Eastern Christians also played a central role in European political and religious controversies. This was the case, for example, when it came to the discovery of the so-called ‘lead books of Sacromonte’. The controversy began in 1606, when several supposedly ancient plates were discovered in Spain. The plates contained a long inscription in Arabic, which purported to contain secret revelations from the Virgin Mary, including the idea that Arabic had been an ancient language in Spain that had been spoken among the earliest Christians there. A team of scholars including several Eastern Christians was commissioned to determine whether or not the plates were authentic. By closely studying the grammar, lexicon, and style of the Arabic inscriptions, the team—which included Ibrahim al-Hakilani—concluded that the lead plates were in fact a forgery. Most likely, they had been planted by moriscos in Spain who had hoped to increase tolerance for the use of the Arabic language among the formerly Muslim communities.

49 For a full list of these works, see J.M. Vosté’s bio-bibliographical article on Khidr (1679-1751), pp. 74-76. 50 For a general study of Hakilani’s career, see Bernard Heyberger, ed., Orientalisme, science et controverse : Abraham Ecchellensis (1605-1664) (Turnhout, 2010). 20

In such matters, few things were more authoritative than the expertise and insights of an Eastern Christian.51 Lest we think that this phenomenon was specific to Catholic Europe, the case of Solomon Negri reveals an Eastern Christian at the heart of early eighteenth-century Protestant missionary efforts. Negri spent two decades of his life trying to make himself useful as a wandering professor of Arabic. He held posts in France, Italy, and Leiden, before he ultimately settled in England. At this point, Negri simultaneously became involved in two projects that highlight the complex, and sometimes conflicting, roles taken on by Eastern Christians in Europe. On the one hand, he was employed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge to assist with the publication of a revised Arabic translation of the New Testament. But at the same time, Solomon also began teaching Arabic to a barrister named George Sale, a member of the SPCK, but also the man who would go on to publish the first English translation of the Qur’ān in 1731. In this way, Negri had his fingers in both the translation of the Bible and the Qur’ān in the same period. Interestingly enough, there is no obvious sign of Negri’s contributions to either of these works. His name is not included in the title pages, nor does Sale even mention that he had learned his Arabic from an Eastern Christian (not in the translation of the Qur’an at least). This is another reminder of the reasons why the stories of these men’s lives in Europe have been forgotten. Clearly, Eastern Christians could make a living for themselves in Europe, but this is not to say that the life they lived was always easy—nor was it secure by any means. In the early years of the eighteenth century, a man from Aleppo named Yusuf al-Jawahirci managed to settle down in Paris and make a living for himself by selling diamonds and precious stones to nobles. Yusuf’s life came crashing down on the day he decided to marry a French woman. According to the statutes of the church, any couple that wanted to be married (and especially if one or both of those individuals was a foreigner) had to have their names read publicly on Sunday for three weeks before the wedding. This reading of the bans was intended in part to prevent clandestine marriages. Poor Yusuf was rather unlucky: the first week passed, no problem; the second week passed, he was fine; but on the third Sunday, a man entered the church and he declared to the Bishop that Yusuf was in fact already married. It appears that he had left his wife back in Aleppo. The identity of the mystery man is unknown, but it is almost certain that this man too came himself from the Ottoman world and had known Yusuf back in Aleppo. As for Yusuf’s

51 The best study of this episode remains the collection by Mercedes García-Arenal and Manuel Barrios Aguilera, eds., Los plomos del Sacromonte : invención y tesoro (Valencia/Grenada/Zaragoza, 2006); and Mercedes García- Arenal, ‘The Religious Identity of the Arabic Language and the Affair of the Lead Books of the Sacromonte of Granada’, Arabica 56 (2009), 495-528. I thank Mercedes García-Arenal for her help in this area. 21 fate, all we know is that he immediately fled the church and ran away. This is a sad reminder of the contingency of life in Europe for some Eastern Christians.52 With this in mind, then, we might wonder what Europeans made of all this? Elias reports something about the reactions he received from people he met in Europe and the Americas. He writes, for example, of how the Indians believed him to be ‘a prophet or a saint’ on account of his long beard.53 Like much else in Elias’ writings, this comment seems to draw from a stock of tropes that were common in early Spanish chronicles of the New World. We can be more certain about the reaction he received from Melchor Liñan y Cortes, the Archbishop of Lima. In 1682, about 6 years after his arrival in Peru, Elias was summoned by the Archbishop. This was how Elias described the exchange: He said to me, ‘Why don’t you go back to your country?’. I said to him, ‘If I wanted to return to my country, nothing would stop me from doing so. But for now, I have no intention of leaving’. He then responded, ‘Your order and permit [i.e. to travel in the New World] was for four years, and that period has passed’. So I said to him, ‘Yes, that is true, but I do not plan to leave and be separated from the minister [a reference to the Viceroy of Lima, one of Elias’ friends]. You do whatever you like’.54

