The Lutheran Experience in the Ottoman Middle East: Stephan Gerlach (1546–1612) and the History of Lutheran Accommodation* (2024)

Abstract

What did it take to live a Lutheran life in the early modern Middle East? A letter that Stephan Gerlach, a Lutheran chaplain to the imperial ambassador in Istanbul, sent to his superiors in Tübingen in 1574 offers us a rare glimpse of how early modern Lutherans grappled with the complexities of lived religion in a foreign cultural-religious environment. Was it allowed, Gerlach wondered, to wear a Turkish turban in order to see mosques and learn about Islam? Would it be possible to postpone the Sunday sermon to attend Greek Orthodox ceremonies? Ought he continue saying grace when Ottoman Turks shared his table? Was it permissible for him, in exceptional circ*mstances, to accept communion under both kinds from a Roman Catholic monk? Was it acceptable if these same monks assisted the Lutheran members of the mission in burying their dead? Could he be on familiar terms with such monks in the first place, and talk to them, without compromising his responsibilities and while keeping a clear conscience? And what about conversation with renegades?1 Essentially, then, this recent graduate from the University of Tübingen wondered to what extent it was possible, in the religious landscape of the early modern Middle East—home to Muslims, Jews and various Eastern Christian groups, as well as certain European Christians—to remain the Lutheran he had grown up to be.

This article explores how a variety of Lutherans who had business in the Ottoman Middle East responded to Gerlach’s queries. It addresses a set of questions that have received surprisingly little attention from historians of early modern Lutheranism, but which lie at the heart of Gerlach’s experiences in Istanbul and are central to our ongoing attempts at understanding early modern Christianity as a global phenomenon. Did religious encounter require Lutherans to develop forms of accommodation similar to those of early modern Catholics? Did travel in the Eastern Mediterranean demand a more flexible and more fluid form of Lutheranism? Could one even adhere to Lutheranism’s core principles so far away from the place where the movement first took root? My aim, then, is to gauge how sixteenth-century Lutheran experiences abroad inflected questions of what it meant to be Lutheran at home—an approach that has yielded rich results in recent work on early modern Catholicism and some Protestant groups, but one that has not yet been fully explored by historians of Lutheranism.2 My focus on late sixteenth-century Lutheranism is also motivated by the fact that, comparatively, so little is known about early Lutheran interactions with other Christians in places like the Ottoman Empire. Historians of early modern Catholicism have explored the Tridentine Church’s encounters with Middle Eastern Christians, and we also know a great deal about later Lutheran forms of globalisation, including the Pietist movement and its adherents’ efforts to spread their faith across the globe.3 Focusing our attention on sixteenth-century Lutheranism can thus enrich our understanding of the relationship between the Reformations and the Christian Middle East, while also offering a pre-history to later Lutheran expansions beyond the confines of Europe.

Through an examination of multiple Lutheran texts and travel journals from this period—including Gerlach’s letters and his posthumously published, oft-mentioned, yet barely analysed travelogue (Tage-Buch)—I suggest that the work of Lutheran chaplains, not unlike that of Jesuit missionaries, demanded a kind of religious flexibility that may have raised eyebrows among Lutheran hardliners. But, unlike the Catholic case, where casuistry and the methods of Jesuit missionaries became subjected to intense scrutiny, the Lutheran movement never developed an official policy of accommodation.4 On the contrary: sixteenth-century Lutheran responses to questions such as those posed by Gerlach were often makeshift and idiosyncratic. Some Lutherans, as we shall see, had no qualms about lying, feigning and other forms of (dis)simulation that challenged Augustine’s rejection of any type of duplicity. For others only necessity made such forms of (dis)simulation acceptable. Still others opted for non-conformity, believing that any kind of (dis)simulation, honest or not, compromised their religious sense of self. One of the reasons for this variety of responses to the question of religious accommodation is, as I ultimately suggest, that no official Lutheran policy developed on this issue in the course of the sixteenth century. Preoccupied, at least initially, with defining doctrine, articulating how their theology and forms of worship differed from Rome’s, and convincing their fellow Lutherans to believe unconditionally, sixteenth-century Lutheran theologians formulated little to no official guidance on their movement as a lived religion.

The ensuing reconstruction is in the first instance exploratory, raising questions rather than answering them, and prioritising evidence of how a motley group of Lutherans practised forms of accommodation over an intellectual history of these concepts. This approach is dictated in part by the fact that no response to Gerlach’s letter has survived, leaving historians today guessing what Lutheranism’s official position on these issues was as well as what kind of guidance chaplains like him may have received. But even if the response of Johannes Brenz the Younger—to whom Gerlach addressed his letter—were extant, it would still be fruitful, I contend, to approach late sixteenth-century Lutheranism not as an immutable set of beliefs and practices but as one that was defined and redefined in this very period, and that to some extent was always adapted and adaptable. The nature of the documentation on which my arguments are based is a case in point: while Gerlach’s letter for guidance bespeaks all the uncertainties that living in a foreign cultural-religious climate caused, his travelogue is silent on these issues. Published in 1674, almost a century after Gerlach’s residency in Istanbul, and heavily curated by his grandson, the Tage-Buch was supposed to inform readers about the perceived existential threat that the Ottomans posed to the Christian way of life as well as inspire in them a steadfastness in the faith that mirrored the piety of Gerlach—who, throughout his stay in Istanbul, as the preface intimated, was never tempted by Catholic superstitions.5 The published account of Gerlach’s residency was thus as much a seventeenth-century statement of Lutheran orthodoxy as it was a sixteenth-century reflection of his experiences.

Historians have turned to travelogues such as the ones examined here for the insights they offer into European conceptions of the Muslim other as well as into Ottoman–European encounters. Yet these documents also have a great deal to say about how European Christians engaged with Christians from the Middle East, and about how rivalries between different Protestant and Catholic groups played out in an Islamic society where none of these groups were in power and all of them together were considered a religious minority. This aspect of Gerlach’s story in particular is revealing for historians of early modern global Christianity and the Middle East: for Lutherans like him, as we will see in more detail below, life in the Ottoman Middle East was not just calibrated by interactions with Muslims. On the contrary: encounters with Christians of all confessions, but Catholics in particular, also shaped in profound ways how Lutherans of different professional stripes carved out a religious life for themselves in a foreign cultural-religious environment.6 Writing Lutherans back into our histories of religious identities in the early modern Mediterranean thus encourages us once more to think about how the early modern formation of distinct confessional identities and communities of believers—a process better known as confessionalisation—was not restricted to the heartlands of the Reformations but, as recent scholarship has also highlighted, a pan-Mediterranean and perhaps even Eurasian affair central to our understanding of the history of the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire.7

The article first describes the very particular Lutheran world in which Gerlach came of age, as well as the bi-confessional embassy that brought him to Istanbul. The next section focuses attention on how the vibrant world of Ottoman–European sociability enabled Gerlach to carry out the various tasks assigned to him. Yet I emphasise that sociability, although profitable, was often as functional as it was sincere and always determined by religious sympathies. The third part reveals that, for Gerlach, living in Istanbul raised all sorts of questions about the kind of behaviour that befitted his Lutheran sense of self. The final part sets Gerlach’s experiences against those of other Lutheran travellers to the early modern Middle East and highlights the great diversity of responses that Lutherans formulated to the questions posed by Gerlach in his letter.

I

The Lutheran world that Gerlach grew up in was one in crisis. Born in Knittlingen in 1546 and educated first in Stuttgart and Maulbronn and later at the University of Tübingen and Tübingen’s famous theological seminary, the Tübinger Stift, Gerlach had experienced at first hand the bitter controversies that beset Lutheranism in the second half of the sixteenth century. In the generation after Luther’s death in 1546, various Lutheran theologians had found themselves locked in debate over the nature and direction of their movement. Theological disagreements—mostly over the role of human will in salvation, the value of good works, what should be classed as adiaphora, and the burning issue of whether Christ was substantially present in the Eucharist—had created a deep rift between two opposing factions: the Philippists and the Gnesio-Lutherans. The latter claimed to uphold the one and only true form of Lutheranism—devoid of any outside influences, be they Catholic or Calvinist—and condemned any talk of syncretism, which had been the preferred position of the former, who seriously considered the possibility of reconciliation with other Reformed churches. What was at stake in these debates was whether or not accommodation with the beliefs of other denominations was acceptable. Only towards the end of the 1570s did both parties manage to resolve their internal disagreements, when they signed the Formula of Concord (1577), a document that was not so much a compromise as a precise articulation of Gnesio-Lutheran theology and an outright rejection of many standpoints of the Philippists.8

Tübingen emerged from this period as one of the most authoritative Gnesio-Lutheran strongholds. It is by now widely accepted that confessional borders even in the heartlands of the Reformation could remain surprisingly fluid. It has also been amply documented that Lutheran confessional culture retained several elements of medieval Catholic worship—such as Marian devotion and the devotional role of visual culture—despite the rejection of such intermediaries that its first theologians, following Luther, had advanced in their writings. Confessional coexistence was also common in various corners of the Holy Roman Empire.9 But the Tübingen that Gerlach knew, and where he was trained, promoted a Lutheranism that eschewed such fluidity. Historians of the Formula of Concord have singled out Jacob Andreae, a staunch defender of the Gnesio-Lutheran position and the then Chancellor of the University of Tübingen, as the Formula’s chief architect.10 His efforts to promote the Gnesio-Lutheran agenda were but one episode in a much longer story of Tübingen’s commitment to Luther’s message and legacy: following the introduction of the Reformation in Tübingen in 1534, Duke Ulrich of Württemberg had ordered a complete overhaul of the Duchy’s educational programme along Lutheran lines. Not only were faculty members unwilling to submit to the Lutheran creed ousted from Tübingen’s university, but the city’s former Augustinian monastery was also turned into a training ground for the army of Lutheran ministers thought necessary to inculcate Lutheran beliefs.11 Lutheranism in the 1570s may thus in some ways have been a broad church, but those in Tübingen believed they upheld the true form of Lutheranism.

Tübingen’s efforts to promote Lutheran orthodoxy also directly influenced Gerlach’s selection as embassy chaplain. It was Andreae who recommended Gerlach to David Ungnad von Sonnegg, the future Imperial ambassador, after the latter sent a letter to Tübingen asking whether someone suitable could be found there to become his chaplain. One of Andreae’s reasons for doing so was that he and others in Tübingen believed that Gerlach could not only bestow great honour upon the Duchy, but also bring Lutheran salvation to Christian captives. It was a wonder, Andreae emphasised in a letter, that they and not the Zwinglians could send a preacher to the Ottoman capital and spread God’s word among Christians living there.12 ‘God’, as Martin Crusius, Tübingen’s foremost professor of Greek, noted, ‘seems to have opened a window for the dissemination of his word’.13 Ungnad, too, had specified in his letter that he wanted his chaplain to preach Lutheran principles as laid out in the Augsburg Confession—though he also made it clear that the chaplain was under no circ*mstances to proselytise among Eastern Christians. These men, then, saw in Gerlach’s appointment an opportunity to gauge whether Lutheranism could take root in the Middle East and to determine whether Eastern Christians would be receptive to Luther’s message.

