University of North Florida UNF Digital Commons History Faculty Publications Department of History 2008 Eastern Orthodoxy Under Siege in the Ottoman Levant: A View from Constantinople in 1821 Theophilus C. Prousis University of North Florida,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/ahis_facpub Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Prousis, Theophilus C., "Eastern Orthodoxy Under Siege in the Ottoman Levant: A View from Constantinople in 1821" (2008). History Faculty Publications. 13. https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/ahis_facpub/13 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of History at UNF Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UNF Digital Commons. For more information, please contact Digital Projects. © 2008 All Rights Reserved EASTERN ORTHODOXY UNDER SIEGE IN THE OTTOMAN LEVANT: A VIEW FROM CONSTANTINOPLE IN 1821 by Theophilus C. Prousis University of North Florida The Fourteenth Annual James W. Cunningham Memorial Lecture on Eastern Orthodox History and Culture University of Minnesota 7 November 2008 RESEARCH on Imperial Russia’s contacts and connections with Eastern Or- thodox communities in the Levant in the early nineteenth century aroused my interest in how Britain, that other edge of Europe, related to the Ottoman Empire during this tumultuous period. Traders, travelers, envoys, consuls, and others registered their impressions and observations in myriad writings, providing historians with a treasure trove for probing the Eastern Question, the nineteenth-century European dilemma of what to do with the surprisingly resilient Ottoman Empire, still possessing strategic lands and vital waterways in the Near East.