Ottoman History Podcast - Martin Crusius and the Discovery of Ottoman Greece

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

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.    « Click for More »

You're listening to the Ottoman history podcast. I'm your host, Marian Patton, and it is my great pleasure today to be interviewing Richard Callas, who is an assistant professor in cultural history at Utrecht University. He specializes in the history of science and intellectual history, and his research revolves around questions of cultural exchange and the forms of globalization. that connected different corners of the globe in the early modern period. And before coming to Utrecht, he was a research fellow in history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and he received his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. Today we'll be discussing his brand new book, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece, knowledge, encounter, and belief in the Mediterranean world of Martin Crucius,

which recently came out through Harvard University Press and explores the life of Martin Crucius, a now-forgotten 16th-century individual who was deeply interested in the lives, of contemporary Greeks living under Ottoman rule. So this episode is a little bit different from our usual fair over at the Ottoman History podcast because it's not focused specifically on the Middle East more generally, but rather the Greeks living under Ottoman rule,

which I think is something we often don't always incorporate within our purview of autumn history, and yet we should. And a figure like Martin Crucius is the sort of quintessential example of the kind of rich ethnographic material that was circulating in the 16th century, and yet which Ottomanists haven't paid much attention. to. So, Richard, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Miriam. It's such a pleasure to be here. And before we dive deeper into the figure of Martin Crucius and his book, the Turkle Grychea,

I wonder if you might give us an introduction to Crucius, the figure, the scholar, and where this interest in Ottoman Greek society even came from, because he seems, based off of your book, to be a little bit of an unusual figure, right? He was the first Phil Helene, as you pointed out. Yeah, I mean, I think you rightly say that this is going to be. bit of a different podcast, different episode. Cruces was an unusual individual, even by contemporary standards. So he was a professor of Greek at the University of Tübingen, which is in the southwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire.

It's a small university town. It was deeply, deeply, deeply Lutheran. So we're really in the heartlands of the Reformation, the heartlands of the Holy Roman Empire. And somehow, without ever leaving Tübingen, so from the comfort of his scholarly home, Cruxius became early modern Europe's foremost expert on Greek affairs on the Ottoman rule. So as you point out, everything is unlikely about him. He is also completely forgotten. Very few of his contemporaries read his works, and ever since much of his life has been hidden.

And when I was writing my dissertation, I worked with his archive, which is extensive. So there's a nine-volume diary, hundreds of annotated books, notebooks, wills, visual material, everything. and this documents the interests of one particular individual in the lives and cultures and religions of another people, in this case, the Ottoman Greeks. I use his scholarship and the work that he produced as an entry point into understanding how people in early modern Europe wrote about other people,

in this case, one Lutheran scholar writing about Ottoman Greece and the Greeks living under Ottoman rule. And so we're in the late 16th century, the Protestant Reformation is underway, And can you share a little bit more about why Crucius as a deeply Lutheran figure is so interested in the Greek community under Ottoman rule? Yeah, this is a great question. So maybe, you know, to an outsider, seems unusual. And it did to me when I started my work.

But actually, it makes a lot of sense. So Lutheranism was in a way kind of a new interpretation of the Christian way of life. And, you know, it split from Catholicism. And they needed to figure out whether their belief systems, their belief systems, system, their thoughts, their ideas, their practices were correct. So how do you prove in Christianity how something is correct? Well, then you look at ancient and venerable traditions. And besides the papacy, perhaps the most venerable and ancient institution in the Christian church, in the Christian world, I should say, is the patriarchate of Constantinople. So one of the reasons why

Crucius was so deeply interested in learning about contemporary Greeks was that he wanted to find out what their religion was like. So he was a professor of Greek, and as a professor of Greek, he studied ancient Greek, and he taught ancient Greek, like think Homer, Plato, Decidus, and he taught those texts with great pleasure and also to great success. But he also wanted to know what had happened to these famous Greek people in Byzantine times and under the Ottomans. So at some point he audaciously wrote a letter, gave it to a chaplain who was supposed to go on an embassy to Istanbul and said, deliver this letter to the patriarch, the patriarch of Constantinople. And from that sprung a 10-year exchange of letters between Lutheran and theologians at

Tübingen and Rick Ecclesiastics at the Patriotate in Constantinople. And by learning about Greek Orthodox practices, Greek religion, the way they interpreted Christianity, Cruzis really hoped to learn more about his own Lutheran beliefs. and to see his Lutheran beliefs confirmed as the right and only way to live a Christian life. And you mentioned how he wrote letters that would travel with figures who were going to Istanbul, but he himself never traveled to Ottoman Greece, right? No, indeed, this is so remarkable, is that he relied exclusively on the eyes and hands of others. So he had others who were his informants.