Gerlach’s appointment was indeed the unique opportunity that Tübingen wanted it to be. Ungnad was the first Lutheran ambassador that the Habsburg Court sent to Istanbul and Gerlach appears to have been the embassy’s first Lutheran chaplain. (Earlier ambassadors had all been Catholic and we know that a Franciscan friar from the Catholic community in Galata by the name of Giovanni Baptisa Zeffi had overseen their spiritual well-being at one point.)14 It is not immediately clear why at that particular moment the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II—nominally Catholic, but not unsympathetic to the reform movement—opted for a Lutheran and not a Catholic aristocrat to represent him at the Ottoman court. It is not unlikely, though, that the sudden upsurge in confessional violence in the 1570s played a role. The Habsburg court in Vienna had long been a place of religious moderation and a world where individuals of different confessional stripes promoted a via media of compromise and conciliation. Howard Louthan has suggested that the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, as well as other bouts of violence that year, fuelled Maximilian’s efforts to promote such irenicism at his court.15 In choosing Ungnad he may have intended his embassy to reflect the conciliatory court it represented. Indeed, it is probably no coincidence that in the 1580s, when Maximilian’s climate of compromise had given way to a regime that was less irenic in its leanings, the resident ambassador in Istanbul would once again be Catholic.

Gerlach’s tasks as chaplain were varied. Primarily employed to oversee the spiritual well-being of the embassy’s personnel, chaplains were usually tasked with delivering sermons several times a week and with administering the sacraments when needed. Gerlach would read from the Gospels on Sundays, while the Friday services were centred on the Book of Psalms and the singing of Lutheran hymns.16 Chaplains also attended to the small group of Lutheran captives that existed in the Ottoman Empire. Though ministers like Gerlach could use one of the communal rooms of the German House in Istanbul to hold their services, Lutherans frequently had to share their churches or religious spaces with Catholics, because there were no religious houses in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire dedicated exclusively to Lutheran worship.17 But accommodating each other’s expressions of worship, both while travelling and in Istanbul, was not always easy. Salomon Schweigger, the Lutheran chaplain who would succeed Gerlach in 1578, described in his travelogue how he, while en route to the Ottoman capital on a ship with both Catholics and Protestants, would read from the Bible and lead the Lutherans on board his ship in prayer; later in the century, however, when a staunch Catholic by the name of Bartholomäus Pezzen travelled to Istanbul as the new Imperial ambassador, he forced all on board, including the Lutherans, to attend Catholic Mass.18

Hardly anything in Gerlach’s early life had equipped him for these tasks. Not even 27 years of age, he was at the beginning of his career when in 1573 he accepted the position of chaplain.19 Tübingen’s university may have instructed Gerlach in the art of disputation and the correct reading of Scripture, and his diligent study of Latin and Greek may have helped him hone his linguistic skills, but when the request for a chaplain arrived in Tübingen he was just a young man with no experience as a minister. His ordination had not even taken place. Nor did Gerlach have a support system in Istanbul. As the only member of the embassy who was a cleric, the chaplain had no one with whom he could exchange ideas about what was permissible in carrying out their tasks. Indeed, people could come to him in moments of spiritual crisis, but no one could alleviate any of his spiritual concerns, should they arise. Here Gerlach’s situation differed markedly from Christians of other denominations who travelled abroad in a similar capacity. Jesuit missionaries often travelled in pairs and small groups and thus could confess to one another and discuss any potential conflict that their work created. In the colonial outposts that the Reformed Church established, along, for instance, the shorelines of the Indian Ocean, consistories were established to govern the various congregations and implement Calvinist policy on proper religious conduct.20 Lutherans were not able to establish such communities in the Ottoman capital. Hence it was without any formal training or a support system—but after having been ordained—that Gerlach on 9 April 1573 left Tübingen for Vienna, from where he travelled onwards to the Ottoman capital.

II

The religious landscape that Gerlach found in Istanbul was nothing like the Tübingen he knew. Not only Muslims, but also Jews and various Eastern Christian denominations called the early modern Ottoman Empire their home. These ethnic and religious minorities, though formally subject to the Sultan, maintained some measure of independence: Jews and Christians, as people of the book, were generally protected under Ottoman law and, in return for paying specific taxes, including the well-known poll tax, were permitted to regulate their own affairs, to practise their beliefs without major constraints, and sometimes to adjudicate in their own courts.21 Enslaved Christians from all over the Mediterranean also lived in and beyond Istanbul, as did, of course, the resident ambassadors from various European polities. Like other members of early modern European embassies, Gerlach, upon arrival, was immediately drawn into that religiously diverse environment and into a vibrant world of Ottoman–European sociability.

Early modern ambassadorial residences, which mirrored elite households of the period, offered numerous opportunities for social interaction with the empire’s various minority groups. Banquets and a range of ceremonial occasions brought members of the Ottoman elite and delegates of the different Eastern Churches to these residences. Europeans’ interests in gathering information attracted other Ottoman subjects, while Ottoman merchants visited the homes of European ambassadors for matters of business and trade. Beyond ambassadorial residences, Europeans encountered the rich variety of Istanbul’s social life in the moments when they, usually accompanied by a Janissary guard, attended court ceremonies, went hunting with their Muslim acquaintances, or went to see one of the city’s many sights.22

Life at the official residence of the Habsburg ambassador, the so-called German House, was no exception to this pattern. Following the peace treaty of 1547 that required the Holy Roman Emperor to pay an annual tribute to the Sultan, the Habsburg monarchs had dispatched a series of ambassadors to the Sublime Porte to reinforce Habsburg–Ottoman ceasefire agreements and prevent hostilities from erupting along their borders. The imperial ambassador’s official residence, a two-storey structure, was located close to the Topkapı Palace and the administrative heart of the Ottoman Empire. Not only the ambassador resided within this caravanserai but so did his exclusively male personnel—servants, valets, cooks, stable boys and the like—as well as members of his diplomatic staff such as secretaries, chaplains and dragomans. These men, as Robyn Radway has shown, managed to establish relationships with a great number of Ottoman subjects and memorialised them in their elaborate alba amicorum.23 Even the most cursory reading of Gerlach’s letters and his travel journal, the Tage-buch, reveals how profoundly the empire’s various ethnic and religious groups shaped his experiences: on one occasion, he witnessed the ceremonies following the meetings of the Ottoman imperial council, the divan, in the Topkapı Palace and made special mention of the grand vizier’s diligence in his work. On another, Gerlach became embroiled in a dispute about the Messiah in the house of Abraham Chaim, a Jewish furrier. In the house of Abraham’s brother, Gerlach witnessed a Jewish circumcision, which, as he explained, differed from the circumcision of a Muslim. At one point, he and the Russian ambassadors even compared the articles of the Augsburg Confession to the Russian Orthodox faith.24 Gerlach recalled seeing Spanish, Portuguese, Slovenian and Italian captives, and many others, including a group of Ethiopian prisoners of war. Numerous encounters comparable to these fill up the pages of Gerlach’s travel journal as well as the letters that he sent to Tübingen. Nearly all of these interlocutors were men; women Gerlach does not seem to have encountered in any substantial way, as was the case for so many early modern Europeans who ventured into Ottoman lands.25

Establishing relations with Greek Orthodox Christians was of particular importance to Gerlach. Not only did his work for Ungnad require him to do so, as the envoy had specified in his original description of the job, but Andreae and Crusius, who had been so optimistic about the possibilities for proselytising that Gerlach’s position offered, had also given the chaplain two letters addressed to the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, hoping that this venerable ecclesiastic would recognise the truth of the Lutheran movement and that a correspondence could be started about shared confessional practices. It was Gerlach’s task to deliver these letters as well as any that would follow. The chaplain did not disappoint: one of his first actions, so the Tage-buch tells us, was to obtain an audience with the Patriarch, and, although the correspondence with the Patriarch ultimately led to nothing, Gerlach still sent an estimated eighty-six letters back to Tübingen before he concluded his work as chaplain. No fewer than twenty of these were written by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, Jeremias II, and other members of the Patriarchate.26 Once Gerlach had established contact, he also continued to meet up with various members of the Greek Orthodox Church, several of whom signed his album amicorum.27 On July 11, 1575, for instance, Gerlach and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, sitting together on a carpet in the garden of the Patriarchate, were engaged in an animated discussion about transubstantiation and whether Christ had used unleavened bread at the Last Supper.28 Later, Gerlach attended the wedding of a Greek man from Galata who also acted as one of his regular translators. A Greek apothecary in Galata by the name of Antonio even accompanied Gerlach at some point on a trip to Anatolia. One might conclude, then, that his life in Istanbul was enriched by the same bonds of friendship that bound so many early modern European and Ottoman subjects together.

Yet face-to-face interactions such as these were never uncomplicated. Setting up and maintaining a network of informants required resources and inventiveness. Most of the relationships that Gerlach established with officials high up in the church came, quite literally, at a price. Not only did Gerlach complain perpetually about the Greeks’ avarice—he intimated at one point that Greeks did nothing free of charge—but he also frequently shared his frustrations about having to bribe them. One of his most important contacts at the Patriarchate, its official translator and exegetist Joannes Zygomalas, would, according to Gerlach, scorn any sum less than twenty thalers and had to be sent gifts all the time to win him over.29 He even suspected that Zygomalas did not fully trust him and for some reason tried to limit his influence on the Patriarch.30 Zygomalas, in turn, once confided in Gerlach that, on account of his interactions with the chaplain, other Greeks accused him of being a Lutheran. In other words, beneath the civilised veneer of Ottoman–European sociability there lurked a world rife with suspicion—and one in which not familiarity and friendship but bribes and gifts served as currency.

Religious sympathies determined social interactions as well. Gerlach may have met frequently with several members of the Patriarchate, but his overall impression of Greek Orthodox Christianity was far from favourable. In his first letters to Tübingen, he painted a rather bleak picture of what he had discovered about the Greeks and their religion: there were no proper Greek schools, he alleged, beyond the most elementary level. Orthodox Church officials were unlearned men with an inadequate command of the Greek language. Some of them even scorned ancient Greek. If priests celebrated Mass at all—which hardly any did—only a few listeners were able to understand what they were saying. ‘In terms of honesty in life’, he lamented, ‘they were little better than Turks’. In terms of doctrine they erred, and they had fallen into superstitious ways. His assessment did offer some room for optimism, though: the office and person of the Patriarch, who cared little for splendour and was a humane man, inspired in Gerlach a profound reverence. Excitement in Tübingen may have grown further upon hearing that Greek Orthodox Christians were not on friendly terms with the Pope and rejected some of the key doctrines of Catholicism: Greek Orthodox Christians, according to Gerlach, administered and received communion under both kinds and despised purgatory and the cult of saints. But ultimately Gerlach had to conclude that the state of the Greek church should be pitied.31 Greeks suffered from a ‘deplorable disease’ which could only be ‘healed’ by Lutheran medicine—an interpretation shared by other sixteenth-century Lutherans who sought to inform themselves about Greek Orthodox Christianity.32 It is difficult not to see in these harsh words evidence that Gerlach’s friendship with Greek Orthodox Christians was to some extent more functional than affective and that his beliefs profoundly shaped his estimation of the people he met.

