The Archive of Orientalism and Its Keepers

THE ARCHIVE OF ORIENTALISM AND ITS
KEEPERS: RE-IMAGINING THE HISTORIES
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OF ARABIC MANUSCRIPTS IN EARLY
MODERN EUROPE*
Among the Arabic manuscripts preserved today in the Biblioteca Nacional in
Madrid, MS 13 stands as a witness to the contributions made by Ottoman
subjects to the development of early modern orientalism. Catalogued in 1889
by the Spanish historian and orientalist Francisco Guillén Robles, the work is
a copy of the Kitāb al- h· ulla al-siyarā’, a biographical dictionary by the medi-
eval Andalusian scholar Ibn al-Abbār (d. 1260). We learn something inter-
esting about the history of this manuscript on the last folio where an Arabic
colophon reveals that the copy had been ‘completed by the hand of the pres-
byter Būlus, son of Ilyās al-Haddār of Laodicea, of the Maronite nation, on 22
April 1765’. Colophons, short passages inscribed by a copyist at the end of a
manuscript that present the circumstances of the manuscript’s completion,
often end with such information. However, the scribe of MS 13 also included
a further detail for anyone likely to cast their eyes on the manuscript.
Let it be known to all that this manuscript and many others, copied
by my own hand, have not yet been catalogued for reasons that are
unnecessary to relate. But if God had willed it that I could remain in
this country, I would not cease until I had catalogued every last
manuscript here. However it seems that my stay here is not
secure, owing to my indiscretions and my lack of correspondents.1
The colophon was deemed important enough for another scribe, Ilyās Shidiyāq,
to comment on it years later. Like al-Haddār, Shidiyāq was also a Maronite who
had come to Madrid in 1786, and he served as a copyist and librarian there until
his death in 1829. He must have stumbled across the Arabic colophon when
* This article draws on research conducted for the project Stories of Survival: Recovering the
Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World, which is supported
by funding from a European Research Council Starting Grant under the European
Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no.
638578).
1
For a description of the manuscript, see MS XIII in F. Guillén Robles, Catálogo de los
manuscritos Árabes existentes en la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid (Madrid, 1889), 8–9; it
is catalogued today as MS 4897, and the Arabic colophon can be found on p. 374.
Past and Present (2016), Supplement 11 ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2017
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://crea-
tivecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.
ARCHIVE OF ORIENTALISM AND ITS KEEPERS 91
leafing through the pages of MS 13 because he jotted down a Spanish translation

of it on a separate folio of the manuscript. He said nothing further, however,
about al-Haddār’s ‘indiscretions’, and the same silence was also preserved by a
third scribe, José Antonio Pellicer, who in August 1795 added his own note to

that which had been left behind by Shidiyāq. As Pellicer explained it, al-Haddār
had worked for many years as a scribe in the library before deciding to leave
Spain — he does not explain why — and to travel onwards to Portugal where he
would teach Arabic at Coimbra until his death in 1779.2
Three individuals, three marginal notes — yet we would know nothing at
all about the scribe of MS 13 and his ‘indiscretions’ were it not for the fact that
the Biblioteca Nacional also preserves an archive of records pertaining to all of
its employees. Here, in a file related to the Arabic scribe, we learn that al-
Haddār was banished from Spain in 1779 after having been found guilty of a
fraud involving a circle of Eastern Christians with links to the library.3 The
affair involved a document forged by al-Haddār, which purported to be a
letter from the Patriarch of Antioch recommending that one of al-Haddār’s
friends be issued with a licence to collect alms in the New World. Driven out
of Spain, al-Haddār took refuge in Portugal where he was appointed to a
lectureship in Arabic and Syriac. Even today, al-Haddār is regarded as one of
the early founders of Portuguese orientalism, although it is unclear whether
his contemporaries at Coimbra ever knew of the scandal that brought an end
to his decade-long career as a record-keeper in Madrid.4
Scribe, migrant, record-keeper, orientalist and suspected forger, the career
of Būlus al-Haddār captures many of the themes raised in this essay: the
contributions of informants and experts from the Ottoman world to the
development of manuscript collections in Europe; the importance of archives
and libraries in wider social histories of migration and mobility; and the
potential overlap between the practice of record-keeping and the act of
2
Shidiyāq’s note (explicacion) begins with the words ‘Hizo esta Copia D. Pablo Hodar’ on
the eighth (unnumbered) folio of the manuscript, and Pellicer’s comments follow im-
mediately afterwards. For a sketch of Shidiyāq’s career, see Mariano Arribas Palau, ‘La
llegada a España del Maronita Elias Scidiac’, Murgetana, cxxxiii (1991).
3
‘Expediente causado contra D. Francisco Araón, de nación maronita, contra D. Juan
Amón y D. Pablo Hodar, individuos de la Biblioteca Real’, Biblioteca Nacional de España,
Madrid (hereafter BNE), Archivo de Secretarı́a, 35–1.
4
On the affair, see Marı́a Paz Torres, ‘Pablo Hodar, escribiente de Árabe en la Biblioteca
Real, y su relación con dos falsificaciones del XVIII’, Al-Andalus Magreb, vi (1998);
Nasser Gemayel, ‘Bulus al-Haddar, alias Pablo Paulo Hodar, moine Antonin Maronite
1720–1780’, Parole de l’Orient, xxvii (2002). On his career in Portugal, see Manuel
Augusto Rodrigues, D. Paulo Hodar presbı´tero maronita professor de lı´nguas orientais
na Universidade de Coimbra (1773–1780) (Coimbra, 1985).
92 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 11
recording the self. Clearly, the margins of oriental manuscripts tell stories
about the archive of orientalism and the circumstances of its production.
Nevertheless, colophons in oriental collections in Europe have rarely been the
subject of any systematic study. Instead, scholars have tended to focus on the