Stefan Gerlach is a famous, as the chaplain I just mentioned, his successor. Salomon Schweiger was another important informant. Both came from Tübingen. And they were both on embassies in Istanbul and in their work as chaplains. They collected letters, collected documents, including books and coins for Crucese that they sent back to Tübingen. He also relied on Lutherans studying at Padua to collect Greek Orthodox and vernacular Greek books printed in Venice. And most interestingly, Crucius interviewed for about 40 years in his own scholarly home Greek Orthodox Christians

who traveled through Europe in search of Alms. So there's a string of Greeks who traveled all over Europe from Spain to the low countries to Italy to Germany, Poland, England. And at some point some of these Greeks ended up in Tübingen where Cruces

interviewed these Greeks about their lives, their religion, their culture, their language. And what is quite unique is that he recorded those interviews. So here we really have kind of an anthropologist of en la Lettre, like someone who is doing anthropological, ethnographic work in a modern sense, but in the 16th century. And by talking to these Greeks, he learned more than any other person at the time about what Greek life on the Ottoman rule was like. And he puts together

all these findings and sources and letters into, what was it, an eight volume book you said, the Turcogrecha? Yes. Can you tell us a little bit more about the names here? So the title of your book, the discovery of Ottoman Greece, and then the title of Cruccius' book, Turcogrechia, did make me curious about Crucius' intentions with this name, what exactly he was getting at with referring to it as Turkish Greece, right? And then that we can discuss the sort of Turkish versus Ottoman label in some more detail. But what does Crucius say or think about calling this book, the Turcogreikia? And could you comment a little bit on the reception as well?

Yeah, so in 1584, he publishes this book called the Turko Greiker, which is in a way a collection of first-hand testimony. So he publishes like a history of the patriarchate that shows kind of its continuity from Byzantine times onwards to the Ottoman period. He collects letters and he annotates all these texts in granular detail. And in these notes, he includes everything and nothing. So there's tons of information about Greek dress, Greek religious, practice, Greek topography, anything you can think of when you think about learning about another country. So it's a really miscellaneous book that he called Turko-Graika, so Turkish Greece. And he calls it like this because he believed that Greece has been, in his word, turkified in the early

modern period, which in his view amounts to a form of decline. So he sees this 16th century Greek world as a world in decline. And we can speak more about how that vision comes into being. but he calls it Turkish Greece, understanding that now all of a sudden Greece was under Turkish rule. He got a little bit of backlash from Greek Orthodox Christians. Some of his contacts wrote to him and said,

like, hmm, we don't really like this. This doesn't make any sense. We are not Turkish. We are Greek. So at the time, he was already criticized. And I think you could rightly criticize the title of my book, a title which I actually quite enjoy,

but there's, of course, nothing to discover, right? Crucius did not discover any sort of terra incognita or unknown lands. What I meant to show is that to him, learning about contemporary Greece is a form of discovery. And I situate this in a sort of conversation of Europeans discovering between square codes, other peoples.

And also there is no such thing as Ottoman Greece, as even one of my dissertation examiners pointed out. So Ottoman Greece is also a bit of a misnomer in the sense that, you know, there were Greek-speaking peoples all over the Ottoman Empire. So they were in what is now Egypt and Laxonians. Alexandria. In Jerusalem, there was an important community of Greeks. But of course, most Greeks in the 16th century lived on the Greek mainland and on the Greek islands, some of which were indeed

