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Arabic Catholicism in the Seventeenth Century
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Bruce Masters |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 By the late eighteenth century, an indigenous Catholic mercantile class existed in Ottoman Arab areas such as Syria, making trade and Catholicism almost synonymous. How did this situation come about? In this extract from his book Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, Bruce Masters offers a broad survey of the rise of Catholicism in the area during the preceding century. |
 he capitulatory treaty signed between France and the Ottoman Empire in 1604 granted Roman Catholic pilgrims and priests the right to visit the holy places in Palestine and permission for French clerics to take up residence in Jerusalem. The Ottomans had routinely renewed the privileges negotiated by St. Francis, but the insertion of France as the guardian of the holy places was an innovation. The treaty of 1673 extended diplomatic status to priests and religious serving the French consuls in "Galata, Izmir, Sidon, Alexandria and wherever else Frenchmen resided" under the terms of the capitulatory treaties. These agreements provided the legal pretext under which Latin priests would enter the sultans' realms, openly wearing their clerical garb. France was recognized in these protocols as enjoying pride of place among the Christian nations represented at the Porte. It would persist in its role as the official protector of the Empire's Christians, and especially Catholics, until Russia challenged that preeminence and claimed the right to protect the empire's Orthodox Christians after the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774. |
Divided loyalties?
Beyond French intentions and papal ambitions, a necessary condition for the success of the missionary effort was the official Ottoman attitude toward the transfer of loyalties by the dhimmi population from patriarch to pope. Initially, the authorities had no clear intent to limit the missionaries' activities other than to be wary of any change in the status of a non-Muslim which might undermine either the sultan's sovereignty or his tax base. The established Muslim legal tradition recognized no distinction between the Christian sects. Rather the prevalent response of Muslim religious scholars to cases involving the defection of an individual Christian from one sect to another was to invoke the saying ascribed to the Prophet, "Unbelief constitutes one nation" and dismiss the complaint. The officials in the sultan's entourage in Istanbul, in contrast to the nonchalance of the Islamic legal establishment, had to be more keenly aware of the internecine nature of Christian communal politics. They had little other choice with the Orthodox Patriarchate (patrikhane) figuratively, if no longer literally, on their back doorstep. But for most of the seventeenth century, the Porte remained neutral in Christian squabbles and at times even moved to stop Orthodox harassment of Catholic priests in Palestine and the Balkans. |
Abetted by this official ambivalence, the Latin Catholics established Aleppo as their headquarters for the Syrian mission after initially considering Damascus. That choice was conditioned in no small part by the fact that there was no consul resident in the latter city. The first Catholic missionaries to take up permanent residence in Aleppo arrived in 1627. They found their warmest response from the Armenians. In the late sixteenth century, the Catholicos of Sis, Azariya, received Leonardo Abel, the emissary of Pope Gregory XII, and signed a profession of the Catholic faith. His reign set in motion a tradition of Armenian hospitality toward the Catholic missionaries in Syria that would last throughout the seventeenth century. The ranking Greek Orthodox clergyman in Aleppo, the Metropolitan Meletius (Malatyus) Karma, also initially welcomed the Roman Catholics. Karma allowed the Jesuit, Jérôme Queyrot, to open a school in his residence in Judayda in 1629. When Meletius was elevated to the patriarchate of Antioch in 1634, he invited the missionaries to establish a second school in Damascus. |
There are signs not all the Christians of Aleppo greeted the Catholic missionaries with open arms. Several Latin priests were arrested in 1633 by the city's governor for holding religious services in their residence, a charge which could only have been initiated by their fellow Christians. The priests were soon released after the European consuls in the city protested their arrest. They resumed administering the sacraments to the city's Christians in the Armenian cathedral. Following this incident, France's ambassador in Istanbul succeeded in convincing the Porte to issue a berat naming the Catholic priests in Aleppo as chaplains to the consul. The number of those claiming to be chaplains must have raised more than a few eyebrows in the governor's saray (seraglio), however. In 1680, the French consul, the chevalier Laurent d'Arvieux reported that there were twenty-four Latin Catholic priests and friars in the city but only fourteen resident French merchants. It would seem that the French merchants' spiritual needs in the city were extremely well attended. |
