During the time of the English Commonwealth (1649–53), two Greeks named Hierotheos Abbatios and Anastasius Comnenus visited the new republic.Footnote ¹ Both were Orthodox priests; both visited the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; and both wanted money, though for different purposes. Abbatios wanted to raise funds for a scheme to promote closer relations between the Protestant and Greek Orthodox churches. Comnenus was attempting to pay the ransom for several friends who had been kidnapped by pirates from Algiers. Abbatios would leave England after a few months; Comnenus would stay for well over a decade. Although, as is discussed below, both men are known to historians, little has previously been written about their visits to England. This article explores their time in England using a wealth of new archival materials. It focuses on the issue of charity and the questions of who helped the Greek travellers, why, and how the two men presented themselves to an English audience. The fact that they had come from the peripheries of Christian Europe and from Greece specifically shaped English interest in the travellers and their treatment, showing how marginality could influence charitable giving.

This article contributes to a growing body of literature investigating Greek travellers to western Europe. Recent studies of such journeys to the British Isles, mainland Europe and beyond have complemented Jonathan Harris’s study from the 1990s on the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century movement of Greeks to the west.Footnote ² The work of John-Paul Ghobrial and Richard Calis in particular has brought to the fore the difficulty of recovering the motivation and identity of the historical traveller who moved through a multiplicity of contexts, often having to assimilate in order to please the particular locality in which they had landed.Footnote ³ Such an obscuring of the traveller is unfortunately apparent in any study of the two subjects of this article. The secondary literature on Abbatios and Comnenus is very small; similarly sparse are references to them in primary printed sources or archival collections. A reconstruction of their time in England is therefore comparable to a mosaic formed from numerous tesserae and is reliant on fragments, such as mentions in the account books of educational institutions. Very little can be recovered of their actual motivations.

However, this article suggests that investigating why and how Comnenus and Abbatios came to be seen as worthy recipients of English charity offers a useful new perspective on Greek travellers to England and Anglo-Greek interactions more widely. As the experiences of these two men suggest, Greek travellers were treated with unusual generosity, largely because of English interest in Hellenic studies and in using information about Greek Orthodoxy in confessional or ecclesiastical debates. However, the same sources also suggest underlying suspicion in England about the possibility of deception. As well as revealing English attitudes, this article recovers insights into how Greek travellers, far from their homes, negotiated interactions in unfamiliar settings. As will be shown, Comnenus and Abbatios assuaged English doubts by emphasizing their personal distress, their written credentials, and their position in the Greek Orthodox Church. More generally, charitable records lead to the suggestion that the two men were aware of what their audiences wanted to hear, especially in the context of places of learning, and acted on this knowledge to secure aid and patronage.

This article also makes an important contribution to understandings of Anglo-Greek relations during the seventeenth century. Historians have traditionally focussed their attentions on the early decades of the century when, under the patriarch of Constantinople, Kyrillos Loukaris (1572–1638), the English and Greek Orthodox churches enjoyed warm relations, most evident in the establishing, in 1617, of a scholarship program for young Greek clergymen to be trained in English universities. Scholars have uncovered the motivations and concerns which drove these interactions and emphasized the deep interest of the Church of England in its Greek peer.Footnote ⁴ John Barron’s important study on the peripatetic career of a Greek archbishop, Joseph Georgirenes, brilliantly reconstructed the eventful life of his subject in 1670s England as he successfully fundraised for the foundation of England’s first Greek Orthodox church.Footnote ⁵ However, the middle decades of the seventeenth century, during which the British Civil Wars occurred and England became a republic, have been relatively underexplored by historians. As this piece argues, analysing these years reveals that the experiences of Comnenus and Abbatios were comparable to those of other Greek travellers to western Europe, but were inflected by the concerns of mid-century England, including a particularly fervent wave of interest in the propagation of the gospel under the English Commonwealth and later the settlement of the Restoration church.