Years later, in his correspondence, the Archbishop would advise his successor to be weary of so- called alms-collectors coming from Europe, whose identities were often impossible to verify through papers. In particular, he mentioned the case of one ‘Don Elias de San Juan, a priest from Babylon’.55 Making sense of European reactions to Eastern Christian intermediaries also requires us to consider the media in this period. As wild as these stories may sound to us today, we must remember that early modern Europeans were inundated with stories of conversion, impostors, and identity games. They encountered such tales in the printed novels they read, in the popular ‘histoires véritables’ of the day, and also in the ‘anecdotes’ of the daily gazettes.56 To take but one such story, several texts were printed in the late seventeenth century about a Dominican priest named Padre Ottomano, allegedly an Ottoman prince who had converted to Christianity and was now living in Italy.57 Apparently, the man had even turned up in Paris, a reminder to contemporaries that even the most fantastic stories might be true. As scholars like Robert Darnton have shown

52 For the story of Yusuf, see f. 131. 53 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 23r. 54 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 48v-49r. 55 Hanke, Los virreyes españoles en America, vol. 5, p. 206. 56 For an introduction to this subject, see the section on ‘Stories of the East’ in chapter 5 of my dissertation, A world of stories. 57 See, for example, Chevalier de Jant, L’histoire du révérend Père Dominique Ottoman, de l’Ordre des FF. Prescheurs, sous le nom de Prince Osman, fils du Sultan Ibrahim, Empereur des Turcs. The book was republished in 1670 and again in 1675 with a new title, perhaps to make the point more explicit, L’histoire du Prince Osman, fils du Sultan Ibrahim, Empereur des Turcs, et Frère de Mahomet IV à présent régnant, depuis nommé le P. Dominique-Othoman, de l’Ordre des Frères Prescheurs. Où est décrit le Combat Naval des Chevaliers de Malthe, les Intrigues du Sérail & de la Porte, au sujet de la Sultane & de son Fils l’histoire du Sultan Jacaya, avec un Abrégé de l’Histoire des Turcs jusqu’à présent (Paris: Estienne Loyson, 1670). 22 us, the boundaries between fact and fiction, news and stories, were constantly blurred in the early modern period.58 If someone encountered an Eastern Christian hiding out in Paris under a new name, for anyone who read the daily news, this may not have been so out of the ordinary. At the very least, it was a plausible reality.

4. Conclusion

The more difficult question to answer is what did Christians in the Ottoman world make of those who had left and never returned. In a sense, it is peculiar that there are so few copies of these autobiographical texts extant today. The first Arabic account of the New World written by Elias, for example, exists in only two copies. As far as I can tell, the text seems to have circulated within a very small circle of individuals. Yet, if we consider the sorts of texts that were likely to be preserved by Eastern Christian scribal copyists, we must think in the first place of the classic genres of Late Antiquity: miracle tales, saints’ lives, and hymns for example.59 In this context, we must ask whether the story told by Elias was necessarily ‘fit for purpose’. True, the story was a curiosity—and because so, it is fascinating to modern scholars—but the story of Elias was ultimately the story of a man who one day simply got up, left his home, and never bothered to return. This is not the sort of edifying text that would have been doled out to young children in Baghdad to help them become good Christians. It is worth remembering that our esteemed mediators—so beloved by modern historians—were sometimes up to no good, at least as far as their contemporaries back home were concerned. We can take this one step further if we consider a final detail about Elias and the world he came from. This comes from the earliest reference to Elias that I have been able to locate in any European or Middle Eastern source. In 1666, the Carmelite missionary Girolamo Sebastiani published an account of a journey that he had made to India in 1658. On his return to Italy, he passed through Baghdad where he mentions having met a young man who he calls ‘il Casis Elias’. (The Arabic word for priest is qasīs, meaning that Sebastiani’s reference, whether he realized it or not, was actually to ‘the priest Elias’.) It is from Sebastiani that we learn something about Elias’ family. In fact, Elias’ uncle was the Patriarch of the Church of the East, a man who was fiercely opposed to any sort of union with Rome.60 In 1658, Elias travelled with Sebastiani onwards to

58 See, for example, Robert Darnton, The forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995). More recently, Robert Darnton, The devil in the holy water, or the art of slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 59 For a window into this world of Syriac literature, see the work of Sebastian Brock. 60 For an account of this Patriarch’s vicious campaign against his Uniate counterparts, see the ‘Vittorioso combattimento de catholici sopra gl’Heretici della parte del Levante’. This account, written by a missionary in 23

