Byzantium, a Mission for the Jesuits? Between Erudition and Proselytism, 1622–1773

This paper aims to bring together the Jesuits’ erudite approach to Byzantium and their missionary activity initiated in the Ottoman Empire from the late sixteenth century. Since Georg Hofmann’s pioneering works on the 17th century, published in 1926 and 1954, the subject of Jesuit missions in Greece has undergone little renewal, as attested by the specialized historiography of the Society of Jesus, in contrast to the flourishing studies devoted to the Jesuits in the Christian Middle East. Founded in 1577, the Pontificio Collegio Greco di Sant’Atanasio was entrusted to the Jesuits in 1622 for the training of missionaries to the Orthodox Greeks of the Ottoman Empire. However, the prominence of French Jesuits and the hostility provoked by their national origin led, in 1628, to their expulsion from Constantinople, which they had chosen as their principal center. They then dispersed to Smyrna, Naxos, Santorini, Thessaloniki, and Athens. Mount Athos also attracted their attention, and several settlement projects – perhaps recalling the Athonite Latin monastery of the Amalfitans – were conceived. While, from Antwerp to Paris, figures such as Papebroch and Sirmond were studying the manuscript legacy of Byzantium, their confrères in the field were applying a more practical knowledge aimed at the hoped-for conversion of the Orthodox. The interplay between erudition and mission raises a central question: what place did Byzantium hold within the Jesuit enterprise in Greece? This paper seeks to address that question by reassessing the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of the Jesuit encounter with the Byzantine world.