The first of the two Greeks to reach England was Hierotheos Abbatios (1599–1664). Abbatios arrived in Oxford in July 1649, preceded by a letter of recommendation from the university’s chancellor, the earl of Pembroke.Footnote ⁶ As Pembroke explained, Abbatios had ‘spent much time and travaile in translating the Confessions of Faith, Catechismes, and the like of the forraigne parts into the Vulgar Greeke, for the benefitt of the Easterne Churches’.Footnote ⁷ He came to England accompanied by ‘sundry ample Testimonies from forrayne Universities, professing the Protestant Reformed Religion’ and with a wish to visit Oxford ‘to see if anything there may be had to the improvement of so pious & glorious a worke’.Footnote ⁸ The work to which Pembroke was referring was Abbatios’s translation of the Ecclesiarum Belgicarum Confessio (1627) into the Greek vernacular. This was a bilingual Greek-Latin text, which included the Belgic Confession (1561), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), and some canons of the Synod of Dordrecht (1618–19).Footnote ⁹ It had been conceived as part of the efforts by Kyrillos Loukaris to initiate closer relations between the Reformed and Orthodox churches, and its significance is discussed below.Footnote ¹⁰ After a short period in Oxford, Abbatios continued to Cambridge and then appears to have left England, reaching Geneva two years later, in 1651, and the Greek island of Cephalonia by 1658.Footnote ¹¹

Abbatios’s journey to England was thus one stop in an extended peripatetic period. He had come from Cephalonia, where he had been a monk and abbot. In 1636, he had left the island following an earthquake and begun travelling in order to raise funds to repair damage wrought by the disaster.Footnote ¹² By 1644, Abbatios had reached the Netherlands, where the States General decided that both he and the sometime metropolitan of Ephesus, Meletios Pantogalos, ought to stay for the winter at the university of Leiden to become acquainted with the Reformed faith before travelling back east.Footnote ¹³ However, the States General subsequently decided that Abbatios should remain in Leiden for another purpose: to translate the Ecclesiarum Belgicarum Confessio into vernacular Greek, a work which would be printed at the expense of the States General and could then be distributed throughout the Greek-speaking east.Footnote ¹⁴ By 1648, Abbatios had finished his project and 1,000 copies had been printed. His hope was to acquire the position of metropolitan in the synod of the churches under the patriarchate of Constantinople so that his translation might be widely circulated. Because ecclesiastical positions were often determined by who could pay the Ottoman authorities the highest amount, such a plan required money which Abbatios failed to raise in the Netherlands.Footnote ¹⁵ He therefore decided to go on a fundraising tour, equipped with travelling expenses and an honorarium from the States General.Footnote ¹⁶ It was this fundraising impetus which took Abbatios to Oxford in 1649.Footnote ¹⁷

Similarly, seeking funds was the aim of the second Greek clergyman, Anastasius Comnenus (fl. 1649–63), described as the ‘Governour of the Monastery of Mount Sinai’ (that is, St Catherine’s Monastery) and also the archbishop of Laodicea.Footnote ¹⁸ The self-declared cause of his journey was a kidnapping: he and several other Greek priests had been captured and robbed by pirates. Comnenus had been freed, but needed to raise a substantial sum to pay off his ransom and that of those who were still held as hostages ‘in Algeers’.Footnote ¹⁹ By the time he reached England, his mission had taken him across north-western Europe, his testimonials and a brief mention in a near-contemporary work on the Greek church by Philippus Cyprius showing that he had passed through Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.Footnote ²⁰ In England, academic financial records show that he was in Cambridge in October 1651, Oxford in December 1651, London in March 1653, and Winchester College in southern Hampshire later the same year.Footnote ²¹