Rome, where the missionary described how Elias was so moved by his meeting the Pope that he converted to Catholicism and spoke with passion of his desire to convert all ‘the heretics in his own country, including his uncle the Patriarch’.61 The story of Elias, then, is also that of a convert to the Catholic faith—and not just any convert, but the nephew of a Patriarch. As well as being a globetrotter, Elias was something of a rebel. On the day he left Baghdad in 1668, not only was he abandoning his church, but he was also going against the will of his own family. In the epic struggle for the hearts and minds of Eastern Christians, someone like Elias was a major propaganda win and this, I think, is how the story he told about his life would have been read by his contemporaries. Here is yet another reason why we still know so little about people like Elias: as far as their contemporaries were concerned, some of these men’s adventures were best left forgotten. If we wanted to enter the realm of psychoanalysis, we might ask whether this was the reason that time and time again throughout his writings, Elias mentioned the praises that he received from everyone he met. Elias reported the blessings supposedly uttered by a Spanish Bishop, who Elias had reconciled with the local governor: ‘Blessed be the name of God: a priest came all the way here from Baghdad to reconcile us as friends with one another.’62 In a separate incident, Elias described how another man was so moved by Elias’ virtue that he proclaimed, ‘God bless your parents and those who gave birth to you, and may the lineage of the Chaldeans always be honoured’.63 When I first read this passage years ago, it struck me as boastful, and I wondered at the audacity of a man who could praise himself in this way after having left his family the way he did. But the more I try to look through such keyholes in the text, the more I wonder whether what I am seeing are glimpses of an apology of sorts emerging from between the lines of Elias’ writing. He seems almost to be trying to justify to his family, to his people, to his readers, and perhaps even to himself, his having left Baghdad to roam the world. Until I have completed further research, I cannot know whether perhaps I am making too much out of these apparently unguarded moments, small details and clues that might ultimately be just as contrived as the more fanciful stories that Elias told. Stepping back from it all then, what does this picture of Eastern Christians in motion amount to? This is a question about which I am still thinking. In the first place, Eastern Christians certainly played an important role in connecting Europe to the Middle East. If we can

Diyarbakir in 1673, was the basis for a longer Arabic hagiography of Joseph I, the first Uniate Patriarch of the Chaldeans (from 1681), written by Joseph’s pupil ‘Abd al-Ahad in the early eighteenth century. For this manuscript, see Haddad’s edition in Mar Yusuf al-Awwal Batriyak al-Kaldān, 1681-1696 (Baghdad, 2004). 61 ‘…tutti gl’Heretici del suo Paese, come pure al Patriarca suo Zio…’ in Girolamo Sebastiani, Prima speditione all’Indie Orientali del P.F. Giuseppe di Santa Maria, Carmelitano Scalzo, Delegato Apostolico Ne’Regni de’Malavari (Rome, 1666), 275. 62 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 56r. 63 Kitāb siyāhat, f. 49v. 24 speak of anything like an ‘encounter between Europe and Islam’ in this period, Eastern Christians were some of the most important human faces at the front-lines of this encounter. As individuals though, each had their own reactions to this situation. Some like Elias never returned to their homes. Solomon Negri, for his part, wanted nothing to do with his old life: when asked about his family in Syria by his English friends in London, he responded only that ‘he had had brothers but that he had now no relation but God’. Others, like Hanna Diyāb, ended up back in the Ottoman world, and perhaps spent the rest of their lives wondering about what might have been. Having described these men as individuals, I must admit that I myself am not so sure whether that is the best way to understand these people and their world. This is because the lives of each of these intermediaries was only made possible by the successes and failures of those that had gone before them. In other words, there is an almost cumulative element to their stories. The opportunities they found, the strategies they used, the stories they told: all of these things built on one another, from generation to generation. I see such behaviour almost as a way of life, one that was perfected over time by a connected chain of individuals. Some were cleverer than others, to be sure, but all of them were working towards a similar goal of sustaining a new life for themselves in faraway lands through a masterful use of objects, documents, and stories. In that sense, no matter where they found themselves, Eastern Christians in the early modern world were never solitary men. They were connected to each other across both space and time. The other reason I want to emphasize the connections between them is that, as I have suggested, it is very difficult to uncover the ‘truth’ behind them as individuals. Who was Elias of Babylon, really? When I try to seize him in my hands and unmask him, too often I am left feeling as if grains of sand are falling through my fingers. There are other questions too: what did he think of the New World that he discovered? How did he persuade so many people to hand over their money? Mostly, I wonder whether he ever missed his home. But when I ask these questions, all I am faced with is yet another story. Whether it is that of his own writings or what others have written about him, no matter what it is always the story as Elias wanted it to be told. And so, individuals like Elias always maintain the upper hand over the modern scholar. Even in those rare moments when I think I have managed to catch a true glimpse of the man, I am only able to see him because he has allowed me to do so. In this way, Elias and his type continue to cast a long shadow into our world today, as the stories they told are given new life by the confusion of historians.

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