Greek Orthodox views of Lutheranism were hardly more encouraging. In one report, sent at the end of 1575, Gerlach outlined what he had heard Greeks say about Lutheranism: Lutherans were innovators, people who departed from the canons of the apostles and the decrees of the (seven) ecumenical synods, and as such differed little from Roman Catholics. Lutherans, in the eyes of Greek Orthodox Christians, endeavoured to detract from the cult of the saints and from saying sermons in honour of the dead. Their position on the filioque controversy—the ancient question whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the father or from the father and the son—was indistinguishable from the Catholic one. In their liturgy, Lutherans used unleavened bread (azymus), a choice Greek Orthodox Christians strongly opposed and a major point of contention in the fifteenth-century discussions about reunion at the Council of Ferrara-Florence. Greek Orthodox Christians also objected to the ways in which Lutherans had stripped their Mass of ancient rites and their churches of images, against the decrees of the seven ecumenical councils. In sum, many were utterly convinced that ‘Lutherans did not believe in God, nor in Christ, that they lacked baptism and all the sacraments; and that they were beyond doubt a godless people’.33 No wonder that with such mutual dislike the correspondence between Tübingen and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch about religious practices had come to nothing.

In Gerlach’s case, then, as in those of other European envoys, the relationships that integrated him into the world of Ottoman–European sociability were at once sincere and functional. There is no doubt that even in moments when his boundless curiosity, the tasks entrusted to him, or necessity encouraged him to cultivate forms of friendship, genuine affection could trump pragmatism. But his experiences in Istanbul clearly also made him doubt the sincerity of the people he met. However intimate Gerlach’s relationships were, and however often he engaged with adherents to other faiths, in the end the picture that emerges when one reads Gerlach’s letters next to his travel journal is one in which the people he encounters, sometimes on a day-to-day basis, are never above suspicion. One reason for this is that for the young Lutheran that Gerlach was becoming, as we shall see in the next section, Istanbul’s social fabric raised all sorts of questions about his personhood and religious sense of self.

III

Life for Lutherans in the Ottoman Empire was not like that of other minorities. Predominantly there as travellers or members of an embassy, Lutherans either lived in the German House or on the road; there was no permanent Lutheran community. Their legal status was not determined by the same laws that governed the lives of Greek Orthodox Christians and other Eastern Christians but by the capitulations that they had negotiated. One could thus best see them as a minority among a minority among a minority—Lutherans among European Christians among Christians among Muslims. One of the consequences of this set of circ*mstances was that, unlike in most Lutheran towns and cities in the Holy Roman Empire, how to live a Lutheran life in early modern Istanbul was by no means self-evident. How, for instance, was one to worship? The letter with which I began this article is an extraordinary witness to this complex situation: of the nearly seventy letters that Gerlach wrote from Istanbul to Tübingen during his tenure as chaplain, this is the only one that explicitly asked his superiors for guidance. Most other letters offered detailed descriptions of Gerlach’s work on behalf of the Tübingen theologians and the ambassador, or reported on the correspondence with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch that Gerlach was supposed to facilitate. But this letter informed its readers in Tübingen—as well as historians today—about the questions concerning proper Lutheran behaviour that occupied him as he was going about his work. Indeed, numerous aspects of Gerlach’s personal and professional life in the Ottoman Empire led him to reflect on various aspects of Lutheranism as a lived religion and as a set of practices.

Burials offered one of the more conspicuous obstacles for Lutherans who, like Gerlach, found themselves in the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul at the time did not have its own Lutheran cemetery. Only in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were various Protestant groups living in the Ottoman empire assigned their own burial grounds.34 This meant that for any funeral services the Habsburg embassy had to rely on the city’s community of Franciscans, as happened in October 1573, shortly after their arrival in Istanbul, when the embassy’s Hungarian clockmaker died of an illness. Gerlach described how the friars placed the clockmaker’s body on a bier with two red pillows and laid a blanket on top before leading the procession to the cemetery designated for Hungarians. Chanting and long wax candles endowed the procession with the right amount of solemnity. Once the body had been interred, as Gerlach went on to describe, the Franciscans sang the Our Father—in Latin—and a few psalms, before sprinkling holy water on the grave. A toast completed the ceremony.35 Nothing in the passage suggests that Gerlach was troubled by any aspect of the service, but it can hardly be a coincidence that he sent his request for guidance on burials not long after this particular one. His most direct concern was to know whether his superior, the ambassador David Ungnad, had acted correctly by having the Franciscans lead the burial. Yet he also seemed to have thought about his own salvation: was he allowed, he added at the very end of his question, to be present at such burials?36

Gerlach also wondered whether it was permissible to be on familiar terms with Catholics. It was an encounter with a friendly Franciscan friar that had prompted this question. When the embassy’s secretary had fallen ill, a Franciscan had welcomed Gerlach and his colleague into his monastery. Gerlach described how this Catholic, even though he knew Gerlach to be of a different religion, was in all respects friendly and treated him with kindness. But the chaplain also wondered whether he could talk to this monk, with whom he had shared a table, in good conscience. It is possible that Gerlach feared that Lutheran Tübingen would consider being in the same room as Catholic monks verboten, let alone eating with them. After all, other people’s foodways and commensality with adherents of other beliefs were in some early modern contexts feared for the risks they posed to one’s faith.37 Indeed, Gerlach had himself seen how one of the embassy’s Croatian stable boys, after a night of heavy drinking with a group of Muslims, had drunkenly announced his intention to convert to Islam.38 Gerlach thus made sure to emphasise in his letter to Brenz that the whole time he was in the home of this Franciscan he ‘had not turned a blind eye to any Popish errors’, implying, of course, that in conversation he had worn his Lutheran heart on his sleeve. He also noted, perhaps in an attempt to play down the differences between himself and his host, that this friar had been punished for criticising the Pope.39 It is nevertheless evident that life in early modern Istanbul had made Gerlach wonder to what extent good character, kindness, hospitality and similar commendable qualities could trump religious conviction and allow Lutherans like him to engage their Catholic brothers in conversation and commensality.

Forging friendships with renegades inspired inquiries of a similar kind. In the summer of 1574 Gerlach had had an animated discussion with the infamous Adam Neuser about the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, which divided Protestant theologians in Heidelberg at the time.40 Some, following Luther, believed that Christ was literally and physically present in the Eucharist, while others advocated a more symbolical interpretation of this ritual. Neuser was a known anti-Trinitarian who had written a letter to Sultan Selim II declaring Islam to be superior to Christianity. Though the letter had never been sent, it had been found among Neuser’s possessions, forcing him to flee to Istanbul. He subsequently converted to Islam and lived the rest of his life working as a dragoman, facilitating the efforts of Europeans like Gerlach, and as an Ottoman spy.41 Not long after his discussion about the Lord’s Supper with Neuser had ended, Gerlach wondered in writing whether such conversation had been appropriate: Neuser, who actually did not appear to be a bad person, had openly admitted his mistakes to him and claimed to have gone to Istanbul, where he was simply a translator, solely because he was safe only there.42 Later Gerlach intimated to his superiors in Tübingen that Neuser would jump at any opportunity to return to the Lutheran fold and ‘laughed at Turkism as if it were some fictional story’.43 Neuser’s conversion may thus have confirmed Lutherans in believing him an apostate, but conversation with him also made Gerlach wonder whether Neuser’s apostasy should necessarily prohibit Gerlach from interacting with him.

Partaking in non-Lutheran forms of worship was another potential area of conflict. One of Gerlach’s questions was whether it was permissible in exceptional circ*mstances to accept communion under both kinds from a Roman Catholic monk. At stake here was what in the Catholic Church would come to be known as communicatio in sacris, the question whether under exceptional circ*mstances Christians were allowed to partake in the liturgy and the administration of the sacraments of other Christian denominations.44 Sixteenth-century Lutheranism did not develop any official policy on shared worship but, given its disapproval of accommodation to Catholic beliefs, it is possible that a Lutheran stronghold such as Tübingen would disapprove of such practices. Neither in the letters nor in his travelogue is there any evidence that Gerlach had received any of the sacraments from a Catholic. He had, however, taken communion in a Greek Orthodox Church one Sunday morning in September 1574.45 Thus only weeks before he wrote his letter to Tübingen and asked whether it was permissible to postpone his own Sunday sermon in order to enter a Greek Orthodox church and to learn more about Greek Orthodox rites and ceremonies, he did exactly that—and he took communion.46 Gerlach would, in fact, continue to visit Greek Orthodox churches long after he had sent his letter. One Sunday in June 1576, for instance, he entered what is now the Church of Saint Mary of the Mongols and was at the time one of the few old Byzantine churches that had not been turned into a mosque. There Gerlach observed two Greek monks performing funeral rites and preparing the dish that Greeks served in honour of the dead (koliva): ‘they consecrated various fruits through certain prayers and singing and much incense’ before ‘handing out these grapes, almonds, and the like’ as well as wine and bread ‘to those present in Church’. Yet, as Gerlach took care to note, he ‘had not heard that at the end of the service the people had been blessed’, as Lutheran pastors were supposed to do.47 Later that year he twice—both times on a Sunday in September—attended Mass in a Greek Orthodox church in Galata and feasted his eyes on the ceremony and the church’s decorations, including the paintings on the wall of various Greek saints and Church Fathers. The gilt binding of the New Testament, which also bore a wooden crucifix and which one of the Greek chaplains had brought to the pulpit to read from, captivated the chaplain in particular.48

Life in Istanbul made Gerlach reflect on his own appearance as well. Could he wear a Turkish turban in good conscience, he asked, so that he could visit mosques and learn about Islam?49 This was no innocent question. In early modern Istanbul, as elsewhere, dress governed interactions both formal and informal, established cultural hierarchies, and shaped day-to-day interactions between adherents of different faiths. Ottoman sumptuary regulations determined what the empire’s various populations were allowed to wear and required them to distinguish themselves from each other by their dress and headgear. Such prohibitions and obligations were put in place to ensure the strict separation between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, the so-called zimmis, and possibly to emphasise the lower social status of the latter. Though Europeans, when travelling, were sometimes permitted to dress as Muslims and carry arms to guarantee their safety, they generally had to follow the Ottoman sumptuary codes that sought to separate different religious groups.50 Donning a turban, moreover, could have salient implications in the Ottoman world: since conversion in the early modern Mediterranean required not solely an inward transformation but also a rigorous change in outward appearance, wearing a turban implied conversion to Islam in the eyes of some. While pronouncing the shahada was the only formal step required for conversion to Islam, converts frequently sought to perform their transformations by dressing up as an Ottoman Turk, sporting a turban, and throwing off their old clothes.51 Gerlach would witness at first hand how the Ottoman authorities had performed the religious conversion of a Frenchman by taking away his own clothes and hat and replacing them with those that befitted his new identity as a Muslim. ‘It often happens’, Gerlach specified in his Tage-Buch, that ‘when Spanish, French and Italians (Welschen), and Hungarians become Muslims, the Divan immediately gives them new clothes’.52 He also knew of a Christian captive whom certain Muslims tricked into converting to Islam by having him dress up as a Muslim and pronounce the shahada.53 Thus, when Gerlach requested permission to wear a Turkish turban, he was essentially asking whether it was possible to exchange the clothes that marked him as a Lutheran for a Turkish outfit without compromising his religious conscience.