French activism in support of the missionary activity substantially increased with the consulship of Frangois Picquet in Aleppo (1652-62). Picquet was the first to link France's economic and political interests in the Ottoman Empire directly to the Catholic cause. His consulship also coincided with a growing interest among the leadership of all the Eastern churches for dialogue with Roman Catholic clerics. In 1647, a council of Damascene laity and clergy elected an Aleppine, Makarios (Makaryus) III al-Zacim, as Patriarch of Antioch. He had previously served as metropolitan in Aleppo where he often hosted the Latin missionaries. Although he publicly made no move to confirm it, the Latin priests were confident of his support, as well as that of Khachadur, the reigning Armenian Catholicos of Sis. Consul Picquet boasted in his dispatches to Paris that all three senior clerics of the Eastern churches in Aleppo, i.e. Orthodox (Rum), Armenian, and Jacobite (Suryani), were now "Catholic." It is, however, not at all clear that he was correct in his assessment. |
The Latins' greatest success in terms of numbers of converts came among the Jacobites. By the end of the seventeenth century, one missionary source estimated that three-quarters of the community in Aleppo were Catholics. The lists kept by the missionaries of their converts also indicate that the Jacobites accepted Catholicism in numbers disproportionate to their share of the total Christian population in the city during the first century of Catholic missionary activity. We can speculate that the Jacobites, who were largely a community of recent migrants, might have been more open to a new spiritual dispensation as they were physically in new surroundings and far removed from their traditional hierarchy. A Catholic faction emerged among the Greek Orthodox community in Aleppo and Damascus as well, but it is tempting to see the Rum's interest in the Catholic option as coming at least initially as an expression of a strong localist sentiment, rather than an ideological shift to the Latins. The Aleppo community was much wealthier than their Damascene counterparts and they must have resented the preponderant voice the laity and clergy of Damascus exercised in choosing those who would sit on the throne of Antioch. That rivalry surfaced in 1672 with the death of Patriarch Makarios III al-Zacim. |
Intrigue and struggle
Initially, things went well for the Aleppines as the Orthodox of Damascus elected as patriarch, Makarios' grandson Qustantin who took the patriarchal name of Kyrillos (Kirilyus), even though he was, according to some accounts, still a minor. Kyrillos' opponents feared the growing assertiveness of the Catholic party among the Rum of Syria and appealed to the Patriarch of Constantinople to nullify the election as they argued Kyrillos was too immature to contain the Latin contagion. In response, Constantinople replaced Kyrillos with Neophytos (Nawifitus), the nephew of Euthymios (Ifthimiyus) al-Saqizi who had preceded Makarios III on the patriarchal throne. This action which marked the first direct intervention of the Ecumenical Patriarch into the affairs of the see of Antioch was not without irony, as it was Neophytos who would turn out to have Catholic sympathies. The struggle between the two men did not end there as Kyrillos al-Zacim had strong support among the Rum merchants of Aleppo and their money was freely expended on his behalf in both Damascus and Istanbul. Unable to compete financially in what had become a bidding war for the office of patriarch, Neophytos abdicated in Kyrillos' favor in 1681. All was not completely secure, however, as Kyrillos' opponents were able to effect his dismissal twice more during a reign which lasted until 1720. |
In the opening salvo of the campaign to depose Neophytos, a large delegation, identified simply as belonging to the ta'ifat al-Rum, affirmed before the chief qadi of Aleppo on September 3, 1678 that Neophytos, whom they acknowledged as their reigning patriarch, was ignorant of the rules of their faith and did not understand Arabic. Citing affidavits registered at court in the previous year, they claimed he had also taken money from the community illegally. The Rum then attested that their true patriarch was Kyrillos who was present at court. The delegation added for good measure that Kyrillos knew all the rules of their faith, spoke excellent Arabic, and possessed outstanding morals. The registry of their affidavit is significant on several