There was nothing unusual about requests to university colleges for charity or financial support, but, in the context of collegiate charity, the treatment of Comnenus and Abbatios – both of whom benefited from financial collections at Oxford and Cambridge – is notable.Footnote ²² Abbatios was treated as a distinguished guest, donating a copy of his translation of the Ecclesiarum Belgicarum Confessio to the Bodleian Library at Oxford and receiving an impressive £50 from the university.Footnote ²³ Such a sum easily dwarfed that given to the numerous others who sought charity from the colleges.Footnote ²⁴ Irish Protestants, for example, displaced by the bitter fighting begun by the 1641 rebellion of Irish Catholics, came to England in such large numbers during the 1640s and 1650s that the frequent references to them in collegiate account books were usually anonymous, while the amounts they received rarely exceeded a few shillings and pence.Footnote ²⁵ The university donations to the two Greeks easily surpassed not only such small contributions, but also the funds offered in more comparable cases such as that of Jan Sictor. Sictor was a Bohemian poet forced into exile after the victory of Catholic forces at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. A learned man, Sictor gravitated towards the English universities in search of patronage and charity and was still capable of attracting generous one-off gifts, such as £1 from Merton, in the mid-seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁶ Like the Greeks, Sictor’s prominence, learning and extraordinary origins seem to have led to him receiving financial aid from the universities.Footnote ²⁷ However, the collections for the Greeks far exceeded what Sictor and those like him could hope to receive. It seems that many agreed with one of the testimonials to Comnenus, which affirmed that the Greeks were ‘true object[s] of Charity’.Footnote ²⁸

The entries in college account books suggest that both were received warmly in the universities. Although it is unclear where either stayed when in the university towns, hospitality may have been provided by well-wishers in the colleges or even by the university authorities. For example, Cambridge University’s governing body reimbursed an official £2 ‘for his carefull attendance uppon a Grecian’ in 1651.Footnote ²⁹ Given the date, this almost certainly refers to Comnenus, suggesting that the university had taken upon itself the duties of providing hospitality for Comnenus during his stay. There are no hints about where Abbatios stayed while in Oxford, but he clearly had links to some well-connected scholars since Christ Church decided ‘That the Gretian have 20s: more added to the 10l: formerly given him by this Colledge [presumably as part of the university’s collection]’.Footnote ³⁰ He also may have been allowed to use Oxford’s academic resources and interact with the university community more generally, since the registers of the Bodleian Library for the time Abbatios was in Oxford seem to record a ‘Graec[ian]’ using library materials.Footnote ³¹ As all this suggests that, in addition to unusually generous collections on their behalf, both Abbatios and Comnenus made friendships while in Oxford and Cambridge, were given access to university resources, and were treated well by both university and collegiate authorities.

Why did they receive special treatment? In part, their reception in the universities exemplifies interest in Hellenic studies among English academic communities in the early modern period. Curiosity about Greek travellers among western Europeans had a long lineage. Jonathan Harris has suggested that Greek émigrés in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were often treated with sympathy and curiosity by western elites due to the latter’s growing enthusiasm for their language and culture.Footnote ³² Such pro-Greek sentiments remained in force in the seventeenth century, especially its first half when, as Mordechai Feingold has demonstrated, the teaching of Greek boomed at institutions such as Oxford.Footnote ³³ As Colin Davey’s work has demonstrated, the future patriarch of Alexandria, Metrophanes Kritopoulos, attended Balliol College for five years from 1617, and attracted widespread interest and friendship from members of the university, especially those involved in the teaching or learning of Greek.Footnote ³⁴ The chance for Englishmen to deepen their knowledge of the Greek language, history or culture stimulated such encounters. Although there is no evidence that Abbatios and Comnenus acted as teachers, it is certain that English scholars were keen to extract information from them (more on which below) and this potential utility influenced the hospitability with which they were met.

As well as benefitting from such attitudes, it might also be suggested that Greek travellers such as Abbatios and Comnenus were aware that they were likely to receive a favourable reaction from scholarly institutions and therefore deliberately visited them. This point might be shown with the example of Comnenus, who, after visiting the universities, travelled to Winchester College and was given £2. The warden of the school was John Harris, ‘so admirable a Grecian, and so noted a preacher, that sir Hen. Savile [the eminent scholar and one of the translators of the King James’ Version of the Bible] used frequently to say that he was second [only] to St. Chrysostome’.Footnote ³⁵ Harris’s fame as a teacher and scholar of Greek was well-earned. Before becoming warden, he had held the prestigious position of regius professor of Greek at Oxford, during which period Kritopoulos had studied at the university. As detailed in the autograph album of the future patriarch, the two had enjoyed a ‘long friendship and acquaintance’.Footnote ³⁶ Bearing in mind Harris’s reputation as an eminent ‘Grecian’, it is very possible that Comnenus went to Hampshire expecting a friendly reception. Indeed, it seems likely that Comnenus would have been aware of Harris, and Harris of Comnenus, given the Greek’s stay in the universities and the links between Winchester College and its sister foundation of New College, Oxford. However, even if Comnenus was unfamiliar with Harris, his trip to Winchester College and the donation made there show the interest in learned Greeks which was prevalent among English academics. That there was an awareness of this interest on the part of the travellers is suggested by the fact that places of learning played such a prominent part in the itineraries of both Abbatios and Comnenus.