It is unlikely that Gerlach ever wore a turban. Nowhere in his travelogue or in any of his surviving letters does he mention doing so. Since Gerlach’s travel journal, like so many of the period, brims with descriptions of people’s appearances, one would expect him to have mentioned his turban had he ever worn or owned one.54 His Tage-Buch does reveal that he had ‘two splendid costumes’ at his disposal, given to him in Vienna before the embassy’s departure, because the ambassador ‘wanted all of his servants to dress as Hungarians (auf Ungarisch)’. One costume was that of a priest and ‘consisted of two robes that reached down to [Gerlach’s] shoes’. He was supposed to close the inner robe, ‘made of washed cloth’, with ‘a Turkish belt’. The outer one ‘was made of expensive cloth’ that had been ‘lined with purple fur at the front’; the costume ‘included two hats of the same colour’. Gerlach was instructed ‘to wear a small velvet bonnet that doctors wear and on top of it another velvet cap’. The second costume was ‘secular’ (Weltlich) and was made of ‘a long cloak with shaggy purple fur sewn in at the front and underneath a shirt with hose made the same way’.55 These different costumes, although they did not include a turban, did allow Gerlach, as Martin Kriebel first noted, to dress either as a layman or as a cleric, and thus to adapt his appearance to what the situation required.56

In sum: Gerlach clearly experienced a type of alienation while residing in the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul, where necessity forced Lutherans to cultivate contact with people whose religious beliefs they did not share or fervently hoped to change, was not Tübingen. But it was not those hotly debated matters of doctrine that had divided Christians for decades—and sometimes for centuries—that occupied Gerlach as he sought to find his way through the world of Ottoman–European sociability. It was, rather, questions of lived religion that dominated his request for guidance: aspects of daily life that were self-evident or at least easily recognisable at home—worship, burials, communion—were evidently anything but in the Ottoman Empire. He and others, whether by necessity or choice, could no longer simply dismiss Catholics as adherents to wicked beliefs and practitioners of damnable rituals. Not only the bi-confessional nature of the imperial embassies but also various day-to-day affairs required Lutherans to adopt a more subtle form of engagement with their Catholic brothers. His chaplaincy thus required, perhaps not clearly defined forms of accommodation and conformity, but at the very least serious thinking about what kind of behaviour befitted Lutherans who were eking out a living in a foreign cultural-religious environment. Gerlach had to realign his cultural and religious horizons continually as he sought to maintain his Lutheran beliefs.

It is in that sense important to remember that we cannot always take whatever Lutherans like Gerlach wrote in their published travelogues at face value. The Tage-Buch presents an altogether different Gerlach from his letter to Tübingen: the latter shows all his anxieties as he carved out a life for himself in Ottoman Istanbul, whereas in the travelogue these doubts are absent. It is tempting to consider this silence the result of the editorial interventions of Gerlach’s grandson, Samuel Gerlach, who brought the book to print in the late seventeenth century—a period in which Lutheran theologians were once more divided over whether reconciliation with other Christian denominations was the right way forward.57 None of these theological debates appear to have had a direct influence on the composition of the Tage-Buch, but the preface by Tobias Wagner, a professor of Theology and the then chancellor of the University of Tübingen, did praise Gerlach for not letting Catholic superstitions and idolatry pollute his experiences in Istanbul.58 It is not unlikely that the doubts about interaction with Catholics which Gerlach voiced in his letter to Brenz would not have combined well with Wagner’s appraisal of Gerlach’s unshakeable beliefs. Yet it is also possible that none of Gerlach’s doubts were ever part of his travelogue in the first place: the moments when Gerlach took communion in a Greek Orthodox Church or described how Franciscans led the burial of a Lutheran clockmaker did appear, after all, in the 1674 edition, possibly because his seventeenth-century editors saw no harm in such behaviour. The Gerlach who emerges from the book is thus ultimately one who can be read both as a staunch defender of the Lutheran cause and as one who did not shun interaction with people of other beliefs.

It is also important to keep in mind that Gerlach’s letter could be as performative as his printed travelogue. Sharing his anxieties may simply have been an attempt to maintain his reputation back home and to show his superiors in Tübingen that he had remained Lutheran at heart—even, or especially, during encounters with other people’s beliefs. Captives often deployed this tactic in the narratives that they spun about their lives in captivity and about the moments when they claimed they had to convert.59 So did Jesuits: their missionary work was highly performative and often conformed to a specific cultural script that emphasised steadfastness in the faith and was based on a particular type of missionary masculinity.60 Some travellers, too, as we will see in the next section, frequently professed their confessional stripes when confronted with those of others. Such may have also been the expectations that Gerlach felt he had to fulfil when writing to Tübingen. Perhaps the best way to read the letter and the travelogue, then, is to see them as part of a complex and continuous process in which Gerlach sought to articulate and adhere to what was deemed—but not always clearly demarcated as—proper Lutheran behaviour. Living a Lutheran life in early modern Istanbul was an experiment in which confessional sympathies were produced as much as they were performed and in which people like Gerlach had to deduce from lived experience whether something was appropriate, all the while making sure that they gave no one any reason to doubt the sincerity of their beliefs.

IV

No other document reveals—to my knowledge—as much about the anxieties that entering a foreign cultural and religious environment provoked in young Lutherans as Gerlach’s letter. It is nevertheless clear that these issues mattered not only to chaplains. Protestant students studying for a degree at the renowned University of Padua had to organise their religious life in a world where they were technically not allowed to be openly Protestant. Matriculation, for instance, required them to swear a declaration of Catholic faith that especially members of the German Nation vehemently opposed.61 Protestant merchants trading in various Mediterranean port cities must have reflected on the problems that came with being buried abroad or with day-to-day worship. Some of those, for instance, who lodged for long periods of time in Venice’s Fondaco dei Tedeschi had arranged for an altar at which they could hold services.62 For the great number of early modern Protestant pilgrims who travelled to Jerusalem, Gerlach’s questions were perhaps most relevant. How could they keep a clear conscience and adhere to their beliefs while visiting the sites of the Holy Land where the Franciscans were the official custodians? Tracing how Gerlach’s fellow Lutherans grappled with these and other questions of lived religion shows the wide variety of Lutheran experiences far away from the home of their movement. Though their responses to questions of accommodation overlapped in some cases, it is, I argue, this diversity that is most revealing.

Encounters with relics elicited different responses in different Lutherans. The Catholic aristocrat Adam von Dietrichstein, who served Maximilian II as a diplomat and in several other capacities and also amassed an important collection of relics, once sent Ungnad a request that he purchase the body of Salome, an early Christian martyr, which was kept at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. Gerlach, whom Ungnad contacted about the matter, advised him to refuse, since complying with this request might upset other Lutherans. The ambassador agreed, being concerned that the Patriarch might even believe that he ‘had wanted this body out of some strange longing’—a clear sexual innuendo that a Lutheran like Ungnad wanted to avoid at all costs. He also believed that any association with such a relic would make him suspect in the eyes of both Lutherans and Catholics.63 Other Lutherans, though, had no qualms whatsoever about collecting relics: the maverick Lutheran traveller and diplomat Albrecht von Löwenstein unashamedly chipped some stone off Christ’s grave on his travels in the 1560s, as many had done before him.64 Influenced by the antiquarian zeal that infused sixteenth-century Protestant pilgrimage, the apothecary Reinhold Lubenau, who travelled in the Middle East sometime between 1573 and 1589, even accepted relics as payment from the various Jerusalem pilgrims whom he was asked to treat.65 Thus, whereas Lutherans such as Gerlach and Ungnad sought to avoid any association with relics, this was less problematic for other Lutheran travellers of the period.

Visiting the Holy Sepulchre was perhaps one of the most tendentious affairs for Lutherans. The problem here, as in other cases, was interaction with Catholics and their ceremonies. The Franciscan custodians asked pilgrims who wanted to see the church to take communion—and frequently, according to Lutheran accounts, abused this privilege.66 For more than a few Protestants, partaking in this Catholic ceremony was completely impossible. One particularly illuminating account of the kind of Protestant–Catholic encounters the Holy Sepulchre produced can be found in the travelogue of Hieronymus Scheidt, an otherwise unknown soldier from Erfurt who travelled to Jerusalem in 1614. When the custodians welcomed him, they were surprised to hear that he had travelled to the Holy Land all by himself. They then discovered that Scheidt, since he was unable to pay his hosts the customary reverence and partake in their ceremonies, was not a Catholic. They asked him what had brought him to Jerusalem: was he there to visit the Holy Sepulchre and other sacred places or was he just passing through? It had happened, after all, that people ‘pretending to be good Christians’ had actually ‘scorned and derided’ the sacred places they were shown. Scheidt reassured them that, although he had been born and raised a Lutheran, he would behave respectfully. He also presented the custodian with a letter of recommendation. Next thing he knew Scheidt found himself in a room with two English pilgrims, one of whom was a Calvinist who suggested the three men should hire a Greek to show them the sights, if the superintendent would not grant them passage. They were then told by a monk from Amsterdam that they ought to thank God for bringing them safe and sound to Jerusalem by reconciling themselves with God—which I take to mean conversion—confessing, and taking communion. This Scheidt simply would not do: he requested a private audience with the monk and decided to tell what he calls a white lie (Nothlüge): he claimed to be travelling in the service of a young prince who was desirous of seeing the Holy Land but feared the journey because in order to see the sights he would have to renounce his faith (verleugnen). Scheidt had agreed to go in his stead and promised to keep his conscience clear (unverletztes Gewissens) by not taking communion with Catholics. Promptly the monk apologised—for he had not wanted to force Scheidt to accept his Catholic beliefs—and treated him with respect and kindness. In the end, Scheidt even joined the monks for a communal dinner.67 Nowhere in the travelogue does he admit to having had any qualms about telling this lie or about sharing a meal with a Catholic. On the contrary: it appears that for Scheidt simulation was perfectly acceptable, while partaking in Catholic ceremonies was anything but. The fact that his interlocutor was a Catholic may also have made telling such a lie less problematic.

Bribing was another tactic that Lutherans adopted to avoid certain Catholic ceremonies. More than a few Lutheran pilgrims to Jerusalem were eager to participate in the knighting ceremony of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. This was considered a great honour, even for noblemen, and meant taking a pledge to defend Christ’s tomb. But it also involved a ceremony in which those to be knighted swore allegiance to the Pope, confessed to a priest, and took communion in the Catholic way. Much like taking communion to enter the Holy Sepulchre, this was something Protestants appear to have wanted to avoid: several Lutherans who were asked to be knighted in the sixteenth century but refused to receive communion bribed the Franciscan custodian in charge, so that they were exempted from participation in the ceremonies while still receiving the honour.68 Nowhere in the sources do these people appear to have been troubled by this practice. Indeed, it is possible they may have preferred simulation to accommodation to Catholic rites.

