Migration from within and without: The problem of Eastern Christians in early modern Europe

This article considers two contemporary ideas about movement and how they intersected with each other. On the one hand, there was a European tradition, rooted in the anxieties and suspicions of state bureaucrats, doctrinally-obsessed clerics and theologians, and officials entrusted with poor relief. Such people worried unceasingly about Eastern Christians in Europe. The testament to this comes in European sources, archives, and even literature, where the stereotype of the wandering Eastern Christian—usually fleeing Muslim persecution—had crystallized by this period into a stock character. ‘Princes of Lebanon’, ‘knights of Jerusalem’, ‘priests of Babylon’: all language coming straight from the documents and witnesses to how Europeans imagined Eastern Christians in their midst. But alongside this, there was a second story of movement that was reflected in Eastern Christian sources. Based on private correspondence, first-person narratives, travelogues, and manuscript colophons, this tradition offers us a glimpse of how Eastern Christians understood their own circulation in the early modern world