under Ottoman rule. Others were under Venetian rule. So in that sense, Ottoman Greece is a very slippery term that doesn't really adequately cover the extent of 16th century Greece. Yeah, I'm fascinated by this discussion of the titles of the labels, because in a way, your choice of the title Ottoman Greece is at least a little bit less ethnographic than Turkish Greece, right? Like they were living under Ottoman rule, these Greek populations, and Ottoman itself isn't an ethnic category, right? So do you have any indication, any sense of those Greeks who are visiting from Constantinople, from other parts of Turkogrecia, to mainland Europe, how they would have presented themselves? I think what's so interesting about this Greek world

in the 16th century is that it is to Europeans at once familiar, right? Everyone thinks they know Greece because they've studied ancient Greek and with everyone I mean the learned world and at the same time it's completely unfamiliar so these Greeks are familiar through the study of Plato and Homer

like Greece is ours are like us Europeans we identify with Greek culture we are building on the foundations of the Greco-Roman antiquity like that is the battle cry of the humanist of course, a humanist tradition in which Cruzius grew up. Like, Greece is Christian, but not Christian, like Catholics or Protestants. So in that sense, it's oriental.

But it's not as oriental as the Turks. Right. So it's just really this in-between place. And I think that's why it really speaks to my interest, and it speaks to contemporary scholarship on the early modern Mediterranean. So I think that's also why it was so difficult to understand the position of Greece for people at the time, like Greece. was really this sort of strange world that couldn't really be placed. And lots of people didn't

really know what had happened under Byzantine rule and under Ottoman rule. Lots of people hoped this was still a place of learning. And then they were disappointed when Greeks pointed out that their schools were rubbish and that Greek books were difficult to get by. So it's this really difficult world to capture in a single word. And that sense, Ottoman Greece is not perfect. The Greeks who show up in Cruz's house, it's also difficult to understand their voice. Because what I have is cruises recordings of these conversations. So what appears in the Sorsens, Greiki, Greco's, right? So Greeks, and he differentiates between people coming from different places,

but he doesn't, for instance, say that Greeks from Cyprus are Cypriots. So in that sense, he uses a generic term, sometimes Elinès, I think, when he makes notes in Greek, but most often he just calls them Greeks. So in that sense, I cannot really use this material to learn. anything about this, like, this important discussion about how these Greeks saw themselves at the time? To step back a little bit from the specific question around the Greeks living under Ottoman rule, although this book is not about the Ottomans, they are there in the background a little bit in some instances in the Turco-Grecia. And so I was curious, if you could

share a little bit more about what Crucius' aim was with presenting things like the genealogy of the sultans, the political history of the Ottomans, kind of side by side with the Byzantines. Yeah, this is a question like lots of people have when they read Cruces' works. Like, where are the Ottomans? Where are the Turks in this story? And in a way, they're everywhere, and they're nowhere. And they're everywhere in the sense that Cruz's grew up in a world where there was lots of anxiety about a possible Turkish invasion of Christian Europe, right? the Turks, the Ottomans are cast a sort of natural enemy to the Christian way of life at the time. In like pamphlets, sermons, in all sorts of documents, there is a lot of anxiety about what

might happen, you know, if somehow the Ottomans are more successful and they push further into Europe. And Cruz's grows up in this world, a world where, you know, rumors about the Ottomans are part of the news, news networks to which Cruces was connected. So in that sense, they're the background against which this entire discovery takes place. So in that sense, they're everywhere, but they're nowhere in the sense that when you look at his published work, that Tukogreik, but also other texts, they'd hardly ever feature prominently. So when you look at his annotated books or his notebooks, you see that he really records everything that he finds out also about the Turks.

So when he's reading Byzantine books, like Byzantine histories, you see that he is not only keeping track of like which Byzantine emperor follows the previous one, but also at what point, you know, the Ottoman sultan's take over. So ironically, Crucius wants to paint a story that's black and white, you know, Greek Orthodox Christians are the victims of Turkish tyranny, that's kind of the story that he tells. And at the same time, he's recording in great depth the kind of continuation that takes place in the political realm with Ottoman sultans replacing Byzantine emperors. So in that sense, he is also a paradox.

