Avi Liberman GRK doctoral researcher since 1 April "Il magnanimo cor e invitto io canto di colomba fedel che corse a morte". Sending missionaries from central Europe to Constantinople via the Mediterranean Sea constituted an important instrument for expanding Europe's political, economic, and religious influence in the Ottoman Empire.
In this context, religious envoys often served as political agents for their worldly sovereigns. Constantinople, a cultural melting pot in the early modern period, was one of the largest ports on the Mediterranean and the importance of trade was thus a decisive reason why so many foreign ambassadors and missionaries were sent to the Golden Horn. As Catholic missions in the Mediterranean were largely propagated after the Council of Trent, they were also conceived as a strategy to compete with the spread of Lutheran reformatory ideas.
The main activities of the missionaries were pastoral care of Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire and spreading the gospel. As the conversion of Muslims was prohibited, the missions focused on Christians under the sultan's rule. Evangelization required a high level of cultural accommodation and interconfessional communication. To analyse the various dimensions of these cultural and religious encounters, this study examines inter alia missionary correspondence and reports sent to the home provinces and Rome.
These documents were intended to be read by many persons across Europe and served to both edify and provide a template for missionary activity. As such, they often gave accounts of everyday and political events illuminating the complexity of early modern religious culture in the Mediterranean region.
This project deals with post-Tridentine missionary work among the byzantine communities of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Greek archipelago. It examines the interconfessional relationship between Catholic clerics, Lutheran and Reformed theologians, and Greek-Orthodox subjects of the sultan and traces the possibilities and limits of interconfessionality in early modern missionary enterprises. Email: christina. In both Catholic and Protestant regions of Europe, a large number of monasteries were disbanded in the 16th and 17th centuries.