content of oriental manuscripts and how they contributed to developments
in European scientific, historical and religious thought. The reason is not
surprising: the sheer size and distribution of such sources, scattered as they
are across thousands of manuscripts in dozens of archives — and not easily
susceptible to the technology of scanning and text recognition that has revo-
lutionized the study of early modern Europe — makes for a formidable task.
Even so, al-Haddār’s colophon reveals just how valuable are such small details
when it comes to reconstructing the social history of the earliest oriental
collections in Europe, not to mention the record-keepers who copied, trans-
lated and managed these collections.
Indeed, a social history of oriental manuscript collections promises to
transform our understanding of orientalism. Long the preserve of intellectual
historians, the study of early modern orientalism traditionally has focused on
‘knowledge of the East’ as it developed among a circle of scholars based in
European universities and centres of learning. Often told as a story of
European curiosity and its extension to the distant shores of the
Mediterranean, it has also been a story of adventurers: triumphant monarchs
such as Louis XIV or enterprising companies such as the Dutch East India
Company and their collaboration with antiquaries and explorers in pursuit of
manuscripts and antiquities. In recent years, however, the study of oriental-
ism has experienced something of a major transformation in at least three
important ways. Firstly, where the historiography has tended to focus on
printed works, recent approaches have paid more attention to the importance
of manuscripts in the study of the East.5 Secondly, there has been an expan-
sion in the range of actors considered to be involved in orientalism.
Merchants, chaplains, informants, agents and a host of intermediaries have
complemented the earlier study of orientalists and their libraries.6 Finally,
and perhaps most importantly, there has been a dynamic reassessment of the
5
Compare, for example, G. J. Toomer’s interest in printed works in Eastern Wisedome and
Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), especially
chs. 2 and 3, with Jan Loop’s meticulous study of manuscript culture in Johann Heinrich
Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2013).
6
For examples, see Alastair Hamilton, Maurits H. van den Boogert and Bart Westerweel
(eds.), The Republic of Letters and the Levant (Leiden, 2005); William Bulman, Anglican
Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and its Empire, 1648–1715
(Cambridge, 2015); and Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World (Harvard, 2015).
social spaces of orientalism. Historians now recognize that knowledge of the

East circulated far beyond the confines of universities and libraries and in
myriad forms ranging from language study in secondary schools to popular
ethnographies of the East to vernacular translations of the Qur’ān.7

Drawing on the momentum of these developments, this essay engages
with a wide variety of issues broadly related to record-keeping in order to
explore how the social history of archives might contribute to a reassess-
ment of early modern orientalism. It does so by focusing on the people and
practices that lurked beneath the development of oriental manuscript col-
lections in Europe. In particular, the focus here is on the ways in which these
collections were shaped by individuals, traditions and practices based in the
Ottoman Empire. Part I explores the mechanics behind this process: orien-
tal collections in Europe were built around the inheritance of Ottoman
family archives, pieced together with the help of Ottoman agents, inter-
preted according to the tools of Ottoman scribal and bibliographic trad-
itions, and assembled from new, original and sometimes even forged works
composed by Ottoman subjects in Europe. In this way, the social history of
archives enables us to move beyond the idea of orientalism as a phenom-
enon emanating purely from the interests and preoccupations of European
thought, and towards a vision of it as a set of processes in deep conversation
with the Ottoman world. In part II, I focus on the particular challenges
raised by the presence of oriental manuscripts in Europe, and the contri-
butions of one category of record-keepers, Eastern Christians, in respond-
ing to them. Finally, in part III, I suggest a few ways in which these
collections also contribute to our understanding of wider phenomena in
social history. For individuals such as al-Haddār who had left their commu-
nities in Aleppo, Mosul and Damascus, record-keeping offered at least one
means of survival: it helped them secure a livelihood to support the new and
often tenuous existences that they carved out for themselves in Europe. The
accounts they left behind of their experiences — scattered today across the
very manuscripts on which they worked — provide a poignant window into
the experience of a category of migrants in Europe about whom we would
otherwise know almost nothing.
7
Asaph Ben Tov, ‘The Academic Study of Arabic in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-
Century Protestant Germany: A Preliminary Sketch’, in Mordechai Feingold (ed.),
History of Universities (Oxford, 2015); Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton and Charles
Burnett (eds.), The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe (Leiden,
2016); and the collection of articles in Aurélien Girard (ed.), Connaıˆtre l’Orient en Europe
au XVIIe siècle (special issue of XVIIe Siècle, cclxviii, 2015), especially the contribution by
Pier Mattia Tommasino, ‘Lire et traduire le Coran dans le Grand-duché de Toscane’.
I
THE ASSEMBLING OF ORIENTAL MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS IN EUROPE
The presence of documents in oriental languages was always a matter of
interest to more than just scholars and librarians in Europe. Already in

