No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2025
This article uses the case studies of two Greek clergymen, Anastasius Comnenus and Hierotheos Abbatios, to explore Anglo-Greek interactions and perceptions in early modern England. Both men visited the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the mid-seventeenth century on fund-raising trips. This article details their time in the universities and in England more widely. It focuses on the issue of charity: who gave them money and why. This approach, making extensive use of new archival material, offers a fruitful perspective on English attitudes to Greek travellers. Suspicion was balanced by philhellenism and a desire to reference the Greek Orthodox Church in confessional or ecclesiastical disputes. These were common trends in early modern Europe, but they were inflected by specific contextual concerns in England. This article also demonstrates that analysing questions of charity can help to recover insights into the decision-making and agency of the early modern Greek traveller.
I am grateful to Eloise Davies, Sarah Mortimer, Anastasia Stylianou, and Studies in Church History’s anonymous readers for their comments on various drafts of this piece. I am also very grateful to Alasdair Grant for drawing my attention to Philippus Cyprius’s Chronicon Ecclesiae Graecae.
1 The transliteration of their names meant that there was variation in the English spelling of Abbatios and Comnenus. I have followed Keetja Rozemond in using ‘Hierotheos Abbatios’: Keetja Rozemond, Archimandrite Hierotheos Abbatios: 1599-1664 (Leiden, 1966). For Comnenus, I have preferred the more common ‘Anastasius’ to the ‘Anastatius’ which was occasionally used in English sources.
2 Harris, Jonathan, Greek Emigres in the West, 1400–1520 (Camberley, 1995).Google Scholar
3 Calis, Richard, ‘The Impossible Reformation: Protestant Europe and the Greek Orthodox Church’, P&P 259 (2023), 43–76 Google Scholar; Ghobrial, John-Paul A., ‘Migration from Within and Without: The Problem of Eastern Christians in Early Modern Europe’, TRHS 27 (2017), 153–73Google Scholar; idem, ‘Moving Stories and What They Tell Us: Early Modern Mobility between Microhistory and Global History’, issue supplement 14, P&P 242 (2019), 243–80; Grant, Alasdair C., ‘Scotland’s “Vagabonding Greekes”, 1453–1688’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 46 (2022), 81–97 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Henny, Sundar, ‘Nathanael of Leukas and the Hottinger Circle: The Wanderings of a Seventeenth-Century Greek Archbishop’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 27 (2020), 449–7210.1007/s12138-019-00552-0CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitsi, Efterpi, Greece in Early English Travel Writing, 1596–1682 (Cham, 2017), 17–41 Google Scholar. See also, in this volume, Anastasia Stylianou, ‘“We are at the furthest part of the inhabited world”: Venetian Greeks and the English Reformations’.
4 Davey, Colin, Pioneer for Unity: Metrophanes Kritopoulos (1589–1639) and Relations Between the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Reformed Churches (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Patterson, W. B., ‘Cyril Lukaris, George Abbot, James VI and I, and the Beginning of Orthodox-Anglican Relations’, in Doll, Peter M., ed., Anglicanism and Orthodoxy 300 Years after the ‘Greek College’ in Oxford (Oxford, 2006), 39–55 Google Scholar; idem, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1998), 196–219; Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Church of England and the Greek Church in the Time of Charles I’, in Derek Baker, ed., Religious Motivation: Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian, SCH 15 (1978), 213–40. See also Stylianou, Anastasia, ‘Textual Representations of Greek Christianity During the English Reformations’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 53 (2023), 25–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Barron, John Penrose, From Samos to Soho: The Unorthodox Life of Joseph Georgirenes, a Greek Archbishop (Bern, 2017), esp. 153–205 Google Scholar.
6 For references to Abbatios in Oxford college account books, all of which are held in archives in Oxford, see Brasenose College Archives, SB Accounts, No. 2, A 2.44, 1650–1, ‘Dona et Regarda’; Christ Church College Archives, D&C i.b.3, fols 4, 7; Corpus Christi Oxford College Archives, C/1/1/10, fol. 59v; Exeter College Archives, RA2/02, July 1649–November 1649; Jesus College Archives, BU:AC:Gen:1, fol. 184; Magdalen College Archives, LCE/29, 1649, expenses inside and outside college; Queen’s College Archives, LR C, 1649-1650, ‘Custos Forinsecorum’; University College Archives, UC:BU2/F1/1, fol. 236; St John’s College Archives, ACC I.A.33, 18 August [1649].