However, alongside curiosity there are unmistakeable hints of a struggle by Abbatios and especially by Comnenus to be considered ‘true object[s] of Charity’ in the face of English suspicion. As John Paul-Ghobrial, among others, has argued, a Greek clergyman travelling to raise funds was so frequent a phenomenon in the early modern world as to be something of a trope and to lead to suspicions of fraudulent behaviour.Footnote ³⁷ In the words of the early modern Scottish traveller William Lithgow, one should be wary of ‘vagabonding Greekes’ with ‘their counterfeit Testimonials’.Footnote ³⁸ To overcome doubts, it was useful to have convincing credentials and letters of recommendation. A sense of the importance the English placed on this can be seen occasionally in account books, such as that of Jesus College, Cambridge, which described the expenditure as ‘Our Coll: Proportion of 50l given by Convocation to Hierotheus Cephalonius Constantinopolitanus on my Lo: our Chancellors l[ett]re to the universitie’.Footnote ³⁹ Revealingly, the ruling body of Jesus College deemed a reference to the letter written by Pembroke, the chancellor, necessary in order to justify why Abbatios was receiving their money, not the Greek’s project. It was Pembroke’s word which lent validity to Abbatios’s claims and settled any doubts.

Comnenus arrived in England in a far weaker position than Abbatios. His story was far less easy to prove and, initially, his testimonials were from non-English authorities. His case is therefore indicative of the means by which some Greek travellers attempted to overcome the suspicions of their hosts. A later seventeenth-century work on the Greek church by Philippus Cyprius discussed Comnenus’s time travelling through Germany, and described him as truly ‘è gente Imperatoriâ Comnenâ’ (‘from the imperial Comnenus family’).Footnote ⁴⁰ This would seem to imply that Comnenus had either declared himself to be descended from the Byzantine ruling dynasty of the eleventh and twelfth centuries when he was in Germany, or that he had allowed the idea to circulate. However, such claims are notably absent from any of the English sources. Why Comnenus, seeking to impress his hosts, would make no mention of this royal connection is unclear, but it may perhaps reveal an aspect of English suspicion. As Jonathan Harris has pointed out, Greeks seeking western interest had claimed kinship with the imperial families of Constantinople since the fall of the city in 1453.Footnote ⁴¹ Although it is dangerous to make inferences based on an absence of evidence, it is possible that the English had notions about what constituted a false claim by a journeying Greek, with one of these being an alleged imperial genealogy. For this, or some other reason, Comnenus does not seem to have invoked his ancestry to impress the English.

Instead, descriptions of Comnenus in financial sources suggest that he heavily emphasized the humanitarian plight underlying his mission. Winchester College’s accounts indicate that he summarized his cause as being to redeem captives from Algiers, while a glimpse of the emotive appeal he made, and the sympathy he engendered, is captured in an entry from St John’s College, Cambridge, that £1 was to given towards the ‘releife of a poore captive Grecian’.Footnote ⁴² It is also clear that Comnenus emphasized his status in the Greek Orthodox Church, perhaps in order to support the veracity of his claims. It was certainly something noted by many college bursars, including those of Clare College, Cambridge, who described the donation as going to a ‘Grecian Archimandrite upon mount Sinai’.Footnote ⁴³ Finally, it appears that Comnenus tried to ensure that, like Abbatios, he had strong English testimonials. As mentioned above, he gained one such accreditation in 1652 signed by a number of leading English ministers. This document was important for Comnenus’s hopes of receiving charity, since the signatories specified that they had carefully scrutinized his non-English testimonials.Footnote ⁴⁴ The implication of this wording was that certificates held by a traveller decreased in value the further away they were from the locale in which they had been issued. At least one other English certificate for Comnenus survives and is discussed below.Footnote ⁴⁵ The collection of such documents by Comnenus suggests that he was cognisant of the need to impress potential donors with regionally specific certificates.