1590, Richard Hakluyt could refer in his second edition of the Voyages to
having consulted some seventeen Turkish documents in England, among
them imperial decrees (firmans), letters of safe-conduct, and orders issued
by Ottoman officials, which he presented to his readers in English, Latin and
Italian translation. Centuries later, in a masterful feat of philological recon-
struction, the orientalist Paul Wittek would demonstrate how Hakluyt’s pos-
session of these documents owed something to informal exchanges of
manuscripts among English merchants and diplomats.8 Long before global
historians recast the early modern past in the guise of a ‘connected world’,
early modern writers conjured up their own visions of how the circulation of
manuscripts linked Europe to the Middle East. In 1605, Miguel Cervantes
explained to his readers how he had stumbled upon the stories of Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza in an Arabic manuscript in a market in
Toledo.9 Lest we think such fantasies were only possible in the unique context
of Spain, Giovanni Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy — a popular work
that circulated in Italian, English and French in the late seventeenth century
— purported to be the translations of a secret cache of Arabic letters written
by an Ottoman spy and discovered in a room in Paris.10 Whether regarded as
fact or fiction, such stories reflected the plausible ubiquity of oriental docu-
ments in Europe, at least in the imagination of contemporary readers.
We still lack a complete picture of how oriental manuscript collections
developed across Europe in this period, and indeed how this documentary
presence varied from one part of Europe to another.11 Even so, it is clear that
the early development of oriental collections in Europe owed something to
particular instances of random and unexpected acquisitions, many of which
occurred in very local and specific circumstances such as in the course of war,
piracy and diplomacy. In July 1612, for example, a Spanish fleet captured the
8
Paul Wittek, ‘The Turkish Documents in Hakluyt’s Voyages’, Bulletin of the Institute of
Historical Research, xix (1942).
9
As he explained it, he found a moor to translate the manuscript for him and discovered it
to be the ‘History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an
Arab historian’. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (London,
2005), 67.
10
Anonymous, Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy who Lived Five and Forty Years Undiscovered at
Paris (London, 1687).
11
For one attempt, see Stephan Roman, The Development of Islamic Library Collections in
Western Europe and North America (London, 1990).
ship of a French corsair that only a couple of weeks earlier had stolen a
collection of some 4,000 manuscripts belonging to Muley Zidan, the Sultan
of Morocco. These manuscripts were eventually deposited in the Escorial
Library, forming the nucleus of one of Europe’s greatest collections of

Arabic manuscripts.12 The Escorial’s collection reflected an Iberian context
of interactions with North Africa that had little in common, for example, with
the sort of documents obtained by other European states in the course of war
and diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire. Along the frontier that separated
the Ottomans from the Habsburgs, for example, manuscripts were some-
times acquired during specific battles, and they might include a wide array of
documents ranging from chancery registers to imperial edicts to scholarly
works in Turkish.13 Similarly, Venetian, English, French and Dutch diplo-
mats could consult in their own archives collections of Ottoman firmans,
letters and even fatwas that had been assembled by previous ambassadors.14
These collections are only beginning to be studied in any systematic way, but
they highlight the extent to which the earliest acquisition of oriental manu-
scripts in Europe was as much a reflection of active European interests in the
East as it was a consequence of more basic factors such as chance and good
luck.
Alongside such ‘inherited’ collections of documents, the seventeenth cen-
tury witnessed the start of active and systematic efforts by several individuals
and states to seek out, copy, collect and transfer manuscripts from the
Ottoman Empire to Europe. Diplomatic and merchant networks played a
crucial role as conduits that facilitated the movement of oriental manuscripts
to Europe. Some of the earliest Arabic manuscripts acquired in England, for
example, were obtained by Edward Pococke, a one-time chaplain to the
Levant Company who drew on his contacts in Aleppo and Istanbul to procure
manuscripts long after his return to Oxford.15 Likewise, French reforms in the
pursuit of a state archive resulted as much in the centralization of the
12
See Daniel Hershenzon, ‘Traveling Libraries: The Arabic Manuscripts of Muley Zidan
and the Escorial Library’, Journal of Early Modern History, xviii (2014).
13
Claudia Romer, ‘Contemporary European Translations of Ottoman Documents and
Vice Versa (15th–17th Centuries)’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae,
lxi, 1–2 (2008); in another context, Robert Jones, ‘Piracy, Wars, and the Acquisition of
Arabic Manuscripts in Renaissance Europe’, Manuscripts of the Middle East, ii (1987).
14
See, for example, Jan Schmidt, ‘French-Ottoman Relations in the Early Modern Period
and The John Rylands Library MSS Turkish 45 & 46’, Turcica: revue d’études turques, xxxi
(1999); John-Paul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London
and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford, 2013), 53–64.
15
G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning, chs. 4–5.
collection of information about the East as the desire, in the words of one
scholar, to ‘divest the East of all its manuscripts and rarities’.16 Some of the
earliest oriental manuscripts acquired by the Bibliothèque du roi originated in
the missions of French agents such as Johann Michael Wansleben (1671–2),