counts. Firstly, the fact that it took place at all indicates that the representative of the Ottoman state, the chief qadi of Aleppo, was still unconcerned as to the process by which the Christians chose their leaders. If the Rum of Aleppo were willing to assert that Kyrillos was properly their patriarch, he was. It did not seemingly matter that another man had been confirmed in that position by an imperial patent. Secondly, among Neophytos' more telling alleged failings was his ignorance of Arabic. This was undoubtedly an exaggeration. Although his family was originally from Chios, (hence his designation in Arabic Saqizi, or Sakizli in Turkish) he had grown up in Damascus where he was educated by the Jesuits. It is doubtful that they would have neglected training such a potentially prominent protégé as the nephew of the patriarch in proper Arabic. Nevertheless, the charge served to accentuate the fact that Neophytos was an outsider in the eyes of his flock in Aleppo. |
For the community in Aleppo, it was undoubtedly more significant that Kyrillos was an Aleppine than that he was an Arab. We know from a case initiated in 1679 by his brother Hananiyya that the family maintained a residence in the city. Furthermore, both brothers were actively engaged in the silk trade and had ties to many of Aleppo's newly emerging Christian commercial elite. Finally, it is significant that the Aleppines voiced their choice for a man who was at that time a confirmed "traditionalist" while Neophytos tentatively was in the Catholic camp. Their choice of candidate for the patriarchal see is perhaps an indicator that the Catholic party among the Rum was weak in the city. It is more likely, however, that Kyrillos' place of birth and continuing connections in the city, rather than his theology or mother tongue, provided the motivation for Aleppo's Rum merchants to support his claim. |
Despite Kyrillos' triumph, the Catholic party throughout the empire was given a major boost in February 1690, when the French ambassador in Istanbul obtained an imperial decree, directed to the governors of the provinces of Egypt, Aleppo, Damascus, Tripoli, Diyarbakir, Mosul, Raqqa, Baghdad, Erzurum, and Cyprus, informing them that the Jesuits and other French priests who were teaching the principles of the Christian faith to the people of the Rum, Armenian, and Coptic sects (mezhebler) were to be left alone. Neither government officials nor members of the other Christian religious communities would be suffered to interfere with their work. Not only was the term millet absent from the order, but the French were implicitly given the right to "convert" members of the Eastern-rite churches to Catholicism. The order came in the wake of a major Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Hapsburgs and, undoubtedly, reflected an attempt by the sultan to curry favor with France. Although this was the first time that the Catholic missionaries were given explicit permission to proselytize openly, it is also clear that there was concurrently an awakening concern in Istanbul that the Catholics were indeed subversive. |
Tradition and innovation
That fear was substantiated in 1695 when the Venetians attempted to capture the island of Chios. Chios had been home to a relatively compact Roman Catholic community whose autonomy from the Greek Orthodox Church had been recognized by the Ottomans when they seized the island from Genoa in 1558. But the Catholics on the island became suspect as a potential "fifth-column" in the aftermath of the failed Venetian assault when their leading clergy on the island decamped with the invaders. This provided the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in the capital, who viewed the island as falling within his proper sphere of influence, with the weapon he needed to lash out against the Latin missionary movement. |
The Orthodox clergy pointed to the intrinsic "foreignness" of Catholicism, invariably labeled in their polemic as Firenk Dini ("the religion of the Franks"). They, in turn, emphasized their own loyalty to the sultan. Perhaps more significantly given the conservative nature of Ottoman public policy, the Orthodox polemic stressed that they were the true heirs of the Christian tradition in the East, while the Catholics represented the sin of innovation. The sultan ultimately agreed with the Orthodox whichever argument he found the more compelling. He could not expel the Latin priests, however, as the treaties with France provided for their presence. But he, and his successors, would make sure that their contacts with local Christians were curtailed. Periodic orders followed over the next century which forbade Latin priests to educate, treat the sick, or offer sacraments to Ottoman Christians in Syria, in what was a stunning reversal of the freedoms granted in 1690. |
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