In August 1690 a man from Bethlehem calling himself ‘Marco figlio di Pietro’ wrote a letter of protest to the Pope in Rome. The letter described the attempt of Marco’s brother ‘Paolo’ to travel to Rome earlier that year. Despite professing himself Roman Catholic, Paolo had been obstructed and harassed at every step of the way by a coalition of Franciscan friars, European consuls, and Ottoman governors. In Jerusalem the Franciscans pressured the European consuls to deny him a travel permit; then in Cyprus the Franciscans detained him in their Larnaca convent after he had set out to reach Rome by other means. Warned by the friars that ‘he would be numbered among the dead’ if he tried to continue his journey, and fearful that they were trying to poison him, Paolo managed to escape the convent.Footnote 1 But he soon found ‘twelve friars running after him in the public streets of Cyprus’.Footnote 2 Seeking refuge in the French consul’s office, he was instead bundled onto the first boat back to the Ottoman mainland. Disembarking at the port of Saida, Paolo suffered a series of further humiliations, this time at the hands of the local Ottoman garrison, who beat him, stripped him of his clothes and money, and ‘put chains around his neck and feet’.Footnote 3 He was eventually placed before the local governor, who granted him passage back to Bethlehem via Acre.
‘Marco’ and ‘Paolo’ were Arabic-speaking Christians from Bethlehem, 6 miles south of Jerusalem, and are here referred to by their Arabic names, Murqus ibn Butrus, and Bulus ibn Butrus. The letter opens a fascinating window onto a world of increasingly entangled relations between local Christians and European Catholics in Ottoman Palestine at the close of the seventeenth century. The city of Jerusalem is receiving increased attention as an important site of Catholic legitimation within the global Counter-Reformation project. Thus far this attention has largely focused on the European actors who sought to reclaim the ‘Holy Land’ within a distinctly Catholic sacral geography, either by travelling themselves to Jerusalem, or by recreating its shrines within Europe.Footnote 4 The Christian population of the Jerusalem area has remained largely silent in this work, despite its pivotal position as the subject of a renewed Catholic missionary enterprise and as local agents for visiting Europeans. Felicita Tramontana’s recent study of seventeenth-century conversions to both Catholicism and Islam in Palestinian villages has provided a welcome counterpoint, but much work remains to be done on the wider surface of contact between European Catholics and the local population.Footnote 5
This article sets out to retell the story of Catholic resurgence in the Holy Land in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the eyes of the local Christian population. The central thesis is that, by shifting the viewpoint to these local actors, we find a type of cross-cultural exchange that differs markedly from most of the recent writing on encounters in global history, and in particular those taking place in the early modern Mediterranean. In the story related here, themes of enforced stasis, subjugation, and contestation predominate, with violence always lurking near the surface. Whereas most recent histories of European–Ottoman encounters follow fluid movements of people, ideas, and goods through networks that criss-crossed the Mediterranean, this study pauses to consider people who aspired to traverse those networks, but found themselves locked out.
Building this type of experience into global history can be a way to address recent criticisms that the discipline’s ‘cosmopolitan self-yearnings’Footnote 6 have blinded it to the large numbers of people for whom globalization represented a threat to their livelihoods, or an imposition of new restraints.Footnote 7 As the postcolonial turn gave way to the transnational one, frameworks of dominance, coercion, and imperial subjugation were largely jettisoned in the study of encounters, giving way to an emphasis on exchange, adaptation, and indigenous agency.Footnote 8 This is especially the case in early modern Catholic missionary contexts, in which Europeans were reliant on the cooperation of non-Christian rulers and negotiation with local populations.Footnote 9 The flurry of recent literature on cross-cultural exchange in the early modern Mediterranean, meanwhile, has emphasized maritime mobility and the porous nature of sectarian and cultural boundaries. In this historiography, Ottoman actors participate as equal partners within domains previously reserved for western Europeans such as ‘Renaissance’, ‘exploration’, and ‘globalization’.Footnote 10
While this scholarship has helped define the limits of European exceptionalism and hegemony, there is a danger of losing sight of the very real inequalities that often governed such encounters. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Catholic influence was more deeply embedded in the Jerusalem area than at any time since the Crusades, as it was more broadly across Ottoman Syria.Footnote 11 Bernard Heyberger has uncovered the opportunities for mobility that this afforded some local Christians, who now began to appear in Rome’s new missionary colleges as instructors of Arabic and students of Catholic theology.Footnote 12 But beyond a handful of cherry-picked clergy, this was not the type of opportunity open to the wider Christian population in the Ottoman empire. The European friars and pilgrims who flooded into Jerusalem in this period did not come to engage in cross-cultural exchange or theological dialogue. They came to claim ownership over key shrines, as well as to convert and discipline an Orthodox Christian population whom they considered morally and spiritually deviant or ‘schismatic’. Crucially, in the city of Jerusalem and its surrounding Christian villages (namely Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Beit Sahour, and Ein Karem) they possessed the necessary wealth and access to political protection to assume this role. It was in this sanctified highland area, referred to here by its historic Arabic name, Jabal al-Quds (‘the Jerusalem hills’), that the local population was subjected to one of the most intensive Catholicization projects anywhere in the early modern Ottoman empire.
The power imbalances between the two groups need not detract from local agency. The examples discussed in this article show that local Christians in Jabal al-Quds played an important role in propagating the idea of a ‘Catholic Holy Land’ among European audiences, which in turn constituted a vital part of the global Counter-Reformation. Recovering this role is a challenging task as only a smattering of sources produced by the local Christian population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries survive today. But by cross-referencing them against the copious writings of European missionaries, pilgrims, and diplomats, as well as the records of the Ottoman sharia court in Jerusalem, we can begin to tease out the everyday agendas of these forgotten voices. Far from passive bystanders, they emerge from these sources as contesting Catholic authority at virtually every point of contact, frequently finding ways to subvert or exploit that authority to their advantage. Whereas the postcolonial approaches of the 1980s and 1990s were sometimes accused of disempowering non-Western actors, Ottoman Christians are portrayed here as protagonists in their own drama, albeit within a restricted role of servitude to their European patrons.