François Pétis de La Croix (1670–6), Antoine Galland (1670–3, 1677, 1679)
and Paul Lucas (1699–1703, 1704–8, 1714–17).17 The success of these indi-
vidual missions complemented similar efforts being carried out on a daily
level by diplomatic staff based permanently at European embassies and con-
sulates in the Ottoman Empire. During his tenure as Dutch ambassador in
Istanbul, for example, Levinus Warner assembled one of the largest collec-
tions of oriental manuscripts of his time, which remains today a core part of
the collection of oriental manuscripts at the University of Leiden.18
The importance of the seventeenth century is reflected in the fact that some
of the earliest attempts to catalogue Arabic manuscripts also took place in this
period. Indeed, the development of what we would today call the first ‘union’
catalogues of manuscript collections included sections on Arabic manu-
scripts; these catalogues deserve further attention as they provide intriguing
snapshots into the development of oriental collections in Europe in their
infancy.19 What is less obvious when surveying these early catalogues, how-
ever, is just how much the creation of these collections owed to individuals
and practices based in the Ottoman Empire. In most cases it remains difficult,
if not impossible, to determine how any given manuscript made its way from
the copyist who created it in the Ottoman Empire to its current location in a
European collection. As such, a host of questions related to the social history
of these collections remain: how did Europeans dispatched to the Ottoman
Empire locate their manuscripts, who assisted them in this work, and indeed
how did they even know what they were looking for? Answers to these ques-
tions are complicated by the fact that even in their own time, European
16
Alastair Hamilton, ‘‘To Divest the East of all its Manuscripts and Rarities’’: The
Unfortunate Embassy of Henri Gournay de Marcheville’, in Hamilton, van den
Boogert and Westerweel (eds.), Republic of Letters and the Levant; more generally, see
Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System
(Ann Arbor, 2009).
17
Henri Auguste Omont, Missions archéologiques françaises en Orient au XVIIe et XVIIIe
siècles (Paris, 1902).
18
Arnoud Vrolijk, Jan Schmidt, and Karin Scheper (eds.), Turcksche boucken: de oosterse
verzameling van Levinus Warner, Nederlands diplomaat in zeventiende-eeuws Istanbul ¼
The Oriental Collection of Levinus Warner, Dutch Diplomat in Seventeenth-Century
Istanbul (Eindhoven, 2012).
19
Richard Ovenden, ‘Catalogues of the Bodleian Library and Other Collections’, in Ian Gadd
(ed.), The History of Oxford University Press: Volume 1: Beginnings to 1780 (Oxford, 2013).
collectors downplayed the contributions of the Ottoman agents and inform-

ants who assisted them. For example, the French antiquary Paul Lucas en-
listed the help of a young Maronite named Hanna Diyāb during his travels
across the Levant and North Africa, but neither Hanna nor his presence

alongside Lucas is ever mentioned in Lucas’s published account of his voy-
ages.20 What little work has been done in this area, however, highlights the
importance of Arabic sources in answering some of these questions. A case in
point is Hilary Kilpatrick’s close study of the correspondence and manu-
scripts of Edward Pococke, which has revealed how Pococke’s acquisitions
relied, in the first instance, on the suggestions of a handful of agents and
experts based in Aleppo, most notably a Muslim scholar known only as
Darwı̄sh Ah·mad.21 Although Pococke had a sense of what manuscripts inter-
ested him, Darwı̄sh Ah·mad also acted as an adviser and connoisseur who
steered Pococke towards some of the most popular contemporary works
circulating among Ottoman scholars in Aleppo. As Kilpatrick rightly
argues for Darwı̄sh Ah·mad and others like him, such individuals played ‘an
active part behind the scenes in the development of Arabic manuscript col-
lections’ in Europe.22 Any history of orientalism that ignores such figures
remains incomplete, misshapen and disingenuous.
Not only did European collections reflect the tastes of agents and biblio-
philes in the Ottoman Empire, but they were also shaped by specific, local
practices of recording, archiving and collecting in the Ottoman world.
Because European collections were built as much around the acquisition of
single manuscripts as of entire manuscript collections, certain family archives
and endowments are disproportionately represented in them today. In a
string of purchases, the Dutch ambassador Levinus Warner, for example,
managed singlehandedly to acquire the personal libraries of several
Ottoman officials he had known in Istanbul, among them that of the
famous scholar and bibliophile Kātib Çelebi.23 Even smaller, private
20
Paule Fahmé-Thiéry, Bernard Heyberger and Jérôme Lentin (eds.), D’Alep à Paris: les
pérégrinations d’un jeune Syrien au temps de Louis XIV (Paris, 2015), 10.
21
Hilary Kilpatrick, ‘Arabic Private Correspondence from Seventeenth-Century Syria: The
Letters to Edward Pococke’, The Bodleian Library Record, xxiii (2010).
22
Ibid., 31. For a masterful study of a similar figure, see Hilary Kilpatrick and G. J. Toomer,
‘Niqūlāwus al-H·alabı̄ (c.1611–c.1661): A Greek Orthodox Syrian Copyist and his Letters to
Pococke and Golius’, Lias: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources, xlii (2016).
23
Jan Schmidt, ‘Between Author and Library Shelf: The Intriguing History of Some Middle
Eastern Manuscripts Acquired by Public Collections in the Netherlands prior to 1800’, in
Hamilton, van den Boogert and Westerweel (eds.), The Republic of Letters and the
Levant, 32.
collections were built around the libraries of particular individuals: the ducal
library in Gotha holds a collection of Arabic manuscripts that belonged to an
otherwise little-known Christian doctor from Aleppo.24 In other cases,
Ottoman subjects travelling to Europe carried their libraries with them, as