7 Oxford, Oxford University Archives [hereafter: OUA], NEP/Supra/Reg T, fol. 55.
8 Ibid.
9 Tsakiris, Vasileios, ‘The “Ecclesiarum Belgicarum Confessio” and the Attempted “Calvinisation” of the Orthodox Church under Patriarch Cyril Loukaris’, JEH 63 (2012), 475–87, at 480–1Google Scholar.
10 Ibid. 475–87.
11 Rozemond, Hierotheos Abbatios, 48. For Abbatios in Cambridge, see the following, which are all held in archives in Cambridge: Christ’s College Archives, B.1.10, fol. 129; Clare College Archives, CCAD 2/1/1/3, Michaelmas 1649–Annunciation 1650, general expenses; CUL, GBR/0265/UA/U.Ac.2/1, fol. 752; QC 15, 1648–9; Emmanuel College Archives, Bur.8.2, expenses since the accounts of 19 October 1649; St Catharine’s College Archives, L/26, fol. 188v; St John’s College Archives, SJAR/3/2/4/6, fol. 406v; Trinity College Archives, Senior Bursar’s Audit Book, 1637–1659, 1649, fol. 12r.
12 For Abbatios’s life, see Rozemond, Hierotheos Abbatios, esp. 17–49.
13 Ibid. 23–5.
14 Ibid. 31–2.
15 Ibid. 45.
16 Ibid. 45–8.
17 For his preparations, see London, BL, Add. MS 22953, fol. 73r; Oxford, Bodl., Selden Supra 108, fol. 219r.
18 Gloucester, Gloucestershire Archives, D1086/R23.
19 Winchester, Winchester College Archives, Bursars’ Book, 1644–1671, 1652–3, ‘Custus Necessariorum cum Donis’.
20 Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, ed. John Henry Hessels, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1887–97), 3: 2213; Philippus Cyprius, Chronicon Ecclesiae Graecae (Leipzig, 1687), 489.
21 For Cambridge (NB all the following archives are in Cambridge), see Clare College Archives, CCAD 2/1/1/3, Michaelmas 1651–Annunciation 1652, general expenses. Clare potentially paid him twice as in September 1651 they made a payment to another ‘poor Grecian’: ibid., Annunciation 1651–Michaelmas 1651, general expenses. Emmanuel College Archives, Bur.8.2, expenses since the accounts of 2 October 1651; St John’s College Archives, SJAR/3/2/4/6, 1650, fol. 25v. For Oxford (NB all the following archives are in Oxford), see Corpus Christi College Archives, C/1/1/10, fol. 84r; Exeter College Archives, RA2/02, 1651–2; Magdalen College Archives, LCE/29, 1651, expenses inside and outside college; Merton College Archives, SC/MCR/F/1/4/2, fol. 120v; New College Archives, 988, 18 December 1651; Pembroke College Archives, PMB/D/1/1/1, fol. 4v; St John’s College Archives, ACC I.A.35, fol. 69v. For London, see Grant, ‘Vagabonding Greekes’, 90. For Winchester College, see Winchester College Archives, Bursars’ Book, 1644–1671, 1652–3, ‘Custus Necessariorum cum Donis’.
22 The collections were raised via colleges, for which see above, nn. 6, 11, 21. I have been unable to find the original orders for the collections in Cambridge, though the fact that such orders were made is mentioned in some of the account book references: see, for example, St John’s College Archives, SJAR/3/2/4/6, fols 406v, (1650) 25v. The order by Oxford for Comnenus’s collection does not survive, for which see Alex Beeton, ‘“Not Infected with the Venime of the Times”: The Rump Parliament and Places of Learning, 1649–53’ (DPhil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2022), 299 n. 89.
23 OUA, NEP/Supra/Reg T, fols 61, 63. Abbatios’s donation was not recorded in the Bodleian’s book of benefactors: Bodl., MS Lib. recs b. 903. See also, Anthony Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. Andrew Clark, 5 vols (Oxford, 1891–1900), 1: 154–5.