So if you want to gain a full picture of cruises as a scholar and understand why he was interested in Ottoman Greece and how he came to his conclusions, we also need to take account of the ways in which people spoke at the time about the Ottoman Turks. So I like this point you made about how the Turks are there in the background, but not really in the source, you know, not in this text. They're not the focus. But there were a couple points where I was surprised to see how the Turks appeared. And I guess they were both in his notes, so not technically in the published book, but I still wanted to ask you about them. Can you tell us a little bit more about Cruces's dreams? I was floored by that example of the dream where Cruceus is at his dinner table with the the Ottoman Sultan and basically asks him if he can take a book home. And I was wondering if you could comment a bit more on dreams in general, because it seems like that, that does appear throughout Crucese notes. And in case there were any other examples of Turks appearing in his dreams. Yeah, so we've talked a lot about the Turkukarya and we've talked about his notebooks,

but he also has a nine-volume diary, which starts off as sort of a record of everything connected to Greece. And at the very end, it's a day-to-day diary in which he records also, you know, when he goes to his vegetable patch or the kinds of seating arrangements in his dinners or parties or when he goes for a walk with other professors. And in this book, he also records his dreams. And so dream culture was not unique in the sense that Cruces was the only one to record his dreams. We have other dreams of the period. But in Cruces' case, the dreams really give an insight into him as a scholar of Greece.

So he, for instance, dreams about his publications getting published and, you know, reaching the goal that he wanted them to reach, like proselytizing Greeks, for instance. I mean, he also records this really wonderful dream. I think it was in 1597, where he says, I was sitting there, me, my mom, at the ultimate court. And the sultan said something in German. And he asked the sultan like, oh, why do you speak? How do you speak German? He said, I learned it from some people.

And then he said, could I, maybe, you know, do you? have some Greek books? And the Sultan said, yeah, sure, come along. Have a look in my collection. And I think it's kind of shows maybe, I don't want to be like a psychologist or do like a full dream. Ordin analysis. Yeah. But I think this shows you how, you know, he's continuously busy trying to get these books. And Greek books were very difficult to get by. I mean, I also described this in the book how for Crucius from afar, it was very difficult sometimes to get Greek books. But it kind of shows you maybe also this weird optimist. him that also is visible in his exchange with the Greek Orthodox patriarch. So it's a strange

and strange dream and he has other dreams too. And for me as a historian, it was wonderful to have that also as, you know, a way to understand him as a person. So Cruz is obviously a very gifted linguist, right? He masters Greek. But did he ever have any interest in learning Turkish or Arabic? Just in the broader context of, you know, the early modern Oriental scholarship. It feels like he would be like a natural figure to sort of be a part of that broader tradition. And this is yet one of the great mysteries of Cruceus. He did not. So indeed he was a very gifted linguist. He also learned French, Spanish, Italian, various Greek registers. He tries at hands at Hebrew. But somehow Arabic and Turkish, never. Two generations after Cruceus, there's

lots of people. There's some people from Tubingen who also learn Turkish and Arabic, like this, you as part of Oriental scholarship. But Cruzius never learned this. I don't know why. However, this is so interesting. This did not prevent him from trying to understand documents in Arabic and Turkish. So at some point he gets a part of the Quran that he can't read. And so he goes to the professor of Hebrew, who tells him that you need to read this from right to left,

but can't really offer any further evidence of what this means. And then at some point when Gerlach returns from his... embassy in the Ottoman Empire. He also gives him further information. So even when he doesn't know the documents, he still tries to understand him. And the best example of this is when there is a letter of safe conduct from the Ottoman sultan that was given to Gerlach. Cruccius sees this, and he has no idea what it means. So what he does is he copies the Tukra, like the signature of the Ottoman sultan. And then there is, I think, maybe 13 lines underneath. And he's just scribble, makes scribbles. That's it. And there's a picture in the book. And then he writes in the margins,

this needs to be read from right to left. And these are 15 lines. So clearly the materiality of the document really impressed Cruces. And he also speaks about seeing like Turkish or Arabic documents. And he's impressed by the materiality. And I think what this shows is that he also wants to collect evidence, even if he can't understand it. He also tries his hands at an Arabic signature that he, I think maybe he copies it without understanding what it means. I think his ghost to show that even when he didn't have the ability to decode the documents, he still found it worthwhile to record them, which maybe is also why he was such an obsessive record keeper.