was the case in 1577 when Ignatius Ni‘matallah, the Syrian Orthodox
Patriarch of Antioch, brought his collection of manuscripts with him to
Rome.25 In this way, oriental manuscript collections in Europe became the
handmaidens of Ottoman collections, and the result was that they came to
include the archives and libraries of certain (sorts of) individuals and families
while entirely ignoring others. Although the history of archives in the Middle
East is still in its infancy, what is clear is that oriental collections in Europe
were shaped in fundamental ways by practices that had a life of their own in
the Ottoman Empire.26 This is another reminder of the potential value of
collaboration between archivists, European historians and specialists in
Arabic studies.
Where the history of orientalism has tended to privilege the study of single
manuscript works of scholarly or literary importance, what is perhaps most
striking about this period is just how wide a spectrum of ‘everyday writing’
found its way into oriental collections in Europe.27 An under-studied but
important subject is the way in which this phenomenon emerged out of the
religious and confessional divides of the period. The Reformation unleashed a
renewed interest in Eastern Christianity, not least because the practices and
beliefs of the Eastern churches could prove useful and instrumental in po-
lemics between Protestants and Catholics. Among the earliest acquisitions in
European collections, therefore, we find an array of documents produced in
the context of daily life such as notes on liturgical practices, responses to
specific questions of doctrine, and even testaments of faith signed by
Eastern Christian patriarchs, bishops and priests. Fierce contemporary de-
bates, for example about the perpetual orthodoxy of the Eastern Christians,
24
These manuscripts were probably obtained from the doctor’s sons by the German ex-
plorer Ulrich Jasper Seetzen. See Feras Krimsti, Der Istanbul-Reisebericht des Aleppiner
ArztesH· annāt·-T·abı¯b (1764/65). Alltagsbilder und identitäre Verortungen (Freie
Universität Berlin Ph.D thesis, 2016), 68–79. I am grateful to Feras Krimsti for sharing
this information with me.
25
Giorgio Levi della Vida, Documenti intorno alle relaxioni delle chiese orientali con la S. Sede
durante il pontificato di Gregorio XIII (Rome, 1948), 1–113.
26
For one example of the promise of this field, see Konrad Hirschler, ‘From Archive to
Archival Practices: Rethinking the Preservation of Mamluk Administrative Documents’,
Journal of the American Oriental Society, cxxxvi (2016).
27
I borrow the term here from Roger Bagnall, Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East
(Berkeley, 2012).
revolved around the interpretation of such documents as crucial pieces of

evidence.28 It is interesting to consider how such requests meant that
Europeans were complicit in the act of creating an archive of Eastern
Christianity, which even today shapes how historians study the history of

the Middle East. Already in the 1720s, these documents were of such import-
ance that the Vatican scholar Joseph Assemani, himself a Maronite from
Mount Lebanon, endeavoured to complete a detailed catalogue and descrip-
tion of them in his Bibliotheca Orientalis.29 The sheer size of Assemani’s work
— which was published in Rome in nine massive folio volumes — indicates
the breadth and diversity of the Vatican’s collection as early as the eighteenth
century. Even today, the collection contains copies of medieval and early
modern documents that have not survived anywhere else.
Whether driven by the confessional debates of theologians or the political
designs of monarchs and state officials, this was a period during which Europe
was exposed to a wide range of documents from the Ottoman Empire, written
in languages still commanded by only a handful of European orientalists.
Purposeful use of such documents required a particular form of expertise —
not only in the strict sense of record-keeping but also in all the related prac-
tices of copying, translating, cataloguing and, perhaps most importantly,
determining the authenticity of a manuscript. The possession of these
Eastern records, therefore, opened a host of new problems: who would
read and translate these works? How might they be copied, organized and
managed? Who could authenticate and date these documents? Above all, who
could identify the priceless works while sifting through the ephemeral ones?
II
EXPERTS, INFORMANTS AND SCRIBES: THE CASE OF EASTERN CHRISTIANS
In principle, a wide range of individuals possessed the requisite skills needed to
engage with such problems including European orientalists, Muslim converts to
Christianity, and European captives who had spent time living in the Ottoman
Empire.30 But among such groups, Eastern Christians were especially well suited
28
See, for example, the attestations in Antoine Arnauld, La Perpetuité de la foy de l’Église
catholique touchant l’Eucharistie (Paris, 1714).
29
Giuseppe Simone Assemani, Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana, 9 vols. (Rome,
1719–28).
30
For examples of such figures, see the chapter on Diego de Urrea in Mercedes Garcı́a-
Arenal and Fernando Rodrı́guez Mediano, The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, The
Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism, trans. Consuelo López-
Morillas (Leiden, 2013), 225–44; Jocelyne Dakhlia and Wolfgang Kaiser (eds.), Les
Musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe: passages et contacts en Méditerranée (Paris,
to the challenges posed by Arabic manuscripts in European collections. This is

perhaps why several of the earliest catalogues of Arabic manuscripts were com-
pleted by Eastern Christians.31 These early efforts also reflect the presence of
Eastern Christians in Europe as part of a wider pattern of alms-collecting and

mobility in this period.32 For an Eastern Christian recently arrived to Europe,
record-keeping represented one of a range of employments available to indi-
viduals with the type of linguistic talents they commanded. Perhaps the most
important of these was the teaching of Arabic, Syriac and other oriental lan-
guages, as much at the level of university chairs and lectureships as in private
circles with small groups of students. Solomon Negri, a Damascene whose
presence in France is documented from the 1690s, spent over three decades of
his life moving between a range of posts in libraries and universities in France,
England, Germany, and Italy.33 Others, however, used their linguistic talents in
different ways: Būlus al-Haddār had spent a few years working as a catechist to
Turkish captives in Naples, and even Abraham Ecchellensis, a Maronite of great
repute in the Republic of Letters, had long-standing ties to slave traders in North
Africa.34 Still others would focus entirely on translation as was the case with
Khidr bin Hormuzd, a priest from Mosul who arrived in Rome in 1724 and
spent the remaining three decades of his life in service to the Propaganda Fide
translating Catholic publications into Arabic, Syriac and Garshuni (Arabic writ-
ten in the Syriac alphabet).35 Of course, none of these pursuits were mutually
2013); Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between

