Richard Calis on Martin Crusius and the discovery of Ottoman Greece
May 13, 2025
Turkey Book Talk #244 – Richard Calis, assistant professor in cultural history at Utrecht University, on “The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius” (Harvard University Press).
The book examines the life and impact of Martin Crusius. Born in Bavaria in 1526, Crusius became celebrated as Europe’s preeminent expert on the Greek world past and present, as well as the Orthodox Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. In his seminal work Turcograecia, he wrote the period’s richest record of Greek life under Ottoman rule, which served for centuries as a key source of knowledge on the Ottoman Empire itself.
The conversation addresses how Crusius’s work affected European views of the Ottoman Empire and the deep chasm between the Christian and Muslim worlds that his perspective reflected.
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