To capture this sense of local agency, the first section of the article sketches out the people and places in Jabal al-Quds most affected by the heightened Catholic presence. On one level, the focus is narrowed to those local Christians who formally converted to the Catholic faith and, even more specifically, to the ‘dragomans’ who served the Franciscans as their inner circle of converts. But the fragility of Catholic conversions and the fluidity of sectarian affiliation in Jabal al-Quds render it difficult to speak in such specific terms. As a result, many of the examples discussed can only be characterized as involving the broader local Christian population, some of whom might self-identify as Catholic when they deemed it advantageous. The second section of the article looks more closely at the most common zone of interaction between European Catholics and local Christians: that of the trade in religious souvenirs. Consisting mainly of devotional objects carved by local artisans from olive wood and mother-of-pearl, these souvenirs were increasingly aimed at Catholic pilgrims, as well as exported to Catholic Europe via the Franciscan convents. It is here that the encounter between Europeans and locals was established as a fundamentally economic exchange, in which local actors were confined to the role of artisans and street hawkers. The third section demonstrates how the economic inequalities embedded within these interactions ensured that the relationship was constantly marked by tension and violence. Finally, some concluding remarks are offered concerning the importance of excavating these largely untold stories, not only in terms of their impact on the global Counter-Reformation, but also as a way to complicate understandings of cross-cultural exchange in the early modern era.
In the aforementioned letter written by Murqus ibn Butrus, a seemingly incidental detail confirms the essentially economic and material nature of these encounters. When describing his brother Bulus’ attempt to take refuge in the French consulate in Cyprus, Murqus nonchalantly mentions that the consul ‘bought from him crowns from the Holy Land and crosses that those in Bethlehem are accustomed to making, paying him … 7 scudi and 10 secchini’.Footnote 13 When combined with Ottoman tax surveys listing Bulus as a rosary maker by profession, we can deduce that he was travelling to Rome as an itinerant merchant attempting to sell religious souvenirs. By 1690 it seems that the likes of Murqus and his brother were attempting to move above their station as local producers and sell directly to European markets. The vehemence with which the Franciscans attempted to restrict Bulus’ journey speaks volumes for how they perceived the role of local Christians within their Counter-Reformation mission: a subservient local population, who were to be disciplined in the ‘true faith’, but could play no active role in the circulation of Catholic culture and capital around the Mediterranean. Yet when the perspective is reversed, and we take seriously the agency of local Christians, we are struck by their restlessness and their refusal to be content with their assigned position. By the late nineteenth century, Christians from Jabal al-Quds were breaking free from the Franciscan shackles and travelling to all corners of the world, especially Catholic Europe and Latin America, selling Holy Land devotional objects.Footnote 14 To study the earlier interactions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between the Christians of Jabal al-Quds and European Catholics is to trace the slow, painful origins of a Palestinian Christian diaspora in an era when global mobility remained firmly out of reach for most local residents.
The ‘Catholic’ parishes of Jabal al-Quds
By the end of the seventeenth century, the local population in Jabal al-Quds would have been keenly aware of a growing cast of Catholic characters walking the streets of Jerusalem and the surrounding Christian villages.Footnote 15 Some locals, however, were more likely than others to meet a European Catholic. The principal conduit for interaction with Catholic actors was the Order of Franciscan Friars Minor, established in the area since the thirteenth century and centred around their convents in Jerusalem (St Saviour’s) and Bethlehem (St Catherine’s).Footnote 16 In the wake of the European Reformations, these sites were reimagined as a specifically Catholic form of guardianship over the Holy Land.Footnote 17 When the Vatican formed the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, or ‘Propaganda Fide’, in 1622 to coordinate Catholic missions around the world, the Franciscans were granted a papal monopoly over proselytism in the area. Their convents were now further transformed, serving as parish churches charged with ‘returning’ local Christians to the ‘true faith’.Footnote 18 This quickly led to a widening of the Franciscans’ reach in Jabal al-Quds. By the end of the seventeenth century they had established a new convent in Ein Karem (1676), the village associated with the birth of John the Baptist, located 5 miles west of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the Bethlehem parish was extended in the same period to include the neighbouring Christian villages of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour.
It was in this area in and around Jerusalem that the only discernible local community of Roman Catholics (lātīn in local terms) in the Arabic-speaking areas of the Ottoman empire took shape. Further north in Ottoman Syria, Catholic proselytism was mostly channelled through Jesuit missionaries and was focused on the adhesion of long-established local churches such as the Maronites and Greek Catholics (or ‘Melkites’) to Rome within the Uniate family of Catholic churches.Footnote 19 But in Jabal al-Quds, where the majority of local Christians were Greek Orthodox (rūmī), no locally based church existed that was prepared to affiliate with Rome. Thus local Christians interested in entering the Catholic fold had little option but to declare themselves Roman Catholic under Franciscan tutelage. The Franciscan conversion registers show that only a handful of local Christians were prepared to do this before the 1670s, after which time more substantial conversion numbers began to be recorded. By 1692 a total of 682 local Christians in Jabal al-Quds had been registered by the Franciscans as Catholic, with Bethlehem (385) and Jerusalem (297) the only established parishes at that time.Footnote 20 By 1715 the total had risen to 769, with Ein Karem (46) now appearing as a parish.Footnote 21 The numbers rose steadily over the next half-century, reaching a total of 2,081 by 1764, distributed among Bethlehem (1,030), Jerusalem (961), and Ein Karem (90).Footnote 22
The reasons for the surge in Catholic numbers during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are multifarious. The Ottoman state’s decision to strengthen its alliance with France must count as an important factor, producing by 1690 the first legislation allowing Catholic priests to preach freely among Ottoman Christians. From this point, Ottoman support fluctuated between Catholics and their increasingly hostile Orthodox counterparts, but no longer could the Orthodox patriarch in Istanbul command exclusive influence over Christian affairs in the empire. Equally important to Catholic success were the Franciscan schools established in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, which provided local Christians with the skills that enabled them to interact with a growing stream of Catholic pilgrims – namely the Italian language and European styles of artisanship. By 1715 there were 58 boys enrolled in the parish schools of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Ein Karem, with the figure rising to 163 by 1764.Footnote 23 Finally, the Franciscans’ allowance of Arabic as a liturgical language appealed to what Bruce Masters has called in the context of Jesuits in Aleppo ‘the pull of localism’ – a policy that contrasted strongly with the Orthodox Church’s insistence on using Greek.Footnote 24 A letter written in 1681 and signed by sixty-four Catholics from Jerusalem and Bethlehem expressed the community’s ‘infinite gratitude’ to the Roman Church for providing Arabic training to a particularly popular local friar named Marc’Angelo di Seraglio.Footnote 25 The letter goes on to state that at least fifteen local Christians were ready to convert if Marc’Angelo was allowed to continue preaching in Arabic.Footnote 26
But when this local population is brought more squarely into the historical limelight we find that the Franciscan claims to missionary success were highly fragile. The friars experienced great difficulty retaining parish members, and they frequently resorted to financial rewards to stop them returning to the Orthodox Church, as well as to gain new converts.Footnote 27 Inter-confessional marriage commonly brought out the inherent tensions in the relationship. In one episode from 1754, a local Catholic from Bethlehem named as ‘Michele’ requested that one of the ordained friars marry him to an Orthodox woman, ‘Anastasia’. The friar, named Felice, agreed on condition that Anastasia ‘learn the ways of the faith and made the profession of Catholic faith’.Footnote 28 A conflict ensued when Felice discovered ‘out of great ignorance she was capable neither of the sacraments nor the profession of faith’, and that her family had barred him from entering their Orthodox home. Felice’s refusal to perform the wedding evoked an angry response from Michele, who went as far as to threaten to kill Anastasia at the altar if he could not marry her.Footnote 29 In the end, the more lenient voices within the Franciscan community prevailed and a different friar married the couple, under the agreement that Michele would later teach his wife the Catholic doctrine.Footnote 30 In the eyes of the local population, confessional conformity was thus viewed in highly pragmatic terms, as an obstacle to be overcome to validate social functions that cut across denominational lines. From the Franciscan viewpoint, the dispute shows the importance of converting whole families rather than isolated individuals. If Michele and Anastasia’s marriage took place within the Catholic fold, a new family would be incorporated into the Franciscan parish, guaranteeing the baptism and schooling of their children as Catholics.