Worlds (New York, 2007).
31
See, for example, Pierre Dipy’s (Butrus al-Dı̄b) handlist of the collections in the royal
library in Paris compiled in 1677 in Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (hereafter
BnF), MS Français 4484; Solomon Negri’s handlist of Arabic manuscripts in France in
British Library, London (hereafter BL), Harley MS 3370, fos. 80–123; Miguel Casiri,
Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana Escurialensis (Madrid, 1760–70); Assemani, Bibliotheca
Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana.
32
Bernard Heyberger, ‘Chrétiens orientaux dans l’Europe catholique (XVIIe–XVIIIe siè-
cles)’, in Bernard Heyberger and Chantal Verdeil (eds.), Hommes de l’entre-deux: par-
cours individuels et portraits de groupes sur la frontière de la Méditerranée (XVIe– XXe
siècle) (Paris, 2009).
33
See John-Paul Ghobrial, ‘The Life and Hard Times of Solomon Negri: An Arabic Teacher
in Early Modern Europe’, in Loop, Hamilton and Burnett (eds.), The Teaching and
Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe.
34
Gemayel, ‘Bulus al-Haddar, alias Pablo Paulo Hodar, moine Antonin Maronite’, 284;
Bernard Heyberger (ed.), Orientalisme, science et controverse: Abraham Ecchellensis
(1605–1664) (Turnhout, 2010), 13.
35
Jacques-Marie Vosté, ‘Qas Kheder de Mossoul (nov. 1679–30 déc. 1751): notes bio-
bibliographiques’, Orientalia christiana periodica, x (1944).
exclusive, and an individual might switch back and forth between several careers
in the course of a single life. Such was the case with Don Andrés de San Juan, a
Christian from Mosul who was the first documented person to sell coffee in
Madrid.36 His involvement in the coffee trade did not preclude him from secur-

ing additional work in the same period as the royal interpreter of oriental lan-
guages in the Spanish court.37
Record-keeping, therefore, intersected with a range of other activities car-
ried out by Eastern Christians in early modern Europe. Even so, there are
reasons to think that record-keeping was a field of particular relevance to
Eastern Christians. In the first instance, this was because Eastern Christians
had direct links to the very manuscript traditions that still interested
Europeans in this period. It is true that by the seventeenth century the scrip-
tural preoccupations of early orientalists had expanded into a much more
diverse set of interests: witness, for example, the interests of a scholar such as
Johann Heinrich Hottinger in Islamic history and Arabic poetry.38
Nevertheless, this was still also a period of sustained interest in the
Christian and pre-Islamic history of the East. When Pococke published a
Latin translation of Bar Hebraeus’s universal history in 1663, he was
making available to his contemporaries a major work of Arabic history by a
Christian author.39 Eastern Christians embodied such Arabic traditions, and
the libraries of their communities still possessed such works. This is one
reason they were called upon to assist in locating Arabic manuscripts. In
1719, for example, the Vatican enlisted the help of the Maronite Andrew
Iskandar on a mission to collect Arabic and Syriac manuscripts from the
Church of the East in Mosul. Upon his arrival, the local community shunned
him for several days. It was only after he had found refuge with a priest who
harboured Catholic sympathies that Iskandar was finally able, with the help of
the priest, to obtain the manuscripts he wanted.40 That Iskandar’s visit was
36
M. Cayetano Martı́n and C. Gállego Rubio, ‘El café y los cafés en Madrid (1699–1835):
una perspectiva municipal’, Annales del Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, xxxvi (1996),
237–8.
37
‘Titulo de traductor de las lenguas turca, arabiga, siriaca y caldea en persona de Don
Andres de San Juan’, 24 Sept. 1700, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid (hereafter
AHN), Estado 249/40.
38
Jan Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger, 131–84.
39
Edward Pococke, Historia Compendiosa Dynastiarum, Authore Gregorio Abul-Pharajio
(Oxford, 1663).
40
A brief description of this episode survives in an Arabic manuscript held today in the
Mingana Collection of the library of the University of Birmingham. See Christian Arabic
72 in Alphonse Mingana, Catalogue of the Mingana Collection of Manuscripts
(Cambridge, 1936), ii, 154.
received with such apathy on the part of the locals should not surprise us:
although his role in the history of the development of oriental collections in
Europe might capture the interest of historians today, we should not forget
that Iskandar’s contemporaries might have been less impressed by his appar-

ent complicity in the looting of manuscript collections from the Middle
East.41 These two processes — the collection of manuscripts in European
libraries and their removal from the libraries of local communities in the
Middle East — were two sides of the same coin.
Another factor that favoured Eastern Christians was that many of those
who travelled to Europe had previous relationships and experiences working
closely with Europeans. Some had studied as children with Catholic mission-
aries in the Ottoman Empire. While the exact content of this education re-
mains an important subject for further research, it is clear that Eastern
Christians who had studied with missionaries came to Europe armed not
only with knowledge of Middle Eastern languages — potentially Arabic,
Turkish, Syriac, Greek, Persian and even Kurdish — but also European lan-
guages including Italian and French. Further study in European institutions
such as the Maronite College of Rome would add Latin to their repertoire.42
All of this facilitated their easy integration into circles of patrons in Europe.
Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that the skills of Eastern Christians even
marked them out for recruitment by Europeans travelling in the Ottoman
Empire. When the young Maronite Hanna Diyāb encountered Paul Lucas
near Aleppo, the French explorer persuaded him that he could secure a pos-
ition for Hanna in one of Louis XIV’s libraries.43 Similarly, in an autobio-
graphical fragment published posthumously, Solomon Negri intimated that
he had been persuaded to travel from Damascus to Europe by promises made
to him by the Jesuits.44 This is a testament to the extent to which Europeans
relied on assistance from Eastern Christians, at least as expressed in Arabic
sources.
41
For one reflection on such issues, see Paul Betts and Corey Ross (eds.), Heritage in the
Modern World: Historical Preservation in International Perspective (Past and Present
Supplement no.10, Oxford, 2015).
42
See, for example, P. Raphael, Le role du Collège Maronite dans l’orientalisme aux XVIIe et
XVIIIe siècles (Beirut, 1950); and, more recently, Aurélien Girard and Giovanni
Pizzorusso, ‘The Maronite College in Early Modern Rome: Between the Ottoman
Empire and the Republic of Letters’, in Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor (eds.),
Collegial Communities in Exile (Manchester, forthcoming). I am grateful to Aurélien
Girard for sending me a copy of this unpublished work.
43
Fahmé-Thiéry, Heyberger and Lentin (eds.), D’Alep à Paris, 70.
44
Ghobrial, ‘Life and Hard Times of Solomon Negri’.
Such experiences highlight the importance of patronage when it came to