Yeah, I thought that copying of the tourer was really charming, and I'll make sure we have an image of it available on the website for this episode. So this is the Ottoman history podcast. Could you share a little bit about why you think Ottomanists should read your book? Yeah, thank you for asking that question. I mean, clearly this is a book that is about a 16th century Lutheran individual who's interested in the Greeks and the Turks only feature, you know, as a background story

or, you know, as the black and a black and white narrative. But I think why it's interesting is that it shows what you can do with non-autominist sources, with European sources, and how you can still gain a full insight into the complexities of the Ottoman Empire. Croesus collects all sorts of evidence about the Greeks, citizens of the Ottoman Empire. That is not really available in other sources. It also shows you the effects that, you know, the Ottoman invasion or the Ottoman capture of Constantinople had on the lives of Greeks, which shows how these Greeks felt the need

to go all over Europe to collect alms. So it tells a story about Greece under Ottoman rule that is not really visible. necessarily if you look only at, you know, Ottoman bureaucratic documents. And in that sense, it is not a story that replaces histories mostly written by Greeks these days about Ottoman Greece based on documents in Greek and documents in Ottoman Turkish that are often, you know, in the state archives. It's a book that tells a story that shows also what happens at the borders, at the margins. It's a story that complements the kind of story that you can tell by state sources.

So in that sense, I feel this is a complementary history and that tells you a lot about this kind of in-between place and also how Ottoman history and the Ottomans were received by people at the time in Europe. Definitely. And that's not even touching on sort of the very strong presence throughout your book of the diplomatic exchanges, right? Even though they were, in Cruces' view,

designed to sort of further his religious aims that may have not been the perspective of the diplomats themselves who happen to be traveling there and sending this material back. Yeah, thank you for pointing out. I can vouch for this book being of interest to autumn historians, so no worries there. Did Cruceus ever discuss examples of Greek figures

who had become art of the Ottoman bureaucracy, figures like the Grand Viziers who often came from Greek families and sometimes even sort of some Byzantine lineage? Just in light of this sort of thesis that Cruces is trying to present of how the Turks are tyrants over the Greek, now, and sort of the Greeks are subject to Ottoman enslavement in a way, like a metaphorical enslavement almost, and sometimes like literal enslavement, but you know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. He collects all this evidence about Greeks being captured by the Ottomans.

Almost exclusively all the Greeks who show up on his doorstep tell a story that's black and white. They tell kind of what is known as a captivity narrative. So they say, oh, you know, the Ottoman authorities seized my husband or seized my brother or took my uncle into custody. I need an X amount in terms of ransom. So please support me. And in that sense, the story that Cruz is here is over, over and over again is one of servitude, right? The Turks, the Ottomans, they are suppressing, they're forcing them into servitude. And that's the narrative that he then also presents in his printed books. And I call Cruz is one of the most famous and one of the most well-informed experts on Ottoman Greek affairs. But he could also be extremely ignorant of things. So he did not

know about the kinds of opportunities that Greeks also had under Ottoman rule, which have been studied by people like Molly Green and other specialist on Ottoman Greece. We now know that Greeks, yes, some of their churches were converted into mosques and some people did indeed face hardships because of the arrival of the Ottomans. Specifically, you know, politically, the Greeks lost their independence. But at the same time in terms of commerce and like the example of the Grand Vizier that you just mentioned, Greeks also had opportunities to enter the Ottoman bureaucracy and to make a career for himself. And in that sense, Cruces also collects what he wants to believe. He doesn't, you know, he finds evidence in the testimonies of his Greek

informants that corroborates his own already sort of preconceived idea of what Turkish tyranny is supposed to look like. This is a story that's black and white. And there is, even though he collects sometimes evidence to the contrary. There's no real, you know, shades of nuance in this story. I find this really fascinating because I feel like in my own research and reading, you often see these captive narratives produced in part as a way to sort of convince European powers, rulers, authorities to do something about it, right? To sort of inspire another crusade or to convince political authority figures to sort of take action. And yet that wasn't the sense I got from Cruceus' scholarship, right?

It's very different, actually. His goal is to, as you conclude towards the end of the book, show that Lutheran Germany is now where Greek learning and original religious principles should flourish. Yes, 100%. In the book, I also connect Cruces to the story of Philhellenism towards the end of the book.