But for others such simulation did not come as easily. The aforementioned Salomon Schweigger and his party, upon arriving in Jerusalem, were urged by the Franciscan custodians of the Holy Sepulchre to receive communion from a Catholic priest. All agreed that this had to be avoided at all costs. Schweigger’s (perhaps optimistic) suggestion that they simply tell the Franciscans that as adherents to the Evangelical creed they differed from Catholics in their religion met with little approval. Neither was another solution—to announce themselves to the local sanjak-bey with their papers and to request direct permission from him to see the Holy Sepulchre—accepted. Eventually they decided to use a ruse that had worked for other Lutherans earlier in the century: Adam von Schlieben of Tammendorf, the Silesian nobleman with whom Schweigger was travelling, suggested that they tell the custodians they had been required to undertake this pilgrimage to do penance for having committed murder and that, consequently, they were not allowed to partake in communion before their pilgrimage had been completed. This was what they ended up doing, despite objections raised by Schweigger, who thought this reeked of dissimulation.69

Strict adherence to one’s beliefs did not always preclude sociability with peoples of other faiths. Gerlach’s encounter with a friendly Franciscan friar is a case in point, despite the questions about cross-confessional contact that it provoked in him. The experiences of Lukas Friedrich Behaim, who signed the Franciscans’ guestbook in 1611, are equally revealing: this Lutheran magistrate from Nuremberg boasted in a letter to his father that while in Jerusalem he had not received communion and had not gone to confession. Indeed, the testimonial that he received was not very useful in Italy, he later revealed, because it did not mention that he had taken part in these ceremonies. Behaim’s steadfast belief had in fact, when he was in Bethlehem, helped him resist the effort of a Spanish monk to convert him. Yet throughout his writings Behaim also stressed the amicable relationships that he built with some of his Catholic hosts and even mentioned the relics he received from them.70 For this Lutheran, then, as for some other individuals who straddled the cultural and religious worlds of the Ottoman Empire, sociability with adherents of other beliefs was not as problematic as it was for Gerlach.71

Sometimes it was also possible to relegate participation in Catholic ceremonies or interaction with Catholics to the realm of indifferent things and customs that were not necessary for salvation (adiaphora). Schweigger came to this conclusion when he reflected on those Lutheran noblemen who wanted to be knighted at the Holy Sepulchre.72 Ungnad interpreted attending Roman Catholic Mass in a similar vein: the ambassador once told Gerlach that Melanchthon, whose table in Wittenberg Ungnad had shared, believed that it was permitted to attend a Catholic service. ‘Faith’, the famous reformer told the future ambassador, ‘is in the heart, not in external gestures and actions’.73 But in separating their interior beliefs from their outward performance, Ungnad and Schweigger steered a course within in the Lutheran Church that was not uncontroversial: in the so-called adiaphorist controversy (1548–52) that erupted after Luther’s death, Lutheran hardliners, including Matthias Flacius Illyricus, the chief architect of the Magdeburg Centuries, had opposed Melanchthon and his followers, who believed that adherence to some ceremonies—including, for instance, confirmation and anointment with oil—was to be condoned since it did not jeopardise justification. Though the official Lutheran position on adiaphora, as set out in the Formula of Concord that Andreae helped craft, would come to be a compromise, it is likely that not everyone in Tübingen, where—as we have seen—Lutheran hardliners won out, would have looked kindly on Ungnad’s adoption of Melanchthon’s views.74

Practicalities sometimes trumped convictions as well. The Lutheran traveller Hans Ulrich Krafft, who travelled through the Levant in the 1570s, described in his travelogue how he had initially prevented a Catholic priest from administering the last rites to one of his travel companions, a man by the name of Lutz, who had fallen ill. But when Lutz died, Krafft not only had to allow a Catholic to administer extreme unction so that his friend could be buried properly, but also to permit local Catholic clerics to lead the funeral service. Krafft described how he first sang a prayer in German while the others brought the body to the cemetery and, later, when he was back in church and when a Catholic priest was saying Mass, sat down in the corner of the church and read in his prayer book.75 Lutherans like Gerlach and Krafft may not have liked Catholics to oversee the funerals of their deceased co-religionists, but they had little choice: in a world where they were a minority among a minority among a minority, there was no alternative. And, evidently, any burial, even one led by a Catholic, was preferable to not being able to bury the dead at all.

Dress could also be ambivalent. Though Gerlach knew that one’s appearance and confessional beliefs were profoundly connected, wearing a turban did not imply conversion to Islam in all situations. Throughout the early modern period zimmis were known to have worn turbans. Several contemporary observers recorded that Jews could wear a yellow turban while Armenians and various Christian groups could be recognised by their blue ones. Muslims were the only group permitted to wear white turbans—a privilege that emphasised their superior social position. (It is therefore all the more unfortunate that Gerlach did not specify what kind of turban he was talking about. Was it any given turban or did a ‘Turkish turban’ (pileum Turcicum) imply a white one?) European travellers also frequently dressed as Muslims—wearing a tufted turban or caftan—for safety on the road. The physician and botanist Leonhard Rauwolf, for instance, who travelled through the Middle East between 1573 and 1575, dressed as a local while travelling. Indeed, the long blue kaftan, buttoned down on the front and cut out around the neck, the yellow shoes, blue turban and Ottoman overcoat, a Meska, that Rauwolf and his travel companion wore—and which he described in his travelogue—made them blend in to such an extent that they no longer recognised each other in their new clothes.76 Some Europeans evidently opted for Ottoman dress because they knew that in order to observe the Ottoman Empire in all its glory and richness—or simply to escape unwelcome attention—exchanging one’s Western dress for a local one could be worth their while. None of the authors considered here seems to have been troubled by this.

Comparing Lutheran travelogues from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries thus highlights the great diversity of Lutheran responses to issues of accommodation. Further research on the Lutheran experience in the Middle East—which is still in its infancy—might yield even more insights into how Lutherans grappled with these issues. Yet, as in the case of Gerlach’s letters and Tage-buch—and early modern travel literature more broadly—the travel journals discussed here were also on some level performative and their authors had to negotiate the expectations of their readers even as they reflected on what in the Ottoman Empire was permissible and possible without compromising their religious sense of self.

V

Gerlach’s letter for guidance opens a window on aspects of early modern Lutheranism that few other sources from the period, if any, discuss explicitly and which for this reason have not received systematic treatment from historians. It reveals, first and foremost, that religious accommodation was clearly on the minds of some Lutherans who found themselves in a foreign cultural-religious environment, even if no official policy on this issue developed in the Lutheran world. Comparing Gerlach’s experiences to those of others also tells us much about the great range of solutions that Lutherans adopted for such questions. One obvious reason for this variety is that my sample has included a motley mix of individuals. Gerlach and Schweigger were ministers; Behaim a magistrate; Lubenau an apothecary; Rauwolf a botanist; Scheidt a soldier; and several others were noblemen. These different backgrounds mattered: what noblemen believed they were allowed to do was perhaps considered impermissible for ministers. Maybe it is true, too, that, while chaplains sought to embody a more rigorous set of beliefs, laypeople tended to favour pragmatism over theological purity and doctrinal consistency—as we know was the case for other contexts in which Lutherans engaged with people with different faiths.77 It is therefore tempting to resist the urge to draw any general conclusions from the individual cases discussed here and, instead, to emphasise, as I have done, that Lutheran responses to these issues were often makeshift and idiosyncratic, generated by what changing circ*mstances required and allowed for.

And yet, I would like to suggest that one other possible reason for this variety of responses is that no official Lutheran guidance existed on these issues. Several generations of historians have taught us what Calvin thought about Nicodemism; what strategies of accommodation Catholic missionaries adopted while converting souls; and what forms of non-conformity developed in early modern England.78 But no such literature exists on the Lutheran context. Indeed, not a single Lutheran document from the sixteenth century treats these topics—to the best of my knowledge—in any depth. Neither in the Augsburg Confession, nor in the Formula of Concord or the Book of Concord, to name the three most important sixteenth-century expressions of the Lutheran faith, could individuals like Gerlach find any guidance on how to be Lutheran in a cultural-religious climate different from their own. No comparable document from Tübingen and Württemberg—such as the Confessio Virtembergica of 1552 or the Große Kirchenordnung of 1559—discusses these issues. No sixteenth-century Lutheran treatises on simulation or dissimulation have survived, nor on notions of accommodation and non-conformity.79 The numerous so-called Türckenbüchlein, pamphlets about the Ottoman Turks, which emerged in German-speaking lands in exactly this period, portrayed the Ottoman Turks as a scourge of God and as ravenous Muslims bent on the complete annihilation of the Christian faith, but offered little practical advice on how one ought to interact with the different peoples of the Ottoman Empire in the first place—the same being true for Lutheran sermons on the Ottomans.80 Even Luther’s celebrated Table Talk, which in some ways taught people how to be good Lutherans, did not give any explicit instruction on what good Lutheran behaviour entailed.

Why was there such a lack of guidance? One possibility is that in the turbulent decades after Luther’s death Lutheran theologians devoted their efforts to defining doctrine rather than explaining their movement as a lived religion. It is also possible that the Lutheran insistence that faith was a divine gift and not a human achievement played a part. One of the great paradoxes of this story is thus that, although Lutheranism in the 1570s was forced to confront the issue of doctrinal accommodation, no policy on accommodation as a set of practices was formulated. Ironically, this meant that, while what Lutherans were and were not supposed to believe was being patrolled and defined with ever greater precision, individuals such as Gerlach found themselves in situations in which they had a certain amount of leeway in how they could act out their beliefs. Indeed, it should not surprise us that, in the absence of any official policy on these matters, Lutherans differed so much in their attitudes to the issue of religious accommodation. And no wonder that Gerlach, towards the end of his stay, would instruct his successor, Schweigger, about the vagaries and contingencies of diplomatic life in Istanbul and about interaction with the different people from the Ottoman Empire: how else was this young man—who, like Gerlach, had come from Tübingen to work as a minister in the Ottoman Empire—supposed to know what to do and how to act?81

Seen in this light, Gerlach’s letter acts as a powerful reminder that to understand Lutheranism in its full diversity we need to examine its manifestations in different parts of the world. For what necessity dictated in Istanbul and other places in the Ottoman Empire was perhaps not self-evident in parts of the Holy Roman Empire, like Tübingen, where Lutheran hardliners reigned supreme. What was taken for granted in the world where the Lutheran movement originated required serious reflection in parts of the world where this Christian way of life would not take root. No wonder that questions about Lutheranism as a set of practices and types of behaviour arose especially in situations where Lutherans were forced to interact on a daily basis with adherents of different religions and denominations, where they hardly had any religious houses or burial grounds of their own, and in which they were a minority among a minority among a minority. So even though it is difficult—perhaps impossible—to gauge from the surviving source material exactly how profoundly the debates between the Philippists and the Gnesio-Lutherans about their movement shaped Gerlach’s sense of religious belonging, it is beyond doubt that this transitional moment in the history of Lutheranism looks very different when viewed through the eyes of Gerlach and other Lutherans who had business in the Ottoman Middle East.

One final point that emerges from exploring the Lutheran experience in the early modern Ottoman Empire is that for these Lutherans encounters with fellow Christians were as fraught with meaning as those with other religious others. Much has been written about the role of the Ottoman Turks in the Lutheran imagination, and about the ways in which Türkenbüchlein impacted life and religion in the Holy Roman Empire. Gerlach, too, as can be gauged from his Tage-Buch, had numerous interactions with Muslims, and some of these raised questions about his religious sense of self. And, of course, there was always the risk that some Lutherans who lived their life in the Ottoman Empire would be lured by the attraction of conversion to Islam, as Gerlach had seen with his own eyes. But it was evidently the interactions with Catholics, and to a lesser extent those with Greek Orthodox Christians and other Eastern Christians, that inflected Gerlach’s experiences in more profound ways. The questions that were on his mind as he sat down to write that letter asking for guidance were nearly all about interactions with other Christian minorities in an Islamic society. If the early modern Ottoman Empire was thus a borderland, frontier, or contact zone—to mention but three conceptual frameworks that historians have used to understand this world—it was, for Lutherans like Gerlach, one in which the encounter with Catholics appears to have been the most consequential. The Ottoman Empire was in that sense yet another space where Lutherans were confronted with the issues that they also faced in bi-confessional towns in the Holy Roman Empire and in situations where interactions with Catholics were necessary and led to forms of coexistence. European confessionalisation, as Gerlach’s story reminds us once more, played out beyond the borders of Christian Europe. And Gerlach’s worries can thus help us reimagine the early modern Ottoman Empire as an important site in which Lutheran belief and behaviour developed not only through a clash with Islam but also through conflict and contact with other Christians.