The stories of Abbatios and Comnenus also help us to gauge the extent to which the English were interested in Greek travellers for confessional reasons. Dorothea Wendebourg’s seminal work on the later sixteenth-century dialogue between Lutheran theologians in Tübingen and Patriarch Jeremiah II on the subject of the Confessio Augustana Graeca (the Greek version of the 1530 Augsburg Confession produced by Philipp Melanchthon and the Greek deacon Demetrios Myros in 1559) highlighted the extent to which early modern Protestant communities were fascinated by the Greek Orthodox Church and interested in finding a confessional ally against Roman Catholicism.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Greek church was an important reference point in Protestant-Catholic rivalry but also more widely, owing to its historic links to patristic authorities and to the primitive church.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the words of Sundar Henny, eastern Christianity was ‘a window through which one could look (even if just through a glass darkly) at how things were done in the early church’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Jean-Louis Quantin has recently explored, interest in the Greek Orthodox Church, and especially the early Church Fathers, burgeoned in seventeenth-century England for a variety of reasons, with the ‘Church of England claim[ing] to be the most faithful to antiquity’.Footnote ⁴⁹ One reason why Abbatios and Comnenus were received with interest, therefore, was because of their association with the Greek Orthodox Church and the possibility that two Greek clergymen could provide advice or aid to Englishmen pursuing their own ecclesiastical or confessional ends.

Comnenus, in particular, seems to have attracted English interest because of his religious standing. It is clear that during Comnenus’s stay in Oxford he was mined for anti-Catholic information by one of the leading religious figures of the Interregnum, the Independent minister, dean of Christ Church, and vice-chancellor of the university, John Owen. In his Vindication of the Animadversions on Fiat Lux, published in 1664, Owen quoted conversations with two Greeks when attacking the Roman Catholic claim to agreement with the Greek church. The Franciscan friar Vincent Canes’s Fiat Lux (1662), which Owen was criticizing, praised the unity of Roman Catholicism in contrast to the discord of the Protestant sects.Footnote ⁵⁰ Owen utilized his conversations with Greeks to challenge this argument. As he wrote, he had personally known some ‘eminent members of that Church’.Footnote ⁵¹ One had been ‘Conopius’; that is, Nathaniel Konopios, who was a Greek scholar in Oxford in the late 1630s and 1640s, and would go on to be an important figure in the seventeenth-century Greek Orthodox Church, serving as metropolitan of Smyrna.Footnote ⁵²

Owen went on to write that the other man whom he met ‘not many years ago, [was] called Anastatius Comnenus Archimandrite as his Testimonials bespake him, of a Monastry on Mount Sinai.’Footnote ⁵³ These conversations probably took place when Comnenus visited the university in late 1651, though they may have occurred later. Given he had been one of the signatories of Comnenus’s 1652 English testimonial, Owen was almost certainly instrumental in the charitable reception Comnenus received at Oxford.Footnote ⁵⁴ Now, years after their meeting, Owen made use of their discussions in attacking Roman Catholicism, writing that: ‘Both these [Greeks] I am sure made it their business to inveigh against your Church & practices, having the Arguments of Nilus against your Supremacy at their fingers ends.’Footnote ⁵⁵ A fourteenth-century bishop of Thessalonika, Nilus Cabasilas, had attacked the papal claims to primacy and by citing his opinions, via Konopios and Comnenus, Owen was buttressing his own argument by associating it with a historical strand of the Greek Orthodox Church antipathetical to Roman Catholicism.Footnote ⁵⁶ Owen’s point was to challenge Fiat Lux’s claim that the Roman Catholic and Greek churches ‘are so well agreed’, and in the process to suggest that it was actually the Greek and Reformed churches which were compatible and in agreement.Footnote ⁵⁷