But this is not the Philhellenism of a Lord Byron. Cruz has called himself. He was the first to call himself a Philhalene after antiquity, but he was not a Phil Hellenic scholar in the sense, you know, that we know of the 18th and 19th century, where people actively fought for the Greeks and strove for Greek independence. This is a story that's very much focused on or calibrated by classics and religion. There is a companion piece to the Turco Greica called the Germano Greikia, so German Greece, which basically showed that Lutheran scholars, Lutheran humanists, were now

the true heirs of Greek learning, the learning of Homer of Plato. And they were cultivating the study of these authors. So that's a companion piece to the Turko Grieke. And in that sense, the Turko Grieke is also meant to show sort of an example of what that learning looks like. And interestingly, Crucius believed that he needed to learn a lot about Greek Orthodox Christians, also because he wanted to convert them. So I already mentioned this kind of 10-year extraneous with the patriarch. And in its initial phase, as Cruces was really looking for information, and with him other Lutheran theologians involved, they were looking for information

that could confirm their religious principle. But over time, it turned out that Greek Orthodox Christianity and Lutheranism are somehow very different. So at the very end, the patriarch says, look, you hate icons, we kiss icons. Please don't write us anymore. Yeah, exactly.

Write us, but only for friendship's sakes, but just leave us alone, basically. And somehow, you know, between that hopeful optimism at the beginning and this negative conclusion at the end, there was this moment where at some point Cruzis and others realized that what they really wanted to do is spread Lutheranism. This was already on the agenda from the very start. So they thought that the election of Gerlach as chaplain was a window given by God to spread Lutheranism amongst Christians in the Ottoman Empire. And Cruzes himself took note of every sermon spoken in the church in Tübingen.

and he was sitting on his knees and he took notes in ancient Greek of the sermons being delivered and he somehow at some point hoped that these notes could be collected and then published, which they were, and then a copy of this book could be sent to Denmark and from there it could be taken to Moscow and he said, surely in Moscow there's Greek Orthodox Christians. So there's a Greek Orthodox Christian who could then take this book from Moscow to the Ottoman Empire and if Greek translated and if then Greek Orthodox Christians would really really, how Lutherans preached, was a Lutheran sermon, then they would automatically, you know, convert to Lutheranism. This was kind of the optimism, this was the extreme optimism that spurred

Cruces to action. And at the same time, it kind of gives a flavor of why Cruces wanted to learn so much about the Ottoman Greeks. And here, I think, you can really compare Cruces well to other missionaries at the time, Franciscans, Lutherans, Jesuits, especially Jesuits. Jesuits. The Jesuits, they collected so much information about other peoples to proselytize, to evangelize, to spread the faith. And Crucius is no different. We don't see Crucius as a missionary. We don't see Gerlach as a missionary, but they were inspired by the same Zell as Jesuits like Matteo Ricci were. So what I do in the book is also draw comparisons between these two very different worlds to understand how Europeans made sense of other cultures and why they did so.

So yes, Cruces was not someone who hoped for political action, like a crusade, but he did hope that his work would, you know, help, it's very patronizing term, but help Greek Orthodox Christians embrace Lutheranism, the only and true Christian way of life. His words, not mine. And did his book have any success in that regard? Zero. Cruces was a ferocious reader of books,

and he kept notes on basically everything that he saw or read or heard. So his archive is immense. The upside of this is that I as a historian have lots of material to work with. The downside, especially for his contemporaries, is that most of his books kept expanding, expanding, expanding and expanding. So when he wanted to publish the Turgograikea, very few publishers were actually interested. And I think this also has to do with the fact that this book kept on growing, growing and growing.

He kept on including more and more and more notes. And it has also meant that his books became big books that were difficult to sell. So we know the Tukarykia didn't really sell well. The Corona Ani, the book I just mentioned in which these sermons were collected, didn't really sell well. We don't have any evidence that Greeks were interested in this material. There's like the occasional Greek who said, oh, please send me a Lutheran text translated into Greek.

But there's no evidence that there is this massive wave of Greek Orthodox Christians converting to Lutheranism. What about in terms of German audiences reading this book? Did he succeed in sort of inspiring any further interest in Ottoman Greeks of the time? So Crucius was, I would say, one of the first to write about the Ottoman Greeks. There were others too. Like Gittreus is a name, some people may have heard of, who wrote history of the Greek church. There were others in the 16th and 17th century he wrote about him.