24 For charity-giving in Interregnum England, and religious refugees in the early modern period more widely, see Fradkin, Jeremy, ‘Christian Hospitality and the Case for Religious Refuge in Interregnum England’, P&P 254 (2022), 51–85 Google Scholar; Milton, Anthony, England’s Second Reformation: The Battle for the Church of England, 1625–1662 (Cambridge, 2021), 339–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Terpstra, Nicholas, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2015).10.1017/CBO9781139170055CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 For example, Exeter College in summer and autumn 1649 recorded giving 2s. 6d. to ‘a distressed minister from Ireland’ and 1s. 6d. to ‘2 poore Irish’: Exeter College Archives, RA2/02, Expenses for 20 July–2 November 1649. For Irish refugees in England during the 1640s and 1650s, and the often-conflicting emotions they engendered in the English, see March, Bethany, ‘“Lodging the Irish”: An Examination of Parochial Charity Dispensed in Nottinghamshire to Refugees from Ireland, 1641–1651’, Midland History 42 (2017), 194–216 Google Scholar.
26 For donations to Sictor, see Emmanuel College Archives, Bur.8.2, Expenses since the accounts of 17 April 1651; Merton College Archives, SC/MCR/F/1/4/2, fol. 111r; SC/MCR/F/1/4/3, fol. 11r. For Sictor more widely, see William Poole, ‘Down and Out in Leiden and London: The Later Careers of Venceslaus Clemes (1589–1637), and Jan Sictor (1593–1652), Bohemian Exiles and Failing Poets’, The Seventeenth Century 28 (2013), 163–85; Robert Fitzgibbon Young, A Czech Humanist in London in the 17th Century (London, [1925]).
27 However, see Anthony Milton’s discussion of how fundraising efforts in the 1620s for the Palatinate in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were affected by the Calvinism and Arminianism of the respective universities: Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 511.
28 Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, 3: 2213–14.
29 CUL, GBR/0265/UA/U.Ac.2/1, fol. 767.
30 Christ Church College Archives, D&C i.b.3, fol. 7.
31 Bodl., MS Lib. recs e. 544, fols. 84v. Subsequent entries in the register record a ‘Gr’ using records for the period roughly corresponding with Abbatios’s time in Oxford: ibid., fols. 85v-8v. However, this evidence is far from certain, especially as he is not recorded in the lists of foreign visitors to the university: Bodl., MS Lib. recs e. 533; Bodl., MS Wood E.5.
32 Harris, Greek Emigres, 62–84.
33 Feingold, Mordechai, ‘The Humanities’, in Tyacke, Nicholas, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, 4: Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford, 1997), 211–357 Google Scholar, at 256–61.
34 Davey, Metrophanes Kritopoulos, 88–111.
35 For Harris’s reputation as a Greek scholar, see Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. Philip Bliss, 4 vols (London, 1813–20), 3: 455.
36 Davey, Metrophanes Kritopoulos, 93.
37 Ghobrial, ‘Migration from Within and Without’, 160–6; Grant, ‘Vagabonding Greekes’, 94; Henny, ‘Nathanael of Leukas’, 454–5.
38 The quotation is in Misti, Greece in Early English Travel Writing, 31. Italics original. See also Ghobrial, ‘Migration from Within and Without’, 162; Grant, ‘Vagabonding Greekes’, 94; Henny, ‘Nathanael of Leukas’, 454–5. Although it is beyond the scope or aim of this article to determine whether Comnenus was what he claimed to be, it is interesting to note that certain elements of his story – such as the familial link to the Byzantine imperial family of the same name, the supposed robbery by pirates, and his role at the renowned monastery of St Catherine – are consistent with some of the claims associated with fraudulent Greek travellers.
39 Jesus College Archives, BU:AC:Gen:1, fol. 184.
40 Cyprius, Chronicon, 487.
41 Harris, Greek Emigres, 81–4.
42 Cambridge, St John’s College Archives, SJAR/3/2/4/6, 1650, fol. 25v. For Winchester College, see Winchester College Archives, Bursars’ Book, 1644–1671, 1652–3, ‘Custus Necessariorum cum Donis’.
