Martin Crusius and the Discovery of Ottoman Greece

with Richard Calis

hosted by Maryam Patton

| In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled a remarkable ethnographic and scholarly account of Greek life under Ottoman rule in his seminal Turcograecia. Though he never left his home in Tübingen, Crusius spent decades corresponding with a far-flung network of intermediaries, including the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Istanbul. He annotated books and manuscripts, and even interviewed Greek Orthodox alms-seekers who passed through Germany. In this episode, Richard Calis explores how Crusius’s fascination with the so-called Ottoman Greeks sheds light on broader early modern debates about cultural and religious difference and how Greek identity became entangled with orientalist perceptions of the Ottoman world. The Ottoman Turks, both omnipresent and strangely absent in Crusius’s research, emerge in unexpected places, including in his dreams.   

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In the late sixteenth century, a German Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius compiled a remarkable ethnographic and scholarly account of Greek life under Ottoman rule in his seminal Turcograecia. Though he never left his home in Tübingen, Crusius spent decades corresponding with a far-flung network of intermediaries, including the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Istanbul. He annotated books and manuscripts, and even interviewed Greek Orthodox alms-seekers who passed through Germany. In this episode, Richard Calis explores how Crusius’s fascination with the so-called Ottoman Greeks sheds light on broader early modern debates about cultural and religious difference and how Greek identity became entangled with orientalist perceptions of the Ottoman world. The Ottoman Turks, both omnipresent and strangely absent in Crusius’s research, emerge in unexpected places, including in his dreams.

Contributor Bios

Richard Calis is Assistant Professor in Intellectual History at Utrecht University. Most of his research revolves around questions of cultural exchange, and how people make sense of the world around them. He obtained his PhD from Princeton University and was a Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge before coming to Utrecht. His first book, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius (1526-1607), was published in 2025 with Harvard University Press.

Maryam Patton is Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University. Her research interests span the cultural and intellectual history of the late medieval and early modern Ottoman Empire, the history and theories of time and temporality, and cross-cultural transmission in the Mediterranean world, among others. She received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and is preparing her first book on the Ottoman conception of time.

Credits

Episode No. 572

Release Date: 24 October 2025
Recording location: West Hartford, CT and Amsterdam, Netherlands

Sound production by Maryam Patton

Music: "Easy Lemon" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons

Bibliography and images courtesy of Richard Calis

Further Listening

	Molly Greene	217 12/18/15	Greeks in the Ottoman Empire
	Michael Tworek	250 7/24/16	Bobovius and the Republic of Letters
	Natalie Rothman	354 3/30/18	Dragomans and the Routes of Orientalism
	Panayotis League	463 5/3/20	The Journeys of Ottoman Greek Music
	Christine Philliou	294 1/19/17	Ottoman Governance and the House of Phanar

Images

The scene depicted is of a Greek Orthodox liturgical procession from the costume book of Lambert Vos, produced circa 1574 in Istanbul. Türkisches Kostümbuch, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen,  MS Or 009, fol. 101r.



Crusius's attempt to reproduce a Turkish letter of safe conduct and the elaborate tughra of the Ottoman sultan. Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen Mh 466, vol. 2, fol. 505.


Frontispiece of the Turcograecia published in Basel in 1584. Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen Fo XVI 18.2, title page.

Select Bibliography

Angelomati-Tsoungaraki, Eleni. “Τὸ φαινόμενο τῆς ζητείας κατὰ τὴ μεταβυζαντινὴ περίοδο”, in: Ἰόνιος Λόγος. Τμῆμα Ἱστορίας, Ἰόνιο Πανεπιστήμιο. Ἐπιστημονικὴ περιοδικὴ ἔκδοση. Τόμος Α. Τόμος χαριστήριος στὸν Δημήτρη Ζ. Σοφιανό (Corfu, 2007): 247-293.

Barren, John. From Samos to Soho: The Unorthodox Life of Joseph Georgirenes, a Greek Archbishop (Oxford & Bern: Peter Lang, 2017).

Bevilacqua, Alexander. The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018).

Bohnstedt, John W. “The Infidel Scourge of God: The Turkish Menace as Seen by German Pamphleteers of the Reformation Era,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 56.9 (1968): 1-58.

Calis, Richard. "Martin Crusius's Lost Byzantine Legacy", in: Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff (eds.), The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021): 105-142

Calis, Richard. "The Lutheran Experience in the Ottoman Middle East: Stephan Gerlach (1546-1612) and the History of Lutheran Accommodation", The English Historical Review (2024): 94-125.

Calis, Richard. The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025).

Floristán, José M. “Basilios ortodoxos y política mediterránea de España”, Erytheia 28 (2007): 139-196.

Ghobrial, John-Paul. “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory”, Past & Present 222.1 (2014): 51-93.

Greene, Molly. The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768: The Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

Johnson, Carina L. Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Konrad, Felix, “From the ‘Turkish Menace’ to Exoticism and Orientalism: Islam as Antithesis of Europe (1453–1914)?”, in: European History Online (2011), online: http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/models-and-stereotypes/from-the-turkish-menace-toorientalism

Papademetriou, Tom. Render Unto the Sultan: Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Podskalsky, Gerhard. Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft (1453–1821): Die Orthodoxie im Spannungsfeld der nachreformatorischen Konfessionen des Westens (München: C.H. Beck, 1988).

Rothman, Natalie. Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).

Toufexis, Panagiotis. Das Alphabetum vulgaris linguae graecae des deutschen Humanisten Martin Crusius (1526–1607): Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der gesprochenen griechischen Sprache im 16. Jh. (Cologne: Romiosini, 2005).

Wendebourg, Dorothea. Reformation und Orthodoxie: Der ökumenische Briefwechsel zwischen der Leitung der Württembergischen Kirche und Patriarch Jeremias II. von Konstantinopel in den Jahren 1573–1581 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986).