'Men Made of Paper: Eastern Christians in the Early Modern
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‘Men made of paper: Eastern Christians in the Early Modern Mediterranean World’ Dr John-Paul Ghobrial Churchill College, Cambridge [DRAFT IN PROGRESS] [PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE BEYOND THE WORKSHOP] Note to workshop: The following is taken from my current and ongoing research for a book I am writing: a microhistory called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 Spain, 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 Arabic 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 Austria, (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.