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

In the late sixteenth century, a Lutheran scholar named Martin Crusius (1526-1607) compiled the richest record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Though he never left his home in the university town of Tübingen, Crusius spent decades annotating books and manuscripts, corresponding with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, and interviewing Greek Orthodox alms-seekers. Ultimately, he gathered his research into the Turcograecia, a seminal work that served for centuries as Europe’s foremost source on Ottoman Greece.

In this wide-ranging book, Richard Calis turns to Crusius’s life and work to understand how early modern Europeans negotiated cultural and religious difference. Through analyses of a variety of printed and manuscript documents—including notebooks, annotated books, and a nine-volume diary—Calis shows how for scholars like Crusius studying cultural and religious difference required approaches in which tropes and techniques from several disciplines came together fruitfully.

More broadly, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece illuminates Western European views of the religious “other” within Christianity: the Greek Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule, a group both familiar and foreign. Many Western Europeans, including Crusius, developed narratives of Greek cultural and religious decline under Ottoman rule. Crusius’s records, however, reveal in exceptional detail how such stories developed. His interactions with his Greek Orthodox visitors, and with a vast network of correspondents, show that Greeks’ own narratives of hardship entwined in complex ways with Western Europeans’ orientalist views of the Ottoman world. They also reflect the religious tensions that undergirded these exchanges, fueled by Crusius’s fervent desire to spread Lutheran belief across Ottoman Greece and the wider world.

A lively intellectual history drawn from a forgotten archive, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece is at once a miscrohistory of knowledge making and a perceptive character study, in which Crusius takes his place in the history of ethnography, Lutheran reform, and European philhellenism and orientalism.