Comnenus seems to have been aware of his value to English churchmen, and either attracted or pursued the attention of patrons very dissimilar to Owen. In 1658, a certificate on his behalf was produced by two episcopalian clergymen, Peter Gunning and William Chamberline.Footnote ⁵⁸ The testimonial outlined Comnenus’s reason for coming to England and that he now was seeking sufficient funds to ‘discharge of his debt’ accrued during his stay in England.Footnote ⁵⁹ The certificate also implied that Comnenus had expressed pro-episcopalian sympathies to Gunning and Chamberline, who wrote that they thought it fit to recommend him:

After the Restoration, Comnenus publicly demonstrated his episcopalian sympathies. In 1663, a gout-ridden Comnenus was drawing a pension from John Cosin, bishop of Durham and, at some point after 1660, he produced a poem in praise of ‘Gods sacred guift the Prelacy’, in which he decried the recent times when ‘Sordid Mechanicks boldly did invade’ the hierarchy of the church.Footnote ⁶¹ Today, this poem is part of MS 688 in Lambeth Palace Library, a collection of miscellaneous documents dating from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. The manuscript was bound when Thomas Tenison was archbishop of Canterbury (1694–1715) and was recorded amongst Tenison’s manuscripts in a 1720 library catalogue.Footnote ⁶² The poem appears to be a fair copy, written out in a neat hand, in English. It is entitled, ‘Doron Ekklesiasikon’ followed by the English description: ‘A poemme written by a Grecian, the Bishop of Mount Sinai, nam’d, Anasstatius Comnenus’.Footnote ⁶³

The poem’s content and its custodial history suggest that it was written after the Restoration and designed to impress Comnenus’s episcopalian patrons; perhaps it was written at their instigation. As William White and Anthony Milton have recently argued, there were significant concerns within the episcopalian community after 1660 that Charles II would implement a broad-based church settlement designed to appease many of his new subjects, rather than a hardline episcopalian one.Footnote ⁶⁴ Just as Owen had been keen to have the support of a learned Greek priest for his arguments, so it is probable that Cosin, Gunning and Chamberline would have welcomed the appearance of Comnenus’s polemical poem, which insisted that the ‘Fair’st English Church’ with its episcopalian government possessed such an ‘Apostolike frame of Discipline; / That our Greeke Church, in thy faire face doth see, / Her selfe, when in her primitive purity’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Were the new king to read the poem, lines such as ‘Witnes Gods Hand! then Scisme cease dispute, / Gods hand writes BISHOPS, his owne Institute’ would leave no doubt that episcopacy was the divinely sanctioned and historically correct form of church government.Footnote ⁶⁶ Not only was rule by prelacy justified, but Comnenus drew a link between a robust church hierarchy and a secure English monarchy: the former was, he said, ‘The strong foundation, on w[hi]ch safely stands / The strength of Thrones, and golden peace of lands’.Footnote ⁶⁷ That the poem was part of Tenison’s collection and was written in, or translated into, English suggests that it circulated in episcopalian networks and may have been disseminated more widely to influence those deciding the ecclesiastical future of England. If, as seems likely, the work was a consequence of Comnenus’s association with episcopalian circles following the Restoration, then his standing as a learned Greek was being utilized in the same way as it had been by Owen, but to very different ends.

Comnenus’s case highlights how deep-rooted European attitudes to Greek Orthodoxy could be inflected by particular contextual issues; the same might be seen with Abbatios and the intersection of his project with mid-century English concerns with the propagation of the gospel, especially inside the universities. English interest in the propagation of the gospel in Britain and the wider world had long preceded the creation of the Republic, but was especially fervent during its rule.Footnote ⁶⁸ As has recently been argued by Jeremy Fradkin, ‘the early years of the English Commonwealth constituted an extraordinary evangelical moment’ when there was notable enthusiasm in the British Isles and New England for the promulgation of the gospel via education and preaching.Footnote ⁶⁹ This interest was not fully matched by government action, but, even so, a spate of acts was passed by the Rump Parliament for propagating the gospel pertaining to Wales, parts of northern England, Ireland and New England, through means such as education or the widespread employment of a financially supported preaching ministry.Footnote ⁷⁰ These schemes were very relevant to places of higher education, since they required an educated preaching ministry. As Charles Chauncey, the president of Harvard College in Massachusetts, explained: ‘if there should not be some supply by schools of learning, Gods people would soon be left without a teaching ministry.’Footnote ⁷¹