*

I would like to thank Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, Tobias Graf, Anthony Grafton, Sundar Henny, Robyn Radway, Karie Schultz, (online) audiences in Amsterdam, Cambridge, Fiesole, London, Oxford, Trento and Tübingen, and the anonymous reviewers for their astute suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this article.

1.

‘ii. Ad Doct. Ioan. Brentium. Quaestiones. 1. Turcae sint ne pro Ethnicis habendi, an pro semichristianis. Ab Erasmo enim alicubi negari, Ethnicos esse: cùm idola, et plures Deos, non adorent. Semichristianos appellari, quia ipsorum religio, ex veteri et novo Testamento compilata sit: et Christuum pro summo Propheta, et ad dextram Dei sedente, habeant: omnes Prophetas veteris Testamenti, et plerasque historias sacras agnoscant. 2. cùm eis persuasissimum sit, totum Alcoranum ab Angelo Gabriele ad Mahometem, ultimum Prophetam, ex ore Dei allatum esse: quomodo ipsis persuadendum sit, Alcoranum non esse verbum Dei: et totam ipsorum fidem esse commentum hominum. 3. An preces mensae, propter Turcas praesentes, intermitti possint: quia magis Barbari interdum obmurmurent, bibant, nostrum morem reprehendant. Dominus Ungnadius, valde Zelotes, ne contentio oriatur, eas intermitti voluit. Sunt autem interdum nobis liberaliter tractandi. 4. An quis bona conscientia pileum Turcicum gerere possit: quò ipsorum templa, et sacra, et alia visu dignissima, inspicere possit. 5. An aliquis, urgente necessitate, possit coenam sub utraque specie à monacho accipere, si Minister Evangelicus non adsit. Monachi enim nostri, petenti, sub utraque specie exhibent, secretò tum: ne vulgus resciscat, quod hic docendi et credendi regulam fert. 6. An cum monacho, nostri omnem benevolentiam exhibente, familiariter, aut humaniter, conversari liceat, sine tum professionis et conscientiae meae periculo: licet alius offendi possit, quasi cum illo colludam. Occasionem huic quaestioni, monachus, patria Chios, sed in Italia institutus, ordinis Franciscani, dedit: qui humanissimus est, etsi sciat, nos diversae Religionis esse. Solus inter monachos, hic quadragesimali tempore concionatur. Interdum a suis punitus, quia errores quosdam papatus reprehendisset. Habitat solus cum ministro, in parvo monasterio: quod in amoeno loco urbis Galatae, transsitum Propontidis, situm est. Aegrotans Caes. M. Secretarius, in id monasterium translatus fuit: et ego ei, tamque singulis momentis obviam efflaturo, additus fui. Ab eo tempore, cùm eadem mensa cum eo uti mihi necesse fuisset, aliquoties dominum meum invisit, me in cubiculo accedit, nos hospites liberaliter tractat. Ego autem non conniveo ad errores Pontificios. Idem de Adamo Neusero quaerendum: quia non videtur malus, sed apertus: confitens suum errorem: sed, quia nusquam totus esset, se huc venisse ait. Discit tùm linguam Turcicam, nullum verbum de Religione facians: se interpretem linguae fore, à Passa promissionem accepit. 7. An Dominus meus rectè faciat: quia funera nostrorum hic à monachis deduci patitur, cum moris sit, accensis cereis, Latinis precibus (in quibus nihil erroris) cantatis, aut demurmuratis. Patitur hoc fieri, ne Catholicos Christianos ibi offendat: ne Iudaei item, et Turcae, nostris dissidiis gaudeant. Item, an ego tali funerationi interesse possim. 8. An concionem Diei Dominici, in alium diem differre possim: quo sacra et ceremonias Graecorum inspicere possim. 9. An deficiente scriba, aut in multitudine negotiorum non sufficiente, politica scribere possim: cùm id sine intermissione studii sacri non possim. Datae Constantinopoli 1. Octob. 74. D.V.R. addictiss. Disc. M. Steph. Gerlachus, Oratoris Caesari ad Portam Ottomanicam indignus verbi minister’: Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen [hereafter UBT], Mh 466, vol. 1, fo. 28. This is the version that Martin Crusius, Tübingen’s professor of Greek, copied into his notebooks. The original has not survived. Gerlach’s letters are currently kept in Gotha; see C. Gastgeber, ‘Ioannes und Theodosios Zygomalas, Stephan Gerlach, Martin Crusius: Der Sammelcodex Chart. A 386 der Forschungsbibliothek Gotha zwischen Konstantinopel und Tübingen’, in S. Perentidis and G. Steiris, eds, Ιωάννης και Θεοδόσιος Ζυγομαλάς. Πατριαρχείο, θεσμοί, χειρόγραφα [Iōannēs kai Theodosios Zygomalas: patriarcheio, thesmoi, cheirographa] (Athens, 2009), pp. 39–124.

2.

For two recent studies of early modern global Protestantism, see C.H. Parker, Global Calvinism: Conversion and Commerce in the Dutch Empire, 1600–1800 (New Haven, CT, 2022), and the articles collected in U. Rublack, ed., Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformations (Cambridge, 2020). For an excellent Catholic case-study, see E. Rowe, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism (Cambridge, 2019). For exceptional work on early Lutheran experiences abroad, see the work of Alexander Schunka cited below.

3.

Examples include S. Kennerley, Rome and the Maronites in the Renaissance and the Reformation: The Formation of Religious Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean (London, 2022); L. Parker, ‘The Ambiguities of Belief and Belonging: Catholicism and the Church of the East in the Sixteenth Century’, English Historical Review, cxxxiii (2018), pp. 1420–45; B. Heyberger, Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique: Syrie, Liban, Palestine, XVII^e–XVIII^esiècles (Rome, 1994). For an overview of the Pietist movement, see D.J. Brunner, Halle Pietists in England (Göttingen, 1993), and D.H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD, 2013).

4.

On accommodation in early modern Catholicism, see S. Tutino, ‘Jesuit Accommodation, Dissimulation, Mental Reservation’, in I.G. Županov, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits (Oxford, 2019), pp. 216–32; N. Amsler, A. Badea, B. Heyberger and C. Windler, eds, Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia: Patterns of Localization (London, 2019); N. Amsler, Jesuits and Matriarchs: Domestic Worship in Early Modern China (Seattle, WA, 2018), pp. 13–31; R. Po-chia Hsia, ‘From Buddhist Garb to Literati Silk: Costume and Identity of the Jesuit Missionary’, in J.P. Paiva, ed., Religious Ceremonials and Images: Power and Social Meaning (1400–1750) (Coimbra, 2002), pp. 143–52. For accommodatio in comparative perspective, see A. Chakravarti, The Empire of Apostles: Religion, accommodatio, and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India (New Delhi, 2018).

5.

Stephan Gerlach, Stephan Gerlachs deß Aeltern Tage-Buch (Frankfurt, 1674), unpaginated preface. See also A. Schunka, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung der Osmanen: Protestantische Orientreiseberichte des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitsprünge, xvi (2012), pp. 8–46, at 17–19.

6.

For a similar argument about Anglican engagement with the non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Sultan, see E.J. Holmberg, British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities in the Early Seventeenth Century: ‘Slaves’ of the Sultan (Basingstoke, 2022).

7.

For the most recent effort to gauge the heuristic potential of the confessionalisation paradigm for the Ottoman context, see T. Krstić’s survey and the other essays collected in T. Krstić and D. Terzioğlu, eds, Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community-Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–18th Centuries (Piscataway, NJ, 2022). See also T. Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA, 2011); Schunka, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung der Osmanen’, and L. Brouwer, ‘“Man Sihet Guts und Boß/ Tugend und Laster Mehr Dann Daheim”: German Lutheran Interest in the Ottoman Empire as Reflected in the Life and Works of Salomon Schweigger (1551–1622)’ (Univ. of Kent and Freie Univ. Berlin Ph.D. diss., 2020). I would like to thank Lottie Brouwer for generously sharing her unpublished work with me.

8.

For a short overview of these events, see B. Nischan, ‘Germany after 1550’, in A. Pettegree, ed., The Reformation World (London, 2000), pp. 387–409.

9.

For Marian devotion, see B. Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge, 2007). On Lutheran visual culture, see J.L. Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago, IL, 2004), and R. Watson, The Beauty of Belief: Decorating the Württemberg Church during the Reformation (Leiden), forthcoming. For two recent studies of multiconfessionalism and confessional coexistence in the Holy Roman Empire, see D.M. Luebke, Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia (Charlottesville, VA, 2017), and M. Christ, Biographies of a Reformation: Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, c.1520–1635 (Oxford, 2021).

10.

On Andreae’s role in drafting the Formula of Concord, see R. Kolb, Andreae and the Formula of Concord: Six Sermons on the Way to Lutheran Unity (St Louis, MO, 1977), and id., Die Konkordienformel: Eine Einführung in ihre Geschichte und Theologie (Göttingen, 2011).

11.

On Tübingen and its university during the Reformation, see C. Methuen, ‘Securing the Reformation Through Education: The Duke’s Scholarship System of Sixteenth-Century Württemberg’, Sixteenth Century Journal, xxv (1994), pp. 841–51. On the theology faculty of the university, see R.L. Harrison, ‘The Reformation of the Theological Faculty of the University of Tübingen, 1534–1555’ (Vanderbilt Univ. Ph.D. diss., 1975); S. Spruell Mobley, ‘Confessionalizing the Curriculum: The Faculties of Arts and Theology at the Universities of Tübingen and Ingolstadt in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century’ (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison Ph.D. diss., 1998); and, most recently, U. Köpf, Die Universität Tübingen und ihre Theologen: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Tübingen, 2020).

12.

Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, A63 Bü44. Ungnad’s letter is analysed and partially transcribed in D. Wendebourg, Reformation und Orthodoxie: Der ökumenische Briefwechsel zwischen der Leitung der Württembergischen Kirche und Patriarch Jeremias II. von Konstantinopel in den Jahren 1573–1581 (Göttingen, 1986), p. 33.

13.

‘Videtur Deus ipse aperire fenestram longè latèque verbum suum purè disseminandi’: UBT, Mh 466, vol. 3, fos 12–13.

14.

R.D. Radway, Paper Portraits of Empire: Habsburg Albums from the German House in Constantinople (Bloomington, IN, 2023). I would like to thank the author for generously sharing her work with me prior to its publication.

15.

H. Louthan, The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna (Cambridge, 1997).

16.

Wendebourg, Reformation und Orthodoxie, p. 33. See also Salomon Schweigger, Ein newe Reyssbeschreibung auss Teutschland nach Constantinopel und Jerusalem (Nürnberg, 1608), p. 68.

17.

Schunka, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung der Osmanen’, pp. 21–2, and Brouwer, ‘Man Sihet Guts und Boß’, pp. 109–13. Such was also the fate of Christian minorities in other places. Eastern Christians who came to Rome in the early modern period, for instance, sometimes had to share their religious houses; see the observations by S. Kennerley, ‘Ethiopian Christians in Rome, c.1400–1700’, and C. Santus, ‘Wandering Lives: Eastern Christian Pilgrims, Alms-Collectors and “Refugees” in Early Modern Rome’, in M.C. Wainwright and E. Michelson, eds, A Companion to Religious Minorities in Early Modern Rome (Leiden, 2021), pp. 142–68 and 237–71 respectively.

