Martin Crusius’ Armchair Voyage

When the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II seized Constantinople in 1453 shockwaves radiated through Christian Europe. According to Pope Pius II, the fall of the Byzantine capital amounted to nothing less than a second death for Homer and Plato. Others lamented the destruction or conversion of churches, including Hagia Sophia, and feared that the Ottomans might uproot the Christian way of life. But as the Ottomans spread into Greece, taking Athens in 1456 and most of the Peloponnese a few years later, few in Latin Europe knew much about the post-Byzantine fate of the country. The circumstances of the Greeks were mostly the subject of speculation, and fears about what life under Muslim oppression would entail prevailed over attempts at finding out the reality of the situation.

One 16th-century individual steered a different course. For nearly 40 years, a Lutheran professor of Greek named Martin Crusius (1526-1607) compiled a rich record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. Long before the plight of the Greeks perturbed Lord Byron, Crusius knew about the state of the Greek Church, studied literature in the Greek vernacular, and learned about Greek dress and folk songs. And he did so from Tübingen, a German university town, without ever visiting Greece – unable to go there himself because he did not have the means, and, as he liked to stress, because his teaching kept him occupied.

How did Crusius become Europe’s foremost expert on Ottoman Greece? His extensive archive offers important evidence. He left a nine-volume diary, each volume 1,000 pages long, as well as numerous notebooks and hundreds of books, coated in thick layers of annotation. In these documents the personal and the professional merged: he recorded seating arrangements for dinner parties and the students that lodged with him as meticulously as the books that he read, the news that reached him, and everything that he ‘discovered’ about Ottoman Greece.

Travelogues by Pierre Belon (1517-64) and Greek histories by Laonikos Chalkokondyles (c.1430-70) drew Crusius into a world he would never see, while Greek texts, such as a book with sailing directions and translations of the Iliad and Aesop’s fables, revealed how the language had developed. German informants in Istanbul were another important source of information: alumni from the University of Tübingen had joined the imperial embassy as chaplains, from where they sent Crusius letters, manuscripts, objects – including an ancient bronze coin with an image of Homer – as well as detailed observations of the churches they entered, the ceremonies they attended, and the people they met. In 1573, for example, one Stephan Gerlach sent to Tübingen an evocative set piece on the dress of Greek women: ‘They veil their hair with the purest gold. They adorn their heads and ears with precious gems and sumptuous earrings ... And with their other ornaments they do not compete with our Empress. They leave her behind by miles.’

More than anything, though, Crusius informed himself by talking to Greeks themselves – not in Greece but in his Tübingen home. In total he interviewed nearly 40 Greek men and women who travelled through Christian Europe in search of alms and at some point passed – serendipitously – through Tübingen. Crusius offered them a bed and gave them food and money. In return, they informed him about their language, culture, and religion. They helped him draw maps, of Athens, for instance, but also of Mount Athos, the most important site of monasticism in Greek Orthodoxy. And they helped him visualise the Greek world through vivid descriptions that he called ‘verbal paintings’. One of his guests made Crusius Cypriot food, while another – a woman called Antonia – sang him a song about the many hardships she had suffered in captivity, accompanying herself on his lyre.

Crusius’ guests also helped him decode his vernacular Greek books. Initially, these had baffled him; the language was so different from the ancient Greek that he taught at university. Crusius’ first Greek guest, Stamatius Donatus, who arrived in Tübingen in 1579, became, Crusius wrote, a ‘living lexicon’, glossing thousands of words in the week that they spent reading books together. This was no mean feat. Donatus could not read or write and knew only a few words of German. He and Crusius thus had to interpret texts using different languages, including Italian and Latin, and sometimes other ways of communication: ‘He often explained these words to me through gestures, his hands, and paraphrases’, Crusius explained in his notebook.

They would also study Crusius’ home: a house full of mundane objects, but also the students who boarded with him, his wife and children, and occasionally a maid. Donatus would take Crusius by the hand and guide him, giving the Greek names of particular parts of the house and of individual domestic items. With other guests such collaborative reading continued. Once Crusius got so carried away that his ‘head was full of Greek and was buzzing with it’, and he admitted that he had tired another guest, a priest by the name of Calonas, considerably. Even as Calonas was departing, Crusius would not leave him alone: he followed his guest to the gates of the city, pen and paper in hand. As Calonas ‘read’ the city, pointing out and translating individual objects, Crusius scribbled new items on his wordlist.

The result of Crusius’ lifelong inquiry was a body of knowledge unparalleled in its day. Some of his findings were published in his Turcograecia of 1584, a groundbreaking book full of evidence that Edward Gibbon referenced repeatedly in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89). Yet the Turcograecia was by and large forgotten, as were Crusius and his notebooks. Leopold von Ranke would remember Crusius as Europe’s first philhellene, but he was not deeply familiar with Crusius’ work. Indeed, the Turcograecia sold poorly and the many colourful vignettes in Crusius’ notebooks remained unexplored until the 20th century.

It is no small irony – and surely one that Crusius would have appreciated – that it took an Ottoman Greek from Istanbul, Basileos Athanasiou Mystakides (1859-1933), to draw attention to Crusius’ archive as an important but untapped source for Ottoman Greek history. After a three-year sojourn in Tübingen, Mystakides published a series of articles that reproduced excerpts from Crusius’ notebooks and diaries and made visible again how Crusius, without ever travelling, had become the period’s foremost expert on Ottoman Greece.

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