It was in Bethlehem, where this incident took place, that the Franciscans had found the most fertile conditions for their missionary enterprise, allowing them to build up an inner circle of Catholic families by the time that Michele demanded his marriage to Anastasia. As the figures above demonstrate, it was Bethlehem that consistently formed the largest Latin Catholic parish in Jabal al-Quds, and by extension anywhere in the Ottoman Middle East.Footnote 31 Although the overall number of Christians in Jerusalem was higher, Bethlehem’s Christian population was more locally rooted and therefore more amenable to long-term missionary success. In Jerusalem the conversion records are dominated by people likely to have been recent immigrants – Nestorians, Maronites, Copts, Syriacs, Armenians, even Calvinists and Lutherans, as well as the occasional Muslim (Ottoman slaves freed for ransom by the Franciscans).Footnote 32 But in Bethlehem every convert to Catholicism in the seventeenth century was listed as previously Greek Orthodox. This was the indigenous Christian population of Palestine: under the patronage of the Greek Orthodox Church since the Ottoman conquest of 1517, but with is own Arabic-speaking identity and local traditions, developed under centuries of Islamic rule.
From this base in Bethlehem a core group of Catholic families had emerged by the mid seventeenth century, who were closely attached to the Franciscan convent. Over time, the Franciscans came to refer to them as their ‘dragomans’, a category usually reserved in Ottoman legal terms for individual translators appointed to European consuls. In Bethlehem, however, an altogether looser definition of the term evolved to refer to the network of families living around St Catherine’s convent and serving the Franciscans as pilgrim guides and translators, as well as carrying out general maintenance and upkeep of the convent. Locally in Bethlehem these families came to be known as the tarajmeh (‘translators’), with a district of the town named after them that extends down Star Street, the main entrance for pilgrims arriving from Jerusalem. Tradition even holds that the tarajmeh families descended from intermarriages between Frankish Crusaders and the local population. While there is little documentary evidence to confirm this, we do know that the Crusader regime in Bethlehem refrained from expelling the local Christian population as it had done in Jerusalem.Footnote 33 The result was most likely a tradition of Frankish–Arabic cohabitation in the town that persisted into the subsequent periods of Muslim rule and eventually evolved into the dragoman community. By the early eighteenth century, Franciscan reports on parish numbers in Bethlehem distinguished between the general Catholic population and their turcimanni (dragomans), with the latter regarded as their inner circle of more reliable converts. In 1714, 157 such dragomans were recorded in Bethlehem out of a total Catholic parish of 438 people.Footnote 34
The value of this community to the Franciscans is demonstrated in episodes such as the marriage of Michele and Anastasia. While Michele was a baptized Catholic, he did not belong to the dragoman community.Footnote 35 But, throughout the saga, the friar Felice relied on local dragomans as cultural mediators. In his report he writes that he communicated with Michele and Anastasia via ‘Giovanni di Davidde’ and ‘Giovanni di Musa di Tilimas’, two family names (Dawed and Talmas) still associated with the tarajmeh clan in Bethlehem today. He also goes on to state that it was only after conferring with ‘Andrea Torjimanno di questo convento’ that he later discovered that another friar was prepared to carry out the wedding.Footnote 36 Numerous other cases show the dragomans mediating between the Franciscans, the local community, and the Ottoman state. In a 1681 hearing at the Ottoman sharia court in Jerusalem, for example, we find two men listed as ‘Ibrahim and Isa, dragomans of the Frankish monks in Jerusalem’, asking that the Ottoman judge, or qadi, sanction the friars’ request to build new fortifications at their Bethlehem convent.Footnote 37 In 1689, two other Jerusalem-based dragomans, Anton and Mansour, appeared at the court, representing the Franciscans in a dispute with the Armenian monks.Footnote 38 In the village of Ein Karem, meanwhile, dragomans from Bethlehem established a form of Catholic ‘colony’ following the Franciscan acquisition of a convent there in 1676. By 1698 a small community of twenty dragomans had been transplanted to Ein Karem, rising to ninety by 1764.Footnote 39
It was within these dragoman communities that the most intimate relations between local Christians and European Catholics developed. Murqus ibn Butrus, author of the aforementioned letter of 1690, came from one of Bethlehem’s earliest dragoman families, instilling in him an unusually strong sense of Catholic identity. In near-perfect Italian he employed a range of Catholic symbolism to make the case for his brother’s passage to Rome. His brother Bulus’ only aim, he claimed, was to carry out a pilgrimage to the Papal See, ‘before which we bow our heads and our souls, considering it our true Mother to whom God has revealed all the mysteries in which we believe’.Footnote 40 To a Catholic reader, the analogy with Paul the Apostle would have been clear and further reinforced by Murqus’ rendering of his brother’s name as ‘Paolo’. In similar fashion to Bulus, Paul the Apostle had been arrested and imprisoned in Caesarea (just south of Saida, where Bulus was arrested), before embarking on his long journey to salvation in Rome.