But overall, not many people wrote about Ottoman Greece. I think Crucius' most important legacy lay in the, evidence that he collected and reproduced about the Greek language, especially the vernacular Greek language. So he peppered the Tukukukrykia with notes on everything and nothing concerning Greek stuff, but there's lots and lots of notes on the Greek language. In his notebooks, there are more, not everything was published, but there's lots of notes on the Greek vernacular, which we see re-emerging in other texts from the 16, late 16th, and early 17, and even 18th century. So there the ghost of Cruceus kind of haunts early modern scholarship on the Greek vernacular.

And you also mentioned how his book preserves some Greek or Byzantine chronicles that are now lost, right? Yeah, and I think that's also really fascinating, that as I mentioned, Crucius was largely forgotten. There were two reasons people in the early 20th century knew about him. He also published the history of Swabia, much in the same vein as the Tuchogrecha. And this book, the Analesuevici, was also this miscellaneous word. in which there was lots and lots of primary source material, lots of notes in which cruises reproduced unique evidence. And that evidence, to this day, is used by local historians

to understand Swabian history. And for the Tukogreikia, this is kind of similar, in the sense that lots of this information was read by people all the way into the 20th century. But other than that, you know, people didn't really read him. So he has this really fascinating chronicle in the beginning. He has letters in the second half and much information in between. So it's a book that's very strong and rich in primary sources.

So it wasn't a book that sold well, but it was a book that was known, you know, almost by every generation because it included so much evidence that was unique. For an unknown figure, this seems like a huge archive to be working with. Thankfully, though, there is this really, really amazing catalog by Thomas Wilhelmie of all of the documents. crucius owned and that are now in existence so in my first year of graduate school in the summer i went to tubing in and you know looked at some of his materials and realized that this is a complete treasure

trove so crucius is certainly interesting and his greek scholarship is certainly worth of more scholarly attention but the real story to me was how he made sense of ottoman greece all of these greeks that showed up in his home in tubing and once i'd spend the summer there i let go of the idea of studying multiple people and how they taught and received Greek. And I just went for kind of a micro history or an intellectual biography of a single person to understand, you know, the history of Ottoman Greece better, but also to understand how European people wrote about non-European cultures and religions. Yeah, no, that's one thing I loved about your book.

It's not just, you know, the Ottoman Greece component, but the history of scholarship and how Christy's as a figure worked and who he met with and spoke with and the meaning. at the dinner tables and these conversations. It's all really wonderful. But were you ever just completely overwhelmed with the size of his notes and archive and books that I left behind? A hundred percent. I remember sort of agreeing to do crucius. I think that was sort of the deal with my supervisor. Like I said, okay, I'll do it. But I couldn't. Someone has to. Someone has to. And I'm really happy I did. Don't get me wrong. But I didn't really, couldn't really read the handwriting. The handwriting is not bad, but it's not great either. It's a conversation. It's a

combination of Latin, Greek, and German, and sometimes he changes mid-sentence. It was tough. This is something the Ottomanists who listen to this podcast can relate to, for sure. 100%. 100%. And that to me was really a challenge. So, you know, I spent hours and hours in the manuscript room in Tübingen. I once distinctly remember telling one of the women who worked there, she told me,

shouldn't you be going outside and go to the swimming pool? It's so warm in here. And I was like, I really want to, but I have to get a grip on this handwriting. So I spent long, long summers there, really wonderful summers. And then at some point, you know, I was like, how am I going to tell a story based on this material? And I had really great help, not only from my supervisor, but also Renato Dure, professor at Tumingen.

And just by talking to people, you know, and telling Cruz's a story bit by bit, all of a sudden, like, you know, the arc of the dissertation and the arc of the book came to me. but it took me a while to figure out why this person was interesting because as you mentioned, I don't want this to be a biography. Like, it's not about one person.