securing posts and, conversely, the often tenuous positions these individuals
held in European societies. In part, this was because Eastern Christians had to
contend with various forms of competition, as much from Europeans as from

other Eastern Christians. In Spain, for example, members of the San Juan
family occupied the posts of Arabic copyists (‘escribiente de árabe’) in the
royal library for several decades after their arrival from Mosul in the 1690s.45
The dominance of the San Juan family lasted until the arrival from Rome in
1748 of Miguel Casiri (or Mı̄khā’ı̄l al-Ghazı̄rı̄), a Maronite who had trained at
the Maronite College and was supported by a long list of powerful Catholic
patrons.46 As a result, the San Juans were ousted from their privileged pos-
ition, and Casiri and his acolytes were established in key posts of the library
long after Casiri’s death in 1791. Less manifest in European sources (but
certainly present in Arabic ones) is the idea that some Eastern Christians
even competed with orientalists for such posts. Fifty years after his sojourn
in Paris, Hanna Diyāb wrote that Antoine Galland, the French translator of
the tales of the Arabian Nights, had been involved in a ruse designed to send
Hanna back to Aleppo. Galland, it seemed, had feared that Hanna would be
appointed to a post in the king’s library that he coveted for himself.47 It is
difficult to know what to make of such accusations, but they are a reminder of
the potential for competition that existed between Eastern Christians and the
European orientalists alongside whom they worked.
The act of reading an Arabic manuscript was as much an issue of under-
standing the content of the work as of deciphering the actual text of it. Here,
collaboration with Eastern Christian informants was crucial, not least given
the variety of hands and alphabets potentially used in oriental manuscripts.
Identifying a manuscript’s provenance in either North Africa or Syria meant
knowing the difference between a maghrebı¯or a nashkı¯ hand. Likewise, Syriac
manuscripts might be written in distinct western (sert·ā) and eastern
(madhnh· āyā) alphabets. The importance of the visual characteristics of a
manuscript were central to wider questions about provenance and authenti-
city, as were technical issues related to the use of multiple calendars.48
45
See the file related to ‘Juan Amón de San Juan’, BNE 3118/024.
46
A basic sketch of Casiri’s life is in Paz Fernández, ‘Expediente personal de Miguel Casiri
en la Biblioteca Nacional’, Al-Andalus Magreb, iv (1996).
47
Fahmé-Thiéry, Heyberger and Lentin (eds.), D’Alep à Paris, 351ff.; the Arabic is in
Vatican Library, Sbath MS 254, fos. 136–7.
48
Even today such issues are the subject of detailed study by specialists. See, for example,
Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers (Leiden, 2009); William
Henry Paine Hatch, An Album of Dated Syriac Manuscripts (Boston, 1946).
Moreover, the linguistic register of Arabic used in these documents included a

wide range of dialectal and lexical features, many of which would have been
foreign to European orientalists better acquainted with the eloquent, literary
register of Arabic used in scholarly works.49 In this way, reading an Arabic

manuscript demanded a range of skills that even the most erudite orientalist
might have lacked in this period.
Beyond the act of copying, cataloguing and translating, the category of
‘record-keeping’ obscures a much wider set of contributions made by Eastern
Christians to oriental collections in Europe. One important but under-stud-
ied role involved the use of Eastern Christians in the authentication of manu-
scripts and other writings of Eastern provenance. Perhaps the best example of
this remains the so-called ‘lead books’ affair in Spain, which involved a com-
mittee of Eastern Christians in determining whether or not a set of lead plates
discovered near the monastery of Sacromonte were what they purported to
be, that is, apocryphal, unknown scriptural texts written in Arabic and dating
back to the first century.50 In arguing that the plates were actually a modern
(sixteenth-century) forgery, Eastern Christians such as Abraham Ecchellensis
invoked the ‘Muslim’ quality of the Arabic used in the texts as evidence of
their provenance among Spanish moriscos.51 In doing so, Ecchellensis
invoked his personal authority as an Eastern Christian with direct knowledge
of what constituted authentic ‘Christian Arabic’. (This was a wider theme in
Ecchellensis’s writings, on which see below.)
Alternatively, the skills commanded by Eastern Christians for authenticat-
ing documents also made them well matched to the work of forging them.52
As described above, Būlus al-Haddār had used his knowledge of the patri-
archal seal to forge a letter of recommendation from the Patriarch of Antioch.
But the potential for forgery had especially wide-ranging consequences when
it came to satisfying European desires for new, unknown manuscripts such as
the popular Arabic tales of Alf layla wa layla, or 1,001 Nights. Following
Galland’s publication of his French translation of the Nights in 1704, pub-
lishers and audiences alike clamoured for manuscripts with new stories to add
to the corpus of Scheherazade’s tales. The potential for forgery arose from the
49
For an example of an orientalist engaging with these issues, see Pierre Ageron and
Mustapha Jaouhari, ‘Le programme pédagogique d’un arabisant du Collège royal,
François Pétis de La Croix (1653–1713)’, Arabica, lxi (2014).
50
Garcı́a-Arenal and Rodrı́guez Mediano, The Orient in Spain.
51
Mercedes Garcı́a-Arenal, ‘The Religious Identity of the Arabic Language and the Affair of
the Lead Books of the Sacromonte of Granada’, Arabica, lvi (2009).
52
Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship
(Princeton, 1990).
ambiguous fact of the title 1,001 Nights, of which Galland’s translation pre-
sented only a few hundred stories. This left open the possibility that there
remained in fact other, unknown ‘nights’ waiting to be discovered. In in-
stances spread over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Eastern