Murqus’ impressive command of Catholic doctrine and symbolism was the result of a lifetime spent in close proximity to European Catholics. Records show that his family played a central role in the diffusion of Catholicism in Jabal al-Quds in the early seventeenth century. His grandfather Elias appears as the very first recorded Catholic confirmation, occurring in Bethlehem on Christmas Day 1616.Footnote 41 Elias always appears in these records with the appellation of ‘il dottore’, as later does his son Butrus (the father of Murqus and Bulus), suggesting that the family served as physicians to the Franciscans. In 1627 Elias’ wife, Salha, became the first entry for Bethlehem in the new conversion records required by Propaganda Fide.Footnote 42 Her and Elias’ numerous children and grandchildren subsequently appear multiple times in the baptism and confirmation registers over the next twenty-five years, confirming the extent to which one family, over successive generations, could form the nucleus of an emergent Catholic community.Footnote 43 By the time that Murqus and his brother Bulus were born (1641 and 1647 respectively), this growing network of dragoman families could be expected to baptize their children as Catholics and send them to the local Franciscan school. Upon reaching adulthood, Murqus and Bulus were already immersed in this Catholic environment and betrothed to local Catholic girls.Footnote 44
Murqus’ letter of 1690 provides a rare opportunity to examine the encounter with Catholic Europe through the eyes of the local dragoman community. But the majority of this community – men, women, and children – remain voiceless in the historical record. Dragoman children were recorded as a distinct category in the Franciscan reports, but scant detail survives on their experiences in the Catholic schools of Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Ein Karem. Women, too, were an integral part of the dragoman community and played a vital role in facilitating further conversions to Catholicism, as noted by Felicita Tramontana.Footnote 45 During the early and mid seventeenth century, when the dragoman community was first emerging, women often feature more prominently than men in the conversion registers. For example, in the single highest year for conversions in Bethlehem, that of 1671, women make up nineteen of the thirty-six names recorded.Footnote 46 The day-to-day experiences of these women are harder to glean, but snippets of information suggest that they served the Franciscan convents as domestic workers and manual labourers.Footnote 47 Occasionally they appear in accusations of sexual affairs with the friars, indicating the close proximity in which they lived with European Catholics.Footnote 48 In 1769, a friar at the Bethlehem convent called Serafino was found harbouring an unnamed local widow in his cell at night. Having initially been dismissed from his position, Serafino convinced the Franciscan guardian in Jerusalem to give him a second chance. But when the same woman was later found pregnant, there would be no more leniency. According to the curate in Bethlehem, the woman’s family threatened to kill both her and the friar, ‘following the Arabic law always practised here’. This time Serafino was immediately dispatched to Verona and the woman sent ‘far away’. Meanwhile, the woman’s family had to be placated in the Ottoman law courts to the tune of ‘at least 15,000 piastres’.Footnote 49 This was clearly not an isolated incident at the convent in Bethlehem, as testified by a nearly identical case occurring in 1783.Footnote 50
Examples such as these provide glimpses of a wider cast of local Christians, whose lives became increasingly intertwined with those of European Catholics in Jabal al-Quds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is often only in tragic or controversial circumstances that we gain information on the day-to-day roles they performed. Such was the case with Isa ibn Marzuq, a man from Bethlehem, who tended the gardens of the Franciscan convent and each day ensured that the fiercely contested boundary with the adjacent Greek Orthodox convent was maintained. In 1665 Isa was found dead under a collapsed wall in the lower northern garden of the convent. He had been trapped under the rubble, unable to be freed by local people who had run to help. A dragoman from Jerusalem named Ibrahim brought the case to the Jerusalem sharia court, which investigated the matter and found no wrongdoing on the part of the Franciscans.Footnote 51 Two of Isa’s nephews, Yusef ibn Ibrahim and Mansour ibn Za’nun, are recorded as attending the court hearing – a rare and sad moment, in which the rank and file of the dragoman community is made briefly visible.
Encounter as economic transaction: the trade in Catholic souvenirs
Beyond the immediate confines of the Franciscan convent walls, encounters between European Catholics and local Christians took place on a primarily economic footing. This was most visibly manifested through the production and sale of religious souvenirs. The prevalence of the trade among local Christians is widely testified in European sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a typical and very early example from 1600, the French traveller Henry Castela described the staple items on offer to pilgrims as ‘pistachio and olive wood crosses, crowns and rosaries’.Footnote 52 By the mid eighteenth century, the growth of the industry was sufficient for the Swedish scientist and travel writer Fredrik Hasselquist to remark: ‘No pilgrim goes away without carrying with him a store of these wares, and therefore the making of these holy things is a constant and certain employ for the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.’Footnote 53
There was nothing new about local Christians producing and selling souvenirs to pilgrims from Europe. In the fifteenth century, the Dominican theologian Felix Fabri described the experience of visiting the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as something akin to shopping in a bazaar.Footnote 54 Among the goods for sale, Fabri listed prayer beads, as well as precious stones and cloths. Two hundred years later, many of the same items could still be purchased at the Holy Sepulchre, but the trade had now greatly expanded and was increasingly focused on a specifically Catholic market. Not surprisingly, the emergent community of local Catholics was best positioned to benefit from this upsurge in sales. To a Greek traveller such as L. S. Kosmopolites, who visited the area in 1753, the Catholicization of the trade was all the more noticeable: ‘Christians [in Bethlehem] are divided into two persuasions, namely, Greek and Romish [Catholic]; the former cultivate the lands … the latter live upon their industry, in making beads, crosses of different sizes from olive trees, wood, and inlaid with mother of pearl … of which they sell great numbers to the convents, and to the pilgrims.’Footnote 55
While rosaries and crosses were the most commonly purchased souvenirs, pilgrims were presented with a range of other options, including precious stones, Holy Land soil, pressed flowers, replica models of churches, and all kinds of relics. One type of souvenir that demonstrates the integral role of local women in the encounter with Catholic Europe were the pieces of chalky limestone lining the walls of the ‘Milk Grotto’ in Bethlehem. This was the network of caves where a drop of Mary’s breast milk was said to have spilled as she fed the infant Jesus, giving the stone walls restorative powers for women with lactation or fertility problems. In 1698 Corneille le Bruyn described how local Christians had collaborated with the Franciscans to develop a more commercialized use of the stone aimed at Catholic markets: ‘At Jerusalem they wash a great many Pieces of that Stone, and afterwards clap the Seal of the City [i.e. the Franciscan ‘Jerusalem Cross’] upon them, to send them over all Europe.’Footnote 56 Having purchased a piece, he later gifted it to a physician friend in Venice to treat a young woman. As Leigh Ann Craig describes in her discussion of the later Middle Ages, male pilgrims’ purchase of these ‘gynaecological souvenirs’ served to strengthen European women’s devotion to the Holy Land, when the journey was considered too costly or dangerous for women to undertake themselves.Footnote 57 But it is also a reminder that local women in Jabal al-Quds were deeply engaged in the encounter with Catholic Europe, even when the surface of contact was more visibly male to male. The Milk Grotto has long been revered as a distinctly female shrine – a place where local women, both Christian and Muslim, have gathered in prayer and extracted powder from the cave walls to mix with water and make into small cakes, either for their own consumption or for sale to pilgrims.Footnote 58