The leading figures of the English universities were fervent supporters of evangelism during the Commonwealth. Their zeal was exemplified by the certificates both Oxford and Cambridge produced in support of the propagation act for New England.Footnote ⁷² As these testimonials indicated, substantial parts of both universities’ governing bodies saw evangelism as part of Protestantism’s global fight against Roman Catholicism. This international attitude was evident in a 1649 certificate of Cambridge college heads encouraging contributions to the New England propagation scheme. Drawing on historical precedent and quoting Matthew 23: 15, they argued that the Pharisees had historically spared no pains in gathering converts for Judaism while the Jesuits ‘at this day refuse not to compasse Sea and Land for spreading of Popery’. Compared to these opponents, ‘Shall Christianity, shall Protestantisme finde fewer Zelots set on worke for their propagation? God forbid’.Footnote ⁷³ Such phrasing tapped into the tradition of anti-Catholicism which was a prominent presence in early modern English universities.Footnote ⁷⁴

Abbatios’s project was relevant to these English concerns for several reasons, including Roman Catholic missionary efforts in the Greek-speaking east. In 1573, the Roman Catholic Church founded the Congregation for the Dissemination of the Faith and began strenuous missionary work to the east as well as to the west.Footnote ⁷⁵ Roman Catholic evangelism in the Greek Orthodox world through education and proselytizing became one of the most pressing worries in the Orthodox Church of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁷⁶ In 1581, the Greek College of St Athanasius had been founded in Rome by Pope Gregory XIII. The College was established in order to train young men from the Orthodox east as Roman Catholic clergy before returning them to minister in their birthplaces.Footnote ⁷⁷ In Istanbul, a permanent Jesuit school giving free education in the vernacular was founded in 1609, greatly to the concern of the patriarch at the time, Kyrillos Loukaris. Loukaris noted the success of such schemes and the sophisticated arguments made by the Roman Catholic missionaries, processes aided by Propaganda Fide’s polyglot printing press at Rome, which, from 1628, began publishing books in Greek targeting the Greek Orthodox community.Footnote ⁷⁸

Abbatios’s translation of the Ecclesiarum Belgicarum Confessio was part of a reaction by a segment of the Orthodox Church against these Roman Catholic activities. This Orthodox response was closely associated with Patriarch Loukaris, a significant but complicated figure in the history of the Greek Orthodox Church, known for his efforts to promote closer connections with the Reformed communities of Europe.Footnote ⁷⁹ As highlighted by Vassa Kontouma’s important work on Patriarch Dositheus II (1641–1707), a figure known ‘pour combattre les avatars du calvinisme dans la théologie grecque de son époque’ (‘to combat the avatars of Calvinism in the Greek theology of his age’) but equally determined to avoid Roman Catholic encroachment in the east, Loukaris’s legacy was enormously controversial, and synods held in Constantinople (1642) and in Jerusalem (1672) issued anathemas against the supposedly pro-Calvinist 1629 Confession of Faith attributed to him.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, recent scholarship, especially by Ovidiu Olar and Richard Calis, has pushed back against former understandings of Loukaris as a pro-Protestant patriarch.Footnote ⁸¹ As Olar has pointed out, the purported Calvinism of Loukaris ‘présente beaucoup de traits particuliers’ (‘presents many particular traits’).Footnote ⁸² They have instead reinterpreted Loukaris, and documents such as his Confession of Faith, particularly by drawing attention to the geopolitical context of the Ottoman world. Their re-evaluation has introduced a more subtle understanding of the patriarch as an anti-Catholic leader, fiercely committed to administrative and pastoral work, who ‘wanted a reformation of his church and believed that Calvinism could provide a model, but he understood this reformation as a “renovation” and “restitution”, not as a conversion’.Footnote ⁸³