What I tried to do is to paint a portrait of a person, a place in a period. So it's a lot about Lutheranism and the Reformation. It's a lot about Ottoman history in the Ottoman Mediterranean and Mediterranean history. So it's about the history of scholarship, history of ethnography. And if you have such a fantastic, rich archive,

you can really show how these now distinct scholarly debate were in the lives of Cruceus deeply intertwined. And in that sense, I managed, I think, to push, you know, certain debates in certain directions because I had such rich material. And also to show how it's important that if you want to study Mediterranean history, if you want to study Ottoman history, sometimes it's really helpful to have a person like Cruceus who, from afar, nevertheless, manages to collect evidence

that is now, you know, only available in his notebooks. Is there anything you found in his archives or notebooks that, You didn't include in the book, but really wanted to. Yes. Okay, so what I found really important is to tell a story in intellectual history that is not about ideas, but about people. So the household plays an important role. Cruces' children, the borders he had, the three wives that Cruz's had,

in succession, I should add. I wanted to tell a story about the deeply paradoxical person that Cruces was. So at one point, he says that everything good comes from the Greeks. At another point, he says that they're not. the Greeks are ignorant because they're, you know, not like we Lutherans. So he's a person with contradictions and complexities, and I didn't want to try to resolve those tensions, but show that this is also part of how people do scholarship. And as I was going through his notes, I found, you know, notes that were sometimes difficult

to make sense of, and historians of reading can attest to this, that it's sometimes difficult to square or to harmonize different sets of notes. but what I really remember was this one beautiful book where Cruces records when he starts reading this book he often does this and then in the margins he includes notes and he often dates those notes and then at some point he says

yeah my daughter died on this and this date and then he says I think two or three days later my wife died on this and this date both died of the plague and then this is dated from the top of my head somewhere in the 1560s maybe a little later. And then he writes the next note in the book

is I think from the top of my head from the 1570s or 1580s. So he closed, in my mind, he closed this book, overwhelmed by grief perhaps, and then only started reading it again years and years later. And here, of course,

like if you're working with a person whose life is richly documented, these are the kinds of notes you'll also find. But not only did I not have, you know, an outlet in the book or a theme to connect this, no too. But also, I don't really can't prove that Crucius was overwhelmed by grief and therefore didn't continue reading. But it was those moments in the archive that made this story so human and so

deeply human to me that I realized that I have to tell this story through Crucius and not only through the Tukogreikia or the ideas that he had about Greece, stories of decline, etc. Those also feature in a book, but I also had to include the human because that's how, you know, that's our entry point into the past in that sense. And you speak about this at the end of your book on how engaging with the notes, the material that Cruces touched and wrote himself adds the texture that we don't get when you just look at the final polished, published version. And it made me think about the kinds of scholarship we do today and how so much of it is so much

more ephemeral and whether we ever could sort of approach that same kind of human texture that you just really beautifully outlined. And I'm really glad you shared that example because those kinds of lives and the margins, I think are what make this period sort of especially rich and interesting to study as a scholar. I think it's also easy for me to make this claim, right? Look, we need to go into the archives and compare printed works to, you know, manuscript notes because Carusius is so well documented. But I think in a general sense, there's still so much to discover.

And if I may be a little bit critical of intellectual history, that sometimes we tend to focus so much on the great minds and their great books. And yes, these are important too. and I love reading them, but at the same time, I feel that there's a world to discover in the archive and a world that also can, you know, upend received wisdom, and also think, maybe think anew of who and who is not important in our histories of the intellectual world of the past. I think that's a really poignant point to conclude on this call for more scholarship is always a welcome one, and especially in Ottoman studies, you know, so much material still in manuscript

form, which frankly is exciting to me because it means that there's so much more to uncover, especially with an interest in sort of the material history and the evidence left behind my sort of lives lived and not just the polished critical editions, even though those are necessary too. And it would be nice to just read a text without having to worry about what letter or something is because the handwriting is so difficult. But I think your book is a perfect testimony of the rewards that come when you sit down and you struggle with the handwriting and the squiggles and the smudges and you dig through it and you uncover the person. For our listeners, we will have a bibliography, some images, and suggestions for further

reading if you are interested in finding out more about this time and place. Thank you, Richard. Thanks, Mary. It's really wonderful to talk to you and to talk about the book. And of course, I'm happy to be contacted by people if they want to hear more or share information. Thank you.