The more adventurous pilgrim, meanwhile, could opt for a tattoo as souvenir. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts abound with descriptions of the ‘pricking’ technique employed by Christians in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, which left permanent images of Holy Land motifs on a pilgrim’s arm. Long before European imperial expeditions discovered the Polynesian practice of tatau, visitors to Jabal al-Quds were encountering similar forms of body art practised by the local population. Pilgrims remarked with amazement how ‘this Colour continues always Fresh, as long as a Man Lives’.Footnote 59 The patterns were chosen from a range of pre-prepared wooden stencils of Holy Land iconography, most common of which was the ‘Arms of Jerusalem’ or ‘Jerusalem Cross’, usually featuring the initials IHS, in reference to the first three Greek letters for Jesus. In local terms, the Jerusalem Cross and IHS Christogram were specifically Frankish symbols associated with the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. While not all the pilgrims who received tattoos were Catholic, the practice clearly took place under Franciscan supervision, with the expectation that only Catholic images should be imprinted on pilgrims’ bodies. When the Scottish traveller William Lithgow managed in 1612 to persuade a local artist he named as ‘Elias Areacheros’ to give him a distinctly Protestant tattoo (featuring the crown of King James), the Franciscan guardian became ‘greatly offended’.Footnote 60 Lithgow managed to placate the friar, but more violent Catholic recriminations would later follow when he was interrogated by the Spanish Inquisition in Malaga in 1620 and had the tattoo torn from his flesh.Footnote 61
More broadly, Holy Land tattoos chimed with Catholic notions of bodily suffering as a route to spiritual purification, evoking the stigmata of Christ and echoing similar examples of pilgrims marking their bodies at Catholic shrines in Europe.Footnote 62 Accounts of Catholic pilgrims who received tattoos in Jabal al-Quds frequently emphasize the physical pain that accompanied the process.Footnote 63 As Richard Coyle has noted, Catholic writers in the seventeenth century sought to ‘rescue the practice of pilgrimage from the derision of … Calvinist polemicists’, emphasizing pilgrimage as a physically punishing experience rather than an object of Renaissance humanist curiosity.Footnote 64 In their efforts to serve the growing numbers of European Catholic pilgrims, local Christians recognized the appeal of tattoos as a means to connect with the physical suffering endured by Christ. For those skilled in the art, such potent symbolism could bring considerable financial reward. Lithgow, for example, states that he paid Elias 2 piastres for his customized tattoo. This was a lot of money by local standards: in 1679 the annual rate of the jizya tax paid by non-Muslims was 4.5 piastres per person.Footnote 65
Such transactions can be viewed as intrinsic to pilgrimage itself. Since at least the medieval period, managers of Christian pilgrimage sites have sought to profit from pilgrims’ desire to bring home, or ‘consume’, physical mementos. From the marketing of relics at Glastonbury Abbey in the twelfth century to the production of plastic Madonnas at Lourdes in the twentieth, scholars have increasingly focused on the commodification of souvenirs as an integral part of pilgrimage rather than a corruption of its spiritual essence.Footnote 66 Likewise, there is nothing uniquely Christian about the process.Footnote 67 But in the case of Jabal al-Quds, the growth of Catholic souvenir production in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was tied to a specific process whereby local Christians were being repositioned, and repositioning themselves, in a relationship of servitude to European Catholics. As a community of non-Muslims in a relatively poor province of the Ottoman empire, Christians in Jabal al-Quds had limited access to economic and social mobility. The marked rise in European Catholic investment (both human and material) in the region offered them new opportunities, but it dictated that they adopt a subordinate position vis-à-vis the European Catholic community. Accounts of these encounters emit a sense of dependency, and often desperation, on the part of local Christians. George Sandys described in 1610 the ‘beggarly living’ that Christians made from the trade, while Nicolas Bénard’s account from 1621 viewed pilgrims’ purchase of souvenirs as an act of charity or ‘alms’, without which the Christians of Bethlehem would not survive.Footnote 68
Those who achieved most success in the trade tended to hail from the community of Catholic converts, and in particular the dragoman families, whose children were taught European styles of carving in the Franciscan schools. They also had the linguistic skills to converse and barter with pilgrims in a more intimate manner, further improving their prospects of commercial success. A classic example was provided by the visiting Italian writer Giovanni Mariti during his stay in Jerusalem:
I had scarcely advanced a few steps in the city, when a man who seemed to be of the Latin communion, but native to Jerusalem, accosted me and politely asked if I was a Frenchman, which is what they call all Europeans here. Upon hearing that I was, he told me to follow him to the convent of St Saviour.Footnote 69
In the case of the tattooists, numerous travellers who received the ‘Jerusalem mark’ noted that the artists worked as dragomans for the Franciscans. Corneille le Bruyn wrote in 1702, ‘this is generally the Drogeman’s Business, who likewise keep these Patterns by them’, while William Lithgow’s artist of 1612 was described as ‘a purveyor for the friars’.Footnote 70
Murqus ibn Butrus and his brother Bulus typified these linkages between artisanship and servitude to the Franciscans. Murqus’ letter of 1690 alludes to the family’s employment as carvers and sellers of devotional objects, when describing Bulus’ attempt to sell ‘crosses and crowns that those in Bethlehem are wont to making’ to the French consul in Larnaca.Footnote 71 This is confirmed in the Ottoman jizya tax survey of 1691, which lists Bulus as a ‘rosary maker’, who was tall in height, with hazel eyes, wide eyebrows, and a grey beard.Footnote 72 He was forty-four at the time, recently returned from his attempted journey to Rome.Footnote 73 Curiously, Bulus is listed as Orthodox (rūmī) in the survey, as were all the Christians in Bethlehem. Equally curious is Murqus’ absence from the survey altogether, just a year after he penned his letter to Rome. The notorious unreliability of the jizya surveys means that no definitive answer to this riddle can be provided. But the absence in the survey of numerous individuals like Murqus, who are listed in Franciscan records as Catholics, suggests that at least some of the Bethlehem dragomans were able to gain exemption from the jizya, in the same way as dragomans in larger Ottoman cities.Footnote 74 This is corroborated from cases recorded in the late seventeenth century of the Franciscans paying the jizya on behalf of Catholic converts.Footnote 75