18.

K. Teply, Kaiserliche Gesandtschaften ans Goldene Horn (Stuttgart, 1968). See also Brouwer, ‘Man Sihet Guts und Boß’, pp. 99–100.

19.

Gerlach still lacks a modern historian. Most details of his life are based on Matthias Hafenreffer, Oratio funebris in obitum Stephani Gerlachii (Tübingen, 1614). The best modern treatment of his life is M. Kriebel, ‘Stephan Gerlach: Deutscher evangelischer Botschaftsprediger in Konstantinopel 1573–1578. Diasporafürsorge in der Türkei und die ersten Beziehungen zur Griechisch-orthodoxen Kirche im 16. Jahrhundert’, Die evangelische Diaspora, xxix (1958), pp. 71–96.

20.

Parker, Global Calvinism.

21.

For a helpful survey of literature on the organisation of minorities in the Ottoman Empire, see T. Krstić, ‘Can We Speak of “Confessionalization” beyond the Reformation?’, in Krstić and Terzioğlu, eds, Entangled Confessionalizations?, pp. 25–115. See also B. Braude, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (Boulder, CO, 2014).

22.

For Ottoman–European sociability, see J.-P. Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford, 2013), pp. 65–87, and E. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MD, 2006), pp. 173–80. For recent surveys of early modern Istanbul as a diplomatic centre, see C. Vogel, ‘Istanbul als Drehscheibe frühneuzeitlicher europäischer Diplomatie’, Europäische Geschichte Online (2020), available at http://www.ieg-ego.eu/vogelc-2020-de (accessed 23 Dec. 2023); T.A. Sowerby and C. Markiewicz, eds, Diplomatic Cultures at the Ottoman Court, c.1500–1630 (London, 2021); H. Rudolph, ‘The Ottoman Empire and the Institutionalization of European Diplomacy, 1500–1700’, in A. Müller and M.-L. Frick, eds, Islam and International Law (Leiden, 2013), pp. 161–83.

23.

Radway, Paper Portraits of Empire.

24.

Gerlach, Tage-Buch, pp. 100–101, 159, 170, 493, 385, 137, and 155.

25.

For a recent analysis of English travellers’ descriptions of women from the Ottoman Empire, see Holmberg, British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities, pp. 129–70.

26.

Gerlach’s successor, Salomon Schweigger, would continue this extraordinary exchange of letters, which is printed in Acta et scripta theologorum Wirtembergensium, et patriarchae Constantinopolitani D. Hieremiae (Wittenberg, 1584). On this correspondence, see Wendebourg, Reformation und Orthodoxie, and R. Calis, ‘Martin Crusius (1526–1607) and the Discovery of Ottoman Greece’ (Princeton Univ. Ph.D. diss., 2020), pp. 34–98.

27.

Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Cod. hist. 8° 120. I would like to thank Robyn Radway for generously sharing her images of this manuscript with me.

28.

Gerlach, Tage-Buch, pp. 100–101, and UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fo. 239.

29.

Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 115.

30.

Gerlach, Tage-Buch, pp. 116, 200.

31.

‘Quod ad honestatem vitae attinet: Turcis paulò meliores sunt’: UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fo. 10. See also UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fos 7 and 9, and Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 118; Wendebourg, Reformation und Orthodoxie, pp. 41–2; G. Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft (1453–1821): Die Orthodoxie im Spannungsfeld der nachreformatorischen Konfessionen des Westens (Munich, 1988), p. 47.

32.

‘Ista propterea refero: ne verbis amplius quid de Graecis quam in rei veritate est, polliceamini: utque D. Cancellarius morbo fero deplorato mederi sciat’: UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fo. 448. For Lutherans’ visions of the Greek Orthodox Church, see Calis, ‘Martin Crusius (1526–1607) and the Discovery of Ottoman Greece’.

33.

‘Sed vulgo Graecorum, Italorum, Armeniorum, persuasissimum est: LUTHERanos, neque in Deum, neque in Christum credere: Baptismo, et omnibus sacris, carere; esseque planè ἄθεον hominum genus’: UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fos 149–150.

34.

Schweigger mentions that certain European diplomats had bought a plot of land in Galata as a burial ground. He seems to be referring, however, not to a cemetery for Lutherans only, but to one where deceased members of any European embassy could be buried: Schweigger, Ein newe Reyssbeschreibung, p. 69. Catholics did have their own burial ground; see François Alphonse Belin, Histoire de la latinité de Constantinople (Paris, 1894), pp. 506–31.

35.

Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 34. Catholic members of the embassy were usually buried in the Catholic churches that dotted the city. Ungnad’s predecessor, for instance, Albert de Wijs, a Flemish Catholic, died in Istanbul and was buried in Galata’s local Franciscan church; see Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 24.

36.

UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fo. 28. See also Schunka, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung der Osmanen’, p. 25. For early modern Venice, which was home to a substantial community of Lutheran merchants but where Lutheranism was also officially forbidden, there is some evidence that Lutherans were buried by Catholic priests; see M. Cassese, ‘I Tedeschi Luterani a Venezia e il loro rapporto con la parrocchia di San Bartolomeo (dal ’500 alla fine della Repubblica)’, in N. Bonazza, I. di Lenardo, and G. Guidarelli, eds, La chiesa di San Bartolomeo e la comunità tedesca a Venezia (Venice, 2013), pp. 249–68. Protestant merchants who died in Catholic lands were also, when no Protestant burial ground was available to them, buried in Catholic ones. See M. van Gelder, Trading Places: The Netherlandish Merchants in Early Modern Venice (Leiden, 2009), pp. 119–30.

37.

O.R. Constable, To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, ed. R. Vose (Philadelphia, PA, 2018), pp. 104–39; E. Barnett, ‘Food and Religious Identities in the Venetian Inquisition, c.1560–c.1640’, Renaissance Quarterly, lxxiv (2021), pp. 181–214; E. Dursteler, ‘The “Abominable Pig” and the “Mother of All Vices”: Pork, Wine and the Culinary Clash of Civilizations in the Early Modern Mediterranean’, in J. Hauser, K. Dmitriev and B. Orfal, eds, Insatiable Appetite: Food as a Cultural Signifier (Leiden, 2019), pp. 214–41; E.R. Dursteler, ‘Bad Bread and the “Outrageous Drunkenness of the Turks”: Food and Identity in the Accounts of Early Modern European Travelers to the Ottoman Empire’, Journal of World History, xxv (2014), pp. 203–28.

38.

Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 216.

39.

‘Ego autem non conniveo ad errores Pontificios’: UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fo. 28.

40.

UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fos 36–37.

41.

M. Mulsow, ‘Adam Neusers Brief an Sultan Selim II. und seine geplante Rechtfertigungsschrift: Eine Rekonstruktion anhand neuer Manuskriptfunde’, in F. Vollhardt, ed., Religiöser Nonkonformismus und frühneuzeitliche Gelehrtenkultur (Berlin, 2014), pp. 294–318; M. Mulsow, ‘Antitrinitarians and Conversion to Islam: Adam Neuser reads Murad b. Abdullah in Ottoman Istanbul’, in C. Norton, ed., Conversion and Islam in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Lure of the Other (London, 2017), pp. 181–93. T.P. Graf, ‘Stopping an Ottoman Spy in Late Sixteenth-Century Istanbul: David Ungnad, Markus Penckner, and Austrian-Habsburg Intelligence in the Ottoman Capital’, in S. Haude, C. Schneider and G. Scholz-Williams, eds, Rethinking Europe: War and Peace in the Early Modern German Lands (Leiden, 2019), pp. 173–93. For the broader context, see T.P. Graf, The Sultan’s Renegades: Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575–1610 (Oxford, 2017).

42.

UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fo. 28.

43.

‘Turcismum, tamque fabulas, ridet’: UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fos 34 and 45.

44.

For two excellent recent studies of communicatio in sacris in the Catholic context, see C. Santus, Trasgressioni necessarie: Communicatio in sacris, coesistenza e conflitti tra le comunità chistiane orientali (Levante e Impero Ottomano, XVII–XVIII secolo) (Rome, 2019), and C. Windler, Missionare in Persien: Kulturelle Diversität und Normenkonkurrenz im frühneuzeitlichen Katholizismus (17.–18. Jahrhundert) (Cologne, 2018).

45.

UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fo. 35.

46.

UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fo. 28.

47.

‘Den 6. als am Sontag der H. Dreyeinigkeit/ bin ich zu Galata/ als ich Herrn Christoph Pfistern von Augsburg/ Röm. Käyserl. Majest. Secretarium in seiner Krankheit besucht/ in einer Griechischen Kirchen gewesen/ genant πανάγια oder zu der heil. Maria/ worinnen obgedachter Mönch ἱερόθεος, (so hernach von dem Patriarchen auf den heil. Berg verwiesen worden) mit noch einem andern Mönch auf einer andern Kirchen/ einem Verstorbnen die Leichbegängnüß hielte/ zu dessen Gedächtinüß er allerley neue Früchten/ mit gewissen Gebeten und Gesängen/ und vielem Beräuchern/ so über dieselbige geschahen/ weyhete. Endlich wurden solche geweyhete neue Früchten/ von gedörten Weinbeern/ Mandeln und dergleichen/ in der Kirchen allen Anwesenden außgetheilet/ auch einem jeglichen ein Krengel oder Brezel und töstlicher Wein zu trincken gegeben/ hab aber nicht gehöret/ daß nach geendigtem Gottes-Dienst der Segen über das Volck wäre gespröchen worden’: Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 58. For another early modern observer of such rites, see S. Henny, ‘On Not Forgetting Jerusalem: Bartholomaeus Georgievits as a Pilgrim and Ethnographer of Eastern Christianity’, in S. Hanß and D. McEwan, eds, The Habsburg Mediterranean, 1500–1800 (Vienna, 2021), pp. 175–200.

48.

Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 62. For the other two visits, see Gerlach, Tage-Buch, pp. 62–3. See also Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 68 for his observations on a mass celebrated by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch. Gerlach also allowed Greek Orthodox Christians to attend his service; see Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 304.

49.

UBT, Mh 466, vol. 1, fo. 28.

50.

M. Elliot, ‘Dress Codes in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of the Franks’, in S.N. Faroqhi and C.K. Neumann, eds, Ottoman Costumes: From Textile to Identity (Istanbul, 2004), pp. 103–23.

51.

V. Aksan, ‘Who Was an Ottoman? Reflections on “Wearing Hats” and “Turning Turk”’, in B. Schmidt-Haberkamp, ed., Europa und die Türkei im 18. Jahrhundert/Europe and Turkey in the 18th Century (Göttingen, 2011), pp. 305–18; M.C. Zilfi, ‘The Changing Politics of Ottoman Dress’, in G. Riello and U. Rublack, eds. The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c.1200–1800 (Cambridge, 2019), p. 395; Graf, Sultan’s Renegades, pp. 59–117, esp. 61–8, 106–7; Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam, pp. 149–50; E. Dursteler, Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MD, 2011), pp. 10, 45 with further references; Teply, Kaiserliche Gesandtschaften ans Goldene Horn, pp. 117–19.

52.

‘Dieweil es offt geschiehet/ daß Spanier/ Welschen/ und Ungarn zu Türcken werden/ die man gleich im Divan mit neuen Kleidungen beschencket’: Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 123. See also Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 304, where Gerlach describes the tumult that arose when one of the Janissaries lost his hat, and p. 367, where he mentions a slave who tried to flee by dressing up as a Polish waggoner.