43 Clare College Archives, CCAD 2/1/1/3, Michaelmas 1651–Annunciation 1652, general expenses.
44 Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, 3: 2213–14.
45 Gloucestershire Archives, D1086/R23.
46 Dorothea Wendebourg, Reformation und Orthodoxie: Der okumenische Briefwechsel zwischen der Leitung der württembergischen Kirche und Patriarch Jeremias II. von Konstantinopel in den Jahren 1573–1581 (Göttingen, 1986). For a recent discussion which extensively analyzes Wendebourg’s book, considering the motivation for these encounters, see Moore, Colton, ‘Wittenberg and Byzantium: Lutheran Incentives to Correspond with the Patriarch of Constantinople (1573–1581)’, Journal of Religious History 46 (2022), 3–23 10.1111/1467-9809.12814CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Calis, ‘Impossible Reformation’, 43–76.
47 Grant, ‘Vagabonding Greekes’, 87.
48 Henny, ‘Nathanael of Leukas’, 457.
49 Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009), 12. See also, Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 379–81.
50 Patricia C. Brückmann, ‘Vincent Canes [alias Thomas Bodwill; name in religion John Baptist] (1608–1672)’, ODNB, online edn (2004), at: <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/4549>, accessed 4 November 2024.
51 Owen, John, A Vindication of the Animadversions on Fiat Lux (London, 1664), 551.Google Scholar
52 Ibid. For Konopios, see Patterson, ‘The Beginning of Orthodox-Anglican Relations’, 39–55.
53 Owen, Vindication, 552. Italics original.
54 Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, 3: 2213–14.
55 Ibid. Italics original.
56 George A. Hadjiantoniou, Protestant Patriarch: The Life of Cyril Lucaris (1572–1638) Patriarch of Constantinople (Richmond, VA, 1961), 81.
57 Owen, Vindication, 552.
58 Several years before receiving this certificate, Comnenus had travelled to Scotland: Grant, ‘Vagabonding Greekes’, 90.
59 The same year, Comnenus petitioned the Council of State for funds: London, TNA, SP, 25/78, fol. 522.
60 Gloucestershire Archives, D1086/R23.
61 The Correspondence of John Cosin, D.D. Lord Bishop of Durham: Together with Other Papers Illustrative of His Life and Times, ed. George Ornsby, Surtees Society 52 and 55, 2 vols (Durham, 1869–72), 2: 102–3 and n.†. London, LPL, MS 688, vol. 2, fols 526r–v. See also a poem written in Greek by Constantine Rhodocanaces, a member of London’s Greek community, to celebrate the Restoration discussed by Barron, Samos to Soho, 154–5.
62 See the manuscript description on the library’s online catalogue: ‘Overview’, CalmView, online at: <lambethpalacelibrary.org.uk>, accessed 22 June 2024.
63 LPL, MS 688, vol. 2, fol. 523r.
64 Milton, England’s Second Reformation, 481–91; William White, The Lord’s Battle: Preaching, Print and Royalism During the English Revolution (Manchester, 2023), 199–205.
65 LPL, MS 688, vol. 2, fol. 523r.
66 Ibid., fol. 528r.
67 Ibid., fol. 524v.
68 The seminal work on the ‘Puritan’ interest in propagation is Christopher Hill, ‘Puritans and “the Dark Corners of the Land’, TRHS 5th series 13 (1963), 77–102. See also Patrick Seamus McGhee, ‘“Heathenism” in the Protestant Atlantic World, c.1558–c.1700’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019), esp. 113–56.
69 Jeremy Fradkin, ‘Religious Toleration and Protestant Expansion in Revolutionary England, 1642–1658’ (DPhil thesis, Johns Hopkins University, 2019), 121–68, quotation at 145. For the issue of propagation during the Commonwealth more generally, see Hill, Christopher, ‘Propagating the Gospel’, in Bell, H. E. and Ollard, R. L., eds, Historical Essays 1600–1750, presented to David Ogg (London, 1963), 35–59 Google Scholar.