Christians arrived in Europe with what they claimed to be manuscript
copies of tales of 1,001 Nights that had not been available in Galland’s original
edition. In one such case, Rufā’ı̄l Zakhūr, a Coptic priest who had travelled to
France along with Napoleon’s army when it returned from Egypt, claimed to
have such a manuscript in his possession. Close study of the manuscript has
revealed it to be a ‘back translation’ of Galland’s French versions of the Nights
into Arabic, a reminder of the blurry lines between expertise and forgery in
the practice of record-keeping.53
Ultimately, expertise and technical skills could easily give way to creative
forms of innovation. This is clear in the way that Eastern Christians composed
new and original works that would be quickly incorporated into emergent
collections of oriental manuscripts. To give an example, sometime between
1646 and 1651, Abraham Ecchellensis completed his Nomenclator Arabico-
Latinus, a dictionary of nearly seven thousand Arabic words with their cor-
responding Latin translations. Alastair Hamilton has described how the work
presented a version of the Arabic language that was stripped of any terms of
Muslim provenance.54 The effect was to create an artificial version of
‘Christian Arabic’, which reveals more about Ecchellensis’s own preoccupa-
tions than any social reality of the Arabic language in this period. Indeed, the
term ‘Christian Arabic’ has become established in the repertoire of some
specialists today, a testament to how the shadow of individuals such as
Ecchellensis still looms over the study of Middle Eastern history. As has
been suggested in other contexts, notably in Romain Bertrand’s recent
study of the ‘Malay collections’ of Leiden, such acts of creativity created a
body of ‘new’ texts that otherwise did not exist in indigenous collections in
53
The work of untangling these traditions has animated an entire field of Nights specialists,
but on the role of Eastern Christians in particular, see Saree Makdisi and Felicity
Nussbaum (eds.), The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West
(Oxford, 2008), 37; and Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, ‘Textual History’ in
Ulrich Marzolph, Richard van Leeuwen and Hassan Wassouf (eds.), The Arabian
Nights Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2004), 713–17. On Zakhur, or ‘Dom
Raphaël de Monachis’ as he was known to contemporaries, see Ian Coller, Arab
France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798–1831 (Berkeley, 2010), 77.
54
Alastair Hamilton, ‘Abraham Ecchellensis et son Nomenclator Arabico-Latinus’, in
Heyberger (ed.), Orientalisme, science, et controverse, 89–98.
the Ottoman Empire.55 These endeavours may have also given voice to very
local (and perhaps unwritten) traditions that were unrepresented in the
manuscript collections that received the most attention from Europeans. In
this way, Eastern Christians managed actually to reshape the archive of orien-

talism, adding new works to a corpus of manuscripts that would continue to
shape European understandings of the history of the (Christian) East into the
twentieth century.
III
ARABIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MIGRATION AND THE USE OF COLOPHONS
If the social history of archives promises to change our understanding of
orientalism, the close study of Arabic manuscript collections also offers im-
portant insights into the history of migration and mobility in early modern
Europe. That we can know anything about Eastern Christian record-keepers
owes something to traces they left behind in the manuscripts they copied,
translated, catalogued and preserved. For newcomers far from their homes,
the act of record-keeping was intimately tied to the act of writing about
themselves. Colophons, marginal notes and marks of ownership offered
Eastern Christians a site for inscribing their presence in European societies.
Yet, one of the reasons for the neglect of such sources lies in old ideas about
‘Arabic autobiography’, most of which were coined by a tradition of schol-
arship dating back to the 1930s and 1940s. Taking their cue from the paucity
of examples of Arabic autobiography, scholars such as Georg Misch and Franz
Rosenthal concluded that those examples of autobiography that did exist
were best approached as anomalies unrelated to any wider literary or histor-
ical tradition. The analysis of Arabic first-person writing, therefore, was con-
sumed by a non-productive focus on whether or not the works counted as
‘true’ (by which was often meant ‘Western’) forms of autobiography.56 Until
fairly recently, this approach has dominated the field, but in the past two
decades or so Arabic literary scholars have refined their approaches by widen-
ing the set of sources studied under the rubric of first-person narratives. In
practice, this has meant a greater recognition of the importance of a rich and
varied spectrum of ego-documents: travelogues, bio-bibliographical works,
55
Romain Bertrand, ‘Peter Floris, Erpenius and Textual Transmission in and out of the
Malay World at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century’, Quaderni Storici, cxlii, 1 (2013).
56
For a review of these debates, see Dwight Reynolds (ed.), Interpreting the Self:
Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (Berkeley, 2001), esp. ch. 1.
marginalia, dream narratives, conversion narratives and maqamat (short,

literary anecdotes written in a highly refined style), just to name a few.57
Adopting such an expansive approach is particularly important when study-
ing the lives of Eastern Christian migrants to Europe, not least given how few of

them ever composed out-and-out autobiographies. Instead, we find