53.

Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 496.

54.

In particular, the different costumes that the Patriarch wore on different occasions received Gerlach’s undivided attention. More than once the chaplain described in dazzling detail how the Patriarch changed costumes before saying Mass. See Gerlach, Tage-Buch, pp. 234–5, 329, 337. His detailed descriptions of Turkish and Greek women also stand out and rival their visual counterparts in contemporary costume books; see, for instance, Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 262.

55.

‘Den 24. Tag in herzn Stützels Behaufung/ in der herzn Straffen geprediget/ Er aber/ mein Gnädiger Herr/ alle seine Diener auf Ungarisch kleiden/ und mich mit zweyen stattlichen Kleidern/ vom besten Tuch versehen lassen/ eines war Weltlich/ das andere Priesterlich/ das gemeine Weltliche war ein langer/ fornen mit Purpurfarben zottichtem Rauchwerk außstaffirter Mantel/ darunter ein Unter-Röcklein/ mit/ auff welsche Art gemachten/ Hosen. Das Priesterliche Kleid/ waren aus zween Röcke/ so biß auf die Schuh reicheten/ der Untere/ den ich mit einem Türkischen Gürtel beschlosse/ von gewässertem Zeuge/ der Außere von anderm köstlichem auch mit Purpurfarben Rauchwerk fornenher gefüttertem Tuch/ darzu zween Hüte von gleicher Purpurfarbe. (Ich müst ein Sammetin Doctor-Häublein tragen/ und einen andern Sammetin Hut darübe/ sagt er an einem anderen Ort.)’: Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 4. Personnel in other imperial embassies also had to dress as Hungarians; see the materials cited in Teply, Kaiserliche Gesandtschaften ans Goldene Horn, p. 35.

56.

Kriebel, ‘Stephan Gerlach’, p. 79.

57.

For these debates, better known as the Syncretistic Controversy, see C. Böttigheimer, Zwischen Polemik und Irenik: Die Theologie der einen Kirche bei Georg Calixt (Münster, 1996), and P. Engel, Die eine Wahrheit in der gespaltenen Christenheit: Untersuchungen zur Theologie Georg Calixts (Göttingen, 1976). For the broader seventeenth-century context, see the overview in R. Kolb, ‘Lutheran Theology in Seventeenth-Century Germany’, Lutheran Quarterly, xx (2006), pp. 429–56.

58.

Gerlach, Tage-Buch, unpaginated preface.

59.

The literature on this topic is vast. For some perceptive studies, see L. Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London, 2002); G. Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford, CA, 2011); N. Matar, British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1573–1760 (Leiden, 2014); and most recently D. Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (Philadelphia, PA, 2018).

60.

U. Strasser, Missionary Men in the Early Modern World: German Jesuits and Pacific Journeys (Amsterdam, 2020).

61.

On the oath, see J. Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 21–3. On the Natio Germanica, see L. Rossetti, Matricula Nationis Germanicae Artistarum in Gymnasio Patavino, 1553–1721 (Padua, 1986), and L. Premuda, ‘Die Natio Germanica an der Universität Padua: Zur Forschungslage’, Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, xlvii (1963), pp. 97–105.

62.

O.R. Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2003), p. 322 with further references.

63.

‘Dann der Patriarch würde gleich in sein Schreiben seßen/ daß er/ der Käyserliche Gesandte/ diesen Cörper auß einer sonderbahren Andacht begehrt habe’: Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 345. See also Gerlach, Tage-Buch, pp. 519, 345, and J. Tracy, ‘Advice from a Lutheran Politique: Ambassador David Ungnad’s Circular Letter to the Austrian Estates, 1576’, in V. Christman and M.E. Plummer, eds, Cultural Shifts and Ritual Transformations in Reformation Europe: Essays in Honor of Susan C. Karant-Nunn (Leiden, 2020), pp. 193–209, at 196. For Dietrichstein, see F. Edelmayer, ‘Honor y dinero: Adam de Dietrichstein al servicio de la Casa de Austria’, Studia Historica. Historia Moderna, xi (1993), pp. 89–116.

64.

Reichert, ‘Protestanten am Heiligen Grab’, p. 53. For von Löwenstein’s journey and life, see H. Ehmer, ‘Graf Albrecht von Löwenstein (1536–1587): Jerusalempilger und Kriegsunternehmer, Diplomat und Beamter’, Zeitschrift für württembergische Landesgeschichte, lxxii (2013), pp. 153–226.

65.

Schunka, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung der Osmanen’, pp. 20, 21. For the broader context, see F.T. Noonan, The Road to Jerusalem: Pilgrimage and Travel in the Age of Discovery (Philadelphia, PA, 2007), pp. 84–100; Z. Shalev, Sacred Words and Worlds: Geography, Religion, and Scholarship, 1550–1700 (Leiden, 2012), pp. 73–140; and S. Henny and Z. Shalev, ‘Jerusalem Reformed: Rethinking Early Modern Pilgrimage’, Renaissance Quarterly, lxxv (2022), pp. 796–848. I want to thank the authors of this last article for sharing their work with me prior to its publication.

66.

Schunka, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung der Osmanen’, p. 26 n. 73. See also M. Lewy, ‘Konfessionelle Konfrontation und Ambiguität zwischen protestantischen Pilgern und katholischen Mönchen im Jerusalem des 17. Jahrhunderts’, in H. Kühne and G. Roth, eds, Andacht oder Abenteuer: Von der Wilsnackfahrt im Spätmittelalter zu Reiselust und Reisefrust in der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen, 2020), pp. 269–315.

67.

Hieronymys Scheidt, Kurtze und Warhafftige Beschreibung der Reise Von Erffurdt aus Thüringen nach dem gewesenen gelobten Lande und der heiligen Stadt Jerusalem (Erfurt, 1615), sigs diii r–v, div r–v. The anecdote is discussed in S.E. Clark, ‘Protestants in Palestine: Reformation of Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ (Univ. of Arizona Ph.D. diss., 2013).

68.

Reichert, ‘Protestanten am Heiligen Grab’, pp. 48–52. Rauwolf, who described the ceremony in great detail, says that those about to be knighted also had to swear to defend Christ’s tomb against Lutheran heretics. See Leonhard Rauwolf, Aigentliche beschreibung der Raiß, so er vor diser zeit gegen Auffgang inn die Morgenländer, fürnemlich Syriam, Iudaeam, Arabiam, Mesopotamiam, Babyloniam, Assyriam, Armeniam etc. nicht ohne geringe mühe vnnd große gefahr selbs volbracht (Laugingen, 1583), pp. 431–8.

69.

Schweigger, Ein newe Reyssbeschreibung, pp. 289–91. The anecdote is mentioned in A. Schunka, ‘Zwischen Altdorf und Jerusalem: Salomon Schweigger im Kontext protestantischer Pilgerpraxis und lutherischer Orientalistik um 1600’, in M. Pohlig, ed., Juden, Christen und Muslime im Zeitalter der Reformation (Gütersloh, 2020), pp. 212–35, at 224.

70.

The anecdote is told in Henny and Shalev, ‘Jerusalem Reformed’. For other examples of cross-confessional sociability, see Ghobrial, Whispers of Cities, pp. 65–87, and Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople, pp. 173–80.

71.

In a justly famous scene, the Lutheran scholar Adam Olearius (1599–1671) described how in 1637, while in Isfahan, he was invited by Augustinian friars to celebrate the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary together with these monks, certain Armenians, and Russians. See C. Windler, ‘Katholische Mission und Diasporareligiosität: Christen europäischer Herkunft im Safavidenreich’, in H.P. Jürgens and T. Weller, eds, Religion und Mobilität: Zum Verhältnis von raumbezogener Mobilität und religiöser Identitätsbildung im frühneuzeitlichen Europa (Göttingen, 2010), pp. 183–212, at 199. See also Schunka, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung der Osmanen’, p. 23.

72.

Schunka, ‘Zwischen Altdorf und Jerusalem’, pp. 224–5.

73.

‘Hab er geantwortet: Jawol/ doch das er nichts davon Halte: dann der Glaub sey im Herzen: und nicht in äusserlichen Gebärden oder Handlungen’: Gerlach, Tage-Buch, p. 241.

74.

On the adiaphorist controversy and Melanchthon’s position in it, see C.L. Manschreck, ‘The Role of Melanchthon in the Adiaphora Controversy’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, xlviii (1957), pp. 165–81; L. Peterson, ‘The Philippist Theologians and the Interims of 1548: Soteriological, Ecclesiastical, and Liturgical Compromises and Controversies within German Lutheranism’ (Univ. of Wisconsin Ph.D. diss., 1974); and I. Dingel, ed., Reaktionen auf das Augsburger Interim: Der Interimistische Streit (1548–1549) (Göttingen, 2010).

75.

Brouwer, ‘Man sihet Guts und Boß’, p. 111.

76.

Rauwolf, Aigentliche beschreibung der Raiß, pp. 133–4.

77.

Luebke, Hometown Religion, p. 12.

78.

On dissimulation, see M. Eliav-Feldon and T. Herzig, eds, Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe (Houndmills, 2015); M. Eliav-Feldon, Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity (Basingstoke, 2012); J.R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley, CA, 2009); P. Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1990); C. Ginzburg, Il Nicodemismo: Simulazione e Dissimulazione Religiosa nell’Europa del ’500 (Turin, 1970). It is telling that not even Luther is mentioned in G. Müller, Die Wahrhaftigkeitspflicht und die Problematiek der Lüge (Freiburg, 1962).

79.

Luther’s celebrated commentary on Galatians, in which he sided with Augustine and insisted that Peter had unjustly pretended to follow Jewish customs while eating with the Jews, is the closest thing we have to an explicit Lutheran statement on dissimulation. See Zagorin, Ways of Lying, pp. 33–4. I have not found any evidence that this passage led to any debates about this issue after Luther’s death.

80.

For some insightful studies of these Türckenbüchlein, see C. Göllner, Turcica: Die europäischen Türkendrucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts (3 vols, Bucharest, 1961–78); J.W. Bohnstedt, ‘The Infidel Scourge of God: The Turkish Menace as Seen by German Pamphleteers of the Reformation Era’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, lvi (1968), pp. 1–58; W. Schulze, Reich und Türkengefahr im späten 16. Jahrhundert: Studien zu den politischen und gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen einer äußeren Bedrohung (Munich, 1978); A. Höfert, Den Feind beschreiben: ‘Türkengefahr’ und europäisches Wissen über das Osmanischen Reich, 1450–1600 (Frankfurt, 2003); T. Kaufmann, ‘Türckenbüchlein’: Zur christlichen Wahrnehmung ‘türkischer Religion’ in Spätmittelalter und Reformation (Göttingen, 2008); F. Konrad, ‘Von der ‘Türkengefahr’ zu Exotismus und Orientalismus: Der Islam als Antithese Europas (1453–1914)’, in Europäische Geschichte Online (2011), available at http://ieg-ego.eu/de/threads/modelle-und-stereotypen/tuerkengefahr-exotismus-orientalismus/felix-konrad-von-der-tuerkengefahr-zu-exotismus-und-orientalismus-1453-1914?set_language=de&-C= (accessed 31 Dec. 2023). For Lutheran sermons, see D. Grimmsmann, Krieg mit dem Wort: Türkenpredigten des 16. Jahrhunderts im Alten Reich (Berlin, 2016).

81.

UBT Mh 466, vol. 1, fo. 631.

© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.