70 For a summary of all the propagation legislation passed by the Commonwealth, see Bidwell, William Bradford, ‘The Committees and Legislation of the Rump Parliament, 1648–1653: A Quantitative Study’ (PhD thesis, University of Rochester, 1977), 200–8.Google Scholar
71 Chauncy, Charles, Gods Mercy Shewed to his People (Cambridge, MA, 1655), 29.Google Scholar
72 [University of Oxford], To Our Reverend Brethren the Ministers of the Gospel in England and Wales (n.pl., 1649); Bodl., MS Wood 423, fol. 30r-v.
73 Ibid., fol. 30v. Italics original.
74 See Eloise Davies, ‘Beyond the Jesuit College: The Role of Cambridge’s “Puritan” Colleges in European Politics and Diplomacy, 1603–1625’, in Alex Beeton et al., eds, The Mind is its Own Place? Early Modern Intellectual History in an Institutional Context, History of Universities 36 (Oxford, 2023), 25–43.
75 Trevor-Roper, ‘The Church of England and the Greek Church’, 217.
76 Davey, Metrophanes Kritopoulos, 41–51; Kitromilides, Paschalis M., ‘Orthodoxy and the West: Reformation to Enlightenment’, in Angold, Michael, ed., The Cambridge History of Christianity, 5: Eastern Christianity (Cambridge, 2006), 187–209 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 193–202; Rozemond, Hierotheos Abbatios, 8–15.
77 Kitromilides, ‘Orthodoxy and the West’, 188.
78 Calis, ‘Impossible Reformation’, 62.
79 For the classic studies of Loukaris, see especially Hadjiantoniou, Protestant Patriarch; Gunnar Hering, Ökumenisches Patriarchat und europäische Politik, 1620–1638 (Wiesbaden, 1968); Trevor-Roper, ‘The Church of England and the Greek Church’, 213–40; Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople From the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (Cambridge, 1968), 259–88; Stylianou, ‘“We are at the furthest part of the inhabited world”’.
80 Vassa Kontouma, ‘La Confession de Foi de Dosithée de Jérusalem: Les versions de 1672 et de 1690’, in Marie-Hélène Blanchet and Frédéric Gabriel, eds, L’Union à l’épreuve du formulaire. Professions de foi entre églises d’Orient et d’Occident (XIIIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Leuven, 2016), 341–72, at 343. See also Vassa Kontouma and Sébastien Garnier, ‘Concilium Hierosolymitanum 1672’, in Alberto Melloni, ed., The Great Councils of the Orthodox Churches: From Constantinople 861 to Constantinople 1872, Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generaliumque Decreta 4 (Turnhout, 2016), 267–327; Olar, Ovidiu, ‘“Un temps pour parler”: Dosithée de Jérusalem et le synode de Jassy (1642)’, Analele Putnei 10 (2014), 215–25Google Scholar. On the 1629 Confession of Faith, see Ovidiu Olar, ‘Les confessions de foi de Cyrille Loukaris (†1638)’, in Blanchet and Gabriel, L’Union à l’épreuve du formulaire, 270–310, at 281.
81 See Calis, ‘Impossible Reformation’, 43–76; Ovidiu Olar, La boutique de Théophile. Les relations du Patriarche de Constantinople Kyrillos Loukaris (1570–1638) avec la Réforme (Paris, 2019); Gara, Eleni and Olar, Ovidiu, ‘Confession-Building and Authority: The Great Church and the Ottoman State in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, in Krstić, Tijana and Terzioğlu, Derin, eds, Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community-Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–18th Centuries (Piscataway, NJ, 2022), 159–214 Google Scholar.
82 Olar, ‘Les confessions de foi de Cyrille Loukaris’, 281.
83 Gara and Olar, ‘Confession-Building and Authority’, 175.
84 Calis, ‘Impossible Reformation’, 67–8; Hadjiantoniou, Protestant Patriarch, 77–88, 93–4.
85 Rozemond, Hierotheos Abbatios, 34–5.
86 Ibid. 35.
87 JHC 6, 282 (21 August 1649).
88 For the Committee for Regulating the Universities and Chaloner’s role, see Beeton, ‘Rump Parliament and Places of Learning’, esp. 39–80 and appendix 1.