This volume contains a selection of thirteen conference papers presented by international scholars at a panel series of the Association Internationale d’Études du Sud-Est Européen (AIESEE) in Bucharest in 2019. Their focus is on the history of Arabic-speaking Christians in the Ottoman Mediterranean who followed a Byzantine-Orthodox rite and are often termed ‘Melkites’. Linked to the patriarchate of Antioch, they became a separate community (millet) in the Ottoman Empire when they were put under the authority of the patriarch of Constantinople. Besides producing a rich corpus of religious writings and translations, Melkite networks comprised Orthodox Christians in several parts of Eastern Europe, including, for instance, the principality of Valachia, the Cossacks and Moscow.
The book is divided into three sections: ‘Eastern Christians in Dialogue with Europe’, ‘Interchange and Circulation’ and ‘Sources and Historiography’. Following a brief preface, the first contribution, by a co-editor, Bernard Heyberger, opens up the field and illustrates that the standard dualism between ‘East’ and ‘West’ only reproduces long-lasting historical stereotypes of victimisation (Eastern Christians versus the Ottoman Turks, the Roman Catholics, the ‘West’) that can be misleading with respect to the manifold connections and entanglements of these Christian Churches. Thus, Heyberger highlights the role of intermediaries, agents and go-betweens in the early seventeenth century who built up links between the Eastern Churches and Western Christianity, either from their base in a Mediterranean Orthodox Church (the most prominent protagonist being Patriarch Meletios Karma) or as Catholic missionaries. These collaborations brought about printing and translation efforts such as the project for an Arabic Bible. At the same time, Catholic institutions in seventeenth-century Rome appear as centres of scholarship on Eastern Christians, and this scholarship soon became a ‘battleground’ between Catholics and Protestants (p. 8).
The ensuing contributions deal with more specialist topics. Constantin A. Panchenko's chapter addresses the Orthodox monasteries of St Catherine's on the Sinai and Mar Saba, east of Bethlehem, during the transitional period between Mamluk and Ottoman rule. Their monks were often of Caucasian or European origin, and the influence of Valachians in particular was instrumental in reviving the monasteries after the power vacuum of the early sixteenth century. Vera Tchentsova then highlights the ties between perhaps the most important Melkite protagonist of the seventeenth century, Patriarch Makarios iii of Antioch, and the patriarchate of Moscow that was established during his two journeys.
The second section largely focuses on the same patriarch and his family: Carsten Walbiner illustrates the value of Makarios's work for Russian church history and culture. He highlights, however, that Makarios considered the Russian Church, piety and society as inferior to that of the Eastern Church. Mihai T¸ipău's chapter follows the travelogue of Makarios's son, Paul of Aleppo, including his depictions of a Byzantine heritage in Constantinople and beyond around the mid-seventeenth century. Even under Ottoman rule, the Greek population of the empire considered themselves as ‘Romans’ (Romaioi), thus preserving a particular (post-) Byzantine identity (p. 85). Sofia Melikyan depicts Makarios as a renewer of post-Byzantine hagiography who integrated new material into an otherwise traditional genre and thus contributed to shaping a Melkite tradition.
Stefano di Pietrantonio addresses an unedited Arabic manuscript on the ‘Art of rhetorics’ that was based on a lost Greek original and translated/re-written by Athanasios iii Dabbās, an early eighteenth-century successor of Makarios in the patriarchate of Antioch. The network of his ‘multiconfessional’ collaborators (p. 136) consisted of the famous Salomon Negri, the SPCK-related merchant Rowland Sherman and others. Ioana Feodorov investigates the possible influences of the mid seventeenth-century Confession of Orthodox Faith of the Metropolitan of Kviv Peter Movilă’ on a little-known Arabic psalter printed over a hundred years later in Beirut, although the direct source and transmissions remain obscure.
Section ii of the book, on Melkite sources and historiography, turns to twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Its first chapter, by Yulia Petrova, deals with an important collection of Arabic manuscripts located in the National Library of Kyiv. Most manuscripts came to Ukraine due to the initiative of individual collectors between the eighteenth and the early twentieth century; seven works specifically relate to Arab Orthodox Christians. What follows is the contribution of Serge A. Frantsouzoff, who introduces the important collection of Christian oriental books and manuscripts from the Rousseau family of St Petersburg (originating from close relatives of the famous Enlightenment philosopher with links to the Levant and Persia). An important Arabic scholar of the Soviet era, Alexandra Mikhailova, and her legacy is treated in Elena A. Korovtchenko's chapter, while Charbel Nassif's article focuses on the development of Melkite art history over the last fifty years. The epilogue to the volume presents a personal account of the exhibition of Melkite icons in Beirut in 1969 that was organised by the Romanian scholar Virgil Cândea, the father of Ioana Feodorov.
All in all, this beautifully-illustrated book presents many valuable insights into state-of-the-art research on Melkite Christianity and scholarship, including descriptions of manuscripts and edited passages of sources, and with a certain focus on intellectual history and philological issues. As is often the case in conference proceedings, the contributions are certainly very knowledgeable but, taken together, they present a slightly kaleidoscopic picture. As there is no real overarching argument, some chapters may be of limited use to non-specialists because – except, for instance, Heyberger's introductory article – they do not seem to be attempting to open up this field to scholars of related disciplines. This is a pity, as historians of Europe and the Ottoman Mediterranean still have much to discover in the field of post-Byzantine Christianity and its connections between south-eastern Europe and the Levant.