The dissemination of key texts in vernacular Greek was an important part of Loukaris’s plans for the revitalization of the Greek Orthodox Church in the face of Roman Catholic proselytization. During his various tenures of the patriarchate throne, he oversaw the introduction of a Greek printing press in Istanbul to publish religious works, and the production of an edition of the New Testament in Greek which was published in Geneva in 1638. Neither of these schemes proved successful: the press in Istanbul lasted less than two years before effectively ceasing operations in January 1628, while the vast majority of the Greek New Testaments remained in Geneva for a century due to a pay dispute with the printers.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, the notion of disseminating printed vernacular material in order to defend the Greek Orthodox Church against Roman Catholic encroachment survived amongst Loukaris’s faction, even after his death. Abbatios’s translation of the Ecclesiarum Belgicarum Confessio was part of this endeavour. As mentioned above, this important text had been printed in a bilingual Latin-Greek edition in 1627 and contained the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and some of the canons of the Synod of Dordrecht. It was intended to present a unified picture of the Reformed communities of western Europe to the Greek-speaking east and, by being translated into Greek vernacular, was intended to have a wide readership.

To the English university-men who were interested in Protestant propagation and wary of Roman Catholic expansion, Abbatios and his mission were of great interest. The translation of the Ecclesiarum Belgicarum Confessio was perceived by the Protestant powers as a way of disseminating Reformed doctrine in a readily accessible form.Footnote ⁸⁵ For these reasons, the Dutch had sponsored Abbatios and printed about 1,000 copies of his work for distribution.Footnote ⁸⁶ Many in England shared these attitudes, as shown by the generous welcome Abbatios enjoyed. While staying in Oxford, Abbatios attracted enough interest that a motion was made in the House of Commons for a public collection to be raised on his behalf.Footnote ⁸⁷ Perhaps significantly, the proposer of the motion was James Chaloner, a leading figure of Parliament’s Committee for Regulating the Universities, the pre-eminent committee for educational institutions of the Republic, suggesting that the motion may have originated in Oxford or Cambridge.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the end, nothing appears to have been done about the establishment of a national collection for Abbatios. However, its proposal reflects how intriguing Abbatios’s project was to his English hosts. This interest indicates how broader European attitudes to Orthodoxy, particularly its anti-Catholic potential, could be influenced by specific contextual concerns, in this case the propagation-moment during the English Republic.

The case studies of Abbatios and Comnenus offer evidence as to what it took for Greeks to be considered worthy recipients of charity. In particular, new archival materials, such as college financial records, have provided a valuable perspective on English attitudes to figures travelling from what they perceived to be the periphery of Christian Europe to its English centre. This article has argued that Greek travellers were treated with suspicion as potential fraudsters, but also with a curiosity which reflected a deep interest in Hellenic studies and the Greek Orthodox Church. The cases of both Abbatios and Comnenus also remind historians that the deep-rooted attitudes to Greeks in Protestant Europe could be inflected by the issues of a particular historical moment. Interest in the Greek Orthodox Church as an important reference point in confessional or ecclesiastical disputes was common across early modern Europe and Comnenus’s experience shows that England was no different. After being mined for information by John Owen for a polemical dispute with the Franciscan friar Vincent Canes, Comnenus seems to have become part of episcopalian efforts to shape the Restoration Church of England. Abbatios’s translation of the Ecclesiarum Belgicarum Confessio reflected a related, but different, type of interest in Greek Orthodoxy. Namely, the desire of Europe’s Reformed communities to pursue closer ties with their Greek peers and battle the common threat of global Catholicism. This was of particular relevance to the England of 1649 with the new regime investing much time and effort in schemes for the propagation of the gospel. Because Abbatios and Comnenus came from outside the mainstream of English life, they were of unusual interest and value to their English hosts, and it is apparent that Comnenus especially knew how to play to an audience. In many ways, it might be concluded that it was thanks to their marginality that the two men came to be seen as ‘true object[s] of Charity’ in seventeenth-century England.