The anomalies in the jizya survey call into question Oded Peri’s claim that the low head count for Bethlehem and Beit Jala in the 1691 survey signified a migration of Christians away from these semi-rural areas towards the city of Jerusalem.Footnote 76 On the contrary, the more precise record-keeping of the Franciscans indicates that a sizeable community of Catholic dragomans had taken shape in Bethlehem, who evaded Ottoman tax records, and who were highly specialized in the trade in religious souvenirs. While it was usually men who dealt face to face with European Catholics, the lives of women within this growing Catholic community were also profoundly affected. When Kosmopolites described the gravitation of Catholic men in Bethlehem towards the souvenir business, he noted that ‘their wives are employed in fetching wood, and providing victuals, tilling the field, looking for their cattel [sic], and carting their husband’s work for Jerusalem, for sale’.Footnote 77 These were the exact same tasks he had previously described Orthodox men fulfilling in the town, suggesting that a newly gendered division of labour was emerging among Catholic families as a result of their heightened interaction with Europeans. Little wonder, then, that Franciscan reports emphasized the difficulties that young Catholic men from Bethlehem faced when searching for suitable wives in Jerusalem: ‘they have no need for women [from Jerusalem] who are always indoors, but rather for those who are out working in the fields’.Footnote 78
A relationship of tension and conflict
Local Christians in Jabal al-Quds constantly probed the boundaries of their role of servitude in the encounter with Catholic Europe. For every ‘favourable impression’ and ‘polite accosting’, there was an accusation of theft, extortion, or violent attack.Footnote 79 A lurking sense of unease permeates all these encounters, particularly where trade was involved. As Diana Webb notes in her study of medieval Christian pilgrimage, the conversion of holy shrines into profitable businesses threw open the question of church ownership over such sites. What right did church clergy have to claim monopolies over the sale of devotional objects, especially when those objects were produced by lay artisans? The result, according to Webb, was ‘a modest chapter in the history of conflict between ecclesiastical institutions and the urban societies that so frequently grew up around them and serviced them’.Footnote 80 Whether or not modest, this inherent tension drove much of the discord between the Franciscans resident in Jabal al-Quds and the local Christian population.
In more simple terms, relations between European Catholics and local Christians were structured by very visible disparities of wealth. The Franciscan convents in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Ein Kerem were adorned with displays of material wealth that contrasted sharply with the poverty of ordinary life in Jabal al-Quds. Despite their founding principles of austerity and mendicancy, the Friars Minor had been among the earliest Christian orders to incorporate trade and finance into monastic life.Footnote 81 By the time of their expansion in missionary activity in Jabal al-Quds in the seventeenth century, the Franciscans were operating within well-established traditions of commerce and economic sustainability. As well as enabling them to forge new export markets for Holy Land devotional objects, this embrace of finance and trade allowed them to act as the recipients of a great outpouring of material objects from Europe. The Friars Minor developed a complex administration to manage the collection of alms and the donation of liturgical objects from European monarchs, dignitaries, convents, and lay communities, all managed by their Commissioners of the Holy Land. As meticulous bookkeepers, the Franciscans assiduously recorded the arrival of paintings, icons, vestments, candlesticks, goblets, bowls, furniture, tapestries, lamps, vases, crucifixes, and a host of other items in the inventories of each parish. Donated as gifts by Catholic dignitaries from the Patriarch of Venice to the King of Spain, and often exchanged for Holy Land devotional objects moving in the opposite direction, these items were produced by some of Europe’s finest artisans, and carved from a range of precious metals and stones.Footnote 82
The traffic in these goods can be set against broader trends in the ornamentation of monastic interiors within early modern Europe.Footnote 83 Recent scholarship is teasing out the specific functions performed by frescoes, devotional objects, and furnishings within the Counter-Reformation, such as signalling new forms of patronage, or disciplining monastic communities in prayer rituals.Footnote 84 In the specific context of the Franciscan convents in Jabal al-Quds, Megan Armstrong has noted a process of ‘imbedding Catholic chapels, rituals and ornamentation in the sanctifying authority of the Holy Land’ as a means of reasserting Catholic legitimacy among European audiences.Footnote 85 But the symbolism of these lavishly adorned Catholic spaces was not only refracted westwards. To local Christians in Jabal al-Quds, the material riches contained within Franciscan convents would have represented a startling display of wealth and power, suggesting the potential benefits of associating with European Catholicism.
The Franciscan convents in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Ein Karem were situated in the heart of the urban (or village) community and performed multiple functions. They acted as parish churches, artisanal workshops, and pilgrim guesthouses, as well as containing the more traditional monastic cloisters. As a result they were spaces into which local Christians frequently ventured in their various roles as parish members, guides, caretakers, and artisans. Whenever the sources recount their presence within the convent walls, a sense of dazzlement prevails. Accustomed to more rudimentary standards of living, they looked at the Franciscan riches with a mixture of awe and envy. For their part, the Franciscans soon learned to conceal their most valuable possessions from the desirous eyes of local Christians. An inventory from St Catherine’s convent in Bethlehem written in 1773 mentions the ‘silverware and equipment hidden next to the curate’s office’, which included ‘silver crucifixes set on an ebony cross’ and a ‘crown with twelve silver stars’.Footnote 86 Meanwhile, at St Saviour’s in Jerusalem numerous gold and silver ceremonial items were locked safely out of reach in the convent warehouse.Footnote 87
But just as security measures increased, so too did the tenacity of the local population. It is impossible to know the full story behind many of the reported incidents of theft occurring in the Franciscan convents. The sources are fleeting and invariably told from the perspective of those seeking to protect Franciscan resources – either the Franciscans themselves, or a local Ottoman administration tasked with upholding Ottoman treaties with Catholic powers. Whatever the finer details, the overriding impression is one of the convents coming under increasingly frequent attack. In 1720 the Franciscans in Bethlehem reported that local residents had twice tried to use ladders to break into the upper floors of the convent.Footnote 88 Later that year, the residents of both Ein Karem and Bethlehem were said to have surrounded the two convents and opened fire with rifles in an attempt to ‘smoke out’ the friars.Footnote 89 In a particularly extreme case from 1773, the friars in Bethlehem were forced to abandon their convent for a week, and subsequently accused locals of sacking the building.Footnote 90 These were some of the more dramatic moments in a steady stream of accusations, culminating in an imperial Ottoman decree being issued by Selim III in 1790 (under pressure from the French ambassador in Istanbul) demanding the cessation of attacks on the Franciscans and ‘the silverware they possess’.Footnote 91
The process by which local Christians could move between roles of servant and saboteur was complex and dependent on individual circumstance. Nor were incidents of theft and sabotage confined to the Christian population. Local Muslims were often implicated alongside Christians, and it was common for the more violent attacks to be attributed to ‘Arabs’ – a byword in European terms for nomadic Bedouin communities. Furthermore, when charges were pressed at the Ottoman sharia court in Jerusalem, the Franciscans relied on their local dragomans to represent them as plaintiffs. But such cases could involve a thorny web of accusation and counter-accusation in which Catholic converts, and even the Franciscans’ inner circle of dragomans, were just as likely to feature among the accused. One of the earliest such cases occurred in 1620 when two local spokespersons for the Franciscan convent in Bethlehem, Sam’an bin al-Shamas and Nu’ma walad Zariq, pressed charges against Jirjis walad Yaqub – himself a curate (or priest’s assistant – qasis) in the Bethlehem convent. The two plaintiffs stated that ten days previously a number of items in the convent had been found missing, including a medium-sized silver tray, a silver cooking pot (tanjarah), silver chains with silver pendants, a red silk communion cup cover, and a white cotton shirt. When they had subsequently caught Jirjis trying to sell some of these items, he had turned the blame onto a certain Elias walad Isa, another local Christian, who eventually admitted entering the convent and stealing the items. The accused were ordered by the judge to repay the value of the goods and give back those not yet sold.Footnote 92 Given Elias’ status as a local Bethlehemite Christian and Jirjis’ membership of the emerging local Catholic clergy, we can surmise that this was an attempted insider job. As many other cases testify, the Catholic material riches were increasingly at risk of theft by the very people who had converted to the ‘true faith’.Footnote 93
The souvenir trade was booming in Jabal al-Quds, but more so for some than for others. In 1674 a Jesuit priest visiting the area, Michel Nau, gave precise details of the prices that pilgrims paid for some of the most popular items: ‘the crosses cost three or four scudi each’, he wrote, ‘while the models of the Holy Sepulchre vary from 15 to 20 scudi’.Footnote 94 With an exchange rate into local piastres (or kurush) of roughly 1 scudo to 1.5 piastres, this means that a single cross could fetch the equivalent of the annual per capita rate of jizya tax levied on non-Muslims (4.5 piastres in 1679).Footnote 95 But Nau was citing the prices that Franciscans charged pilgrims for such objects, not what they paid local producers.Footnote 96 Nor were the producers able to gain access to the even more profitable export routes that the Franciscans had established to Catholic Europe. According to Hasselquist, writing in the 1750s, there were 15,000 piastres-worth of devotional objects in the Jerusalem warehouse awaiting export to Europe.Footnote 97 In the same period, Giovanni Mariti provided details of some of the specific chains of supply: ‘The European merchants of Acre are the ones who purchase the majority of those works which are packed into boxes and transported to Venice from where they are sent to Germany.’Footnote 98 By the seventeenth century, the trade in devotional objects had become an essential revenue stream for Franciscan operations in the Holy Land, which were entirely dependent upon external revenues to survive. Propaganda Fide correspondence indicates a complex distribution network, in which Franciscan convents all over the Italian peninsula acted as sorting houses for these goods, with the convent of San Bonaventura in Rome serving as an important regional depot.Footnote 99
The mobility of these devotional objects and the European actors who distributed them contrasted strongly with the stasis of the people who made them. This is not to claim that Ottoman artisans lived in complete fixity; recent scholarship has emphasized the circulation of artisans and their goods around and beyond the Ottoman empire in the early modern period, as well as the impact of these circulations on intellectual and religious culture.Footnote 100 But in the specific context of Catholic mobility in the Mediterranean, the immobility of local merchants and artisans from Jabal al-Quds remains striking. As we have seen, when aspiring local traders such as Murqus ibn Butrus and his brother Bulus attempted to travel to Europe to sell the devotional objects they produced, they were quickly halted. Unable to obtain travel permits from a local Ottoman administration with a vested interest in keeping its subjects in situ as sources of tax revenue, local Catholics turned instead to the Franciscans to facilitate their journeys.Footnote 101 But they quickly discovered that the Franciscan appellation of ‘dragoman’ did not carry the same privilege of European consular protection afforded by the official Ottoman definition of the term. As Murqus’ letter makes clear, the Franciscan leadership in fact actively intervened against his family’s efforts to obtain travel documents from the French consul in Jerusalem. ‘I want to believe we would find some of them [the Franciscans] in our favour’, he wrote, ‘if the superiors didn’t persuade their subjects to prevent our journey to Christendom and if they didn’t employ the secular arm of the consuls of the country to prevent our journey.’Footnote 102
If Murqus’ assessment is correct, the Franciscan leadership in Jerusalem was engaged in a concerted effort to exclude local Christians from the flows of people and religious goods between Catholic Europe and the Ottoman empire. Murqus’ frustration is palpable as he professes himself ‘dumbfounded and mortified’ in a letter otherwise marked by its gushing praise for Catholic benevolence. The letter concludes by mentioning other family members who have attempted similar journeys and encountered equally virulent opposition from the Franciscans. The only explicit explanation that the Franciscans provide for their opposition, he writes, is that ‘it is not necessary while we know the Italian language’.Footnote 103 In other words, Murqus and his brother were deemed to have reached their highest possible station within the Catholic family: that of local interpreters and artisans who could serve incoming Europeans, but never themselves move in the opposite direction.
While Murqus’ sense of injustice is understandable, he had nevertheless progressed beyond the expectations of most local Christians in Jabal al-Quds. His family had been one of the first to embrace Catholicism, allowing them an elevated status within the dragoman community in Bethlehem. Their understanding of Catholic doctrine, their fluent Italian, and their specialism in Catholic styles of artisanship allowed them to contemplate a journey that would have been unthinkable in both economic and cultural terms for most local Christians. A more common concern for this community was receiving payment for the devotional objects they crafted. Reports of the warehouse at St Saviour’s convent in Jerusalem stacked high with such goods suggest that the Franciscans erred on the side of over-production to ensure that maximum levels of overseas demand could be met. This led to frequent episodes of friction with local producers when sales abroad were temporarily saturated. European chroniclers tended to depict local artisans during such times as aggressively exploiting the benevolence of the Franciscan friars. As Frederik Hasselquist wrote about Bethlehem: ‘None suffer more from these wicked Bethlehemites than the Monks, their neighbours … they surprise the Monks, either to obtain provisions, which like most other robbers they want continually, or attack and force them to buy a quantity of Paternosters, models of the grave of Christ, crosses, and other ware of this kind.’Footnote 104
It seems to have eluded Hasselquist that the Franciscans were largely responsible for the local population’s reliance on this trade for their livelihood. From the perspective of local artisans, the Franciscans had cultivated a sense of expectation that a steady stream of Catholic buyers was available. Some of them had taken out loans or bought property based on an assumed income from the souvenir trade – commitments they could no longer maintain when the Franciscans cut off the supply chain.Footnote 105 Others complained of the harsh physical conditions they endured to maintain the flow of goods during times of high demand. For example, one local Christian named Elias brought a legal case to the sharia court against the Franciscans in 1743 after his pregnant wife had miscarried while carrying boxes of souvenirs from Bethlehem to Jerusalem.Footnote 106 Elias lost the case, but the accusation is indicative of a mutual suspicion that could easily spill over into open hostility.
One of the most tragic incidents occurred in the 1760s, at a time when the Franciscans had ceased buying devotional objects from local producers. When a local artisan presented himself at St Saviour’s convent in Jerusalem demanding payment for his stock of crosses and rosaries, he was told that the storehouse was already full of unsold goods, hence no more items could be purchased. According to Franciscan reports, as well as an account provided by the visiting Italian writer Giovanni Mariti, the man responded by throwing his own son into a well where he promptly drowned. Mariti describes how he then blamed the incident on the Franciscans: ‘After this dreadful deed, the father began to scream and despair, spreading the rumour that it had been the friars who had drowned his son.’Footnote 107 In the resulting legal case, the Ottoman governor ordered the Franciscans to pay 3,000 zecchini (Venetian gold coins), although Mariti reports that the decision was later overturned.Footnote 108 With only the highly partisan accounts of Mariti and the Franciscans to go by, it is difficult to know exactly what happened at St Saviour’s that day, but we can be sure it was not the product of a harmonious patron–client relationship.
Conclusion
The case of the drowned boy reminds us of the brittleness that characterized relations between European Catholics and local Christians in Jabal al-Quds. These were the very people whom the Franciscans had been charged with ‘rescuing’ from a ‘schismatic’ Orthodox Church. But, from the perspective of local Christians, Catholic salvation came to signify a route to economic betterment rather than a theological transformation. Most Europeans who travelled to Jabal al-Quds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries encountered local Christians within structures of economic exchange, which the Franciscans themselves had established. Staying in Franciscan guesthouses, they came across dragoman communities serving the convents, and they bartered with the wider population on the streets of Bethlehem and Jerusalem for souvenirs and guided tours.
Such visitors frequently expressed their distaste at the local population’s readiness to exploit holy shrines for profit.Footnote 109 But this was a situation of the Franciscans’ own making. In their drive to affirm Catholic ownership over the Holy Land, they had imported a lavish array of material riches from Catholic Europe, dazzling the local population in the process. Their approach to conversion was equally based on material premises, signified by their willingness to pay local Christians to convert and remain Catholic. Most noticeably, they had cultivated an industry in devotional objects that locked many of their converts into an inherently economic, yet unequal, relationship with Catholicism. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that local Christians approached their relations with Catholic Europe on economic terms. They kept their own religiosity at arm’s length from the Franciscan friars and visiting pilgrims, rarely conforming to a strictly Roman interpretation of liturgy.Footnote 110
By searching across the copious writings of European Catholics and matching them against fragments of textual and material sources left behind by local Christians, we can begin to tease out the historical agency of these elusive characters. It is clear that they played a significant role in redefining an image of the Holy Land in European Catholic minds that would have important consequences for the wider Counter-Reformation. Whether as dragomans facilitating pilgrimages that would later be written up and read in France or Italy, as tattooists imprinting the arms of Catholic pilgrims to be displayed upon their return, or as artisans producing thousands of small crosses, rosaries, and replica church models for use all over Europe, their contribution to global Catholic culture was palpable, as long as we look hard enough.Footnote 111 In the recent historiographical shift, particularly pronounced in early modern history, towards writing ‘the global lives of things’,Footnote 112 it can be easy to lose sight of the people who produced the commodities that reshaped global cultures. If, as several scholars of the Counter-Reformation have insisted, the spread of devotional objects served as a vital tool ‘to establish and reproduce new Catholic societies outside Europe’, we must also consider the people who made those objects to have exerted an important influence on the global Counter-Reformation.Footnote 113
But equally important is an appreciation of local Christians’ own experience of these encounters, and the extent to which they diverge from the type of cross-cultural exchange most commonly found in the current historiography on early modern encounters. Christians in Jabal al-Quds were inextricably bound up in the Catholic networks of trade and piety that spanned the early modern Mediterranean. But they were simultaneously immobilized within these networks, fixed in a role of servitude from which they constantly struggled to wriggle free. By the nineteenth century this Catholic community was forging its own mobility, creating new global migratory networks that would play an important role in the advent of mass migration away from the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman empire.Footnote 114 The links between these later circulations and the encounters with Catholicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are salient, not least because the migrations of the nineteenth century were facilitated by the export of Holy Land devotional objects to predominantly Catholic countries in Latin America. But we should not lose sight of the differences between the two epochs: the one characterized by mass migration in the age of modern steam travel, the other by a more exclusive form of mobility that largely kept the Christians of Jabal al-Quds in a state of fixity.
Jeremy Adelman has recently urged global historians to ‘dispense with the idea that global integration was like an electric circuit, bringing light to the connected’.Footnote 115 If we are to take this seriously we need to make difficult methodological choices that require us to search out historical actors who exist only in the shadows of the more illustrious travellers who traversed transnational and trans-regional spaces. In his exhaustive study of the replica models of religious shrines produced by artisans from Jabal al-Quds in the early modern era, Michele Piccirillo found only one named reference to a local artisan: a brief note of attribution written by the Franciscans in 1638 to ‘Giorgio nostro turcimanno’ (‘our dragoman Jiryes’).Footnote 116 Who was ‘Giorgio’ and what did it mean to be a dragoman for the Franciscans in seventeenth-century Jerusalem or Bethlehem? Digging deeper into these stories is inherently frustrating, allowing only fleeting glimpses of the local perspective. But it can at least give us a sense of the highly uneven ways in which global integration was experienced in this corner of the Ottoman empire.
Jacob Norris is Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Sussex. His first book was Land of progress: Palestine in the age of colonial development, 1905–1948 (Oxford University Press, 2013). He is currently researching the history of Bethlehem and its role in the creation of a global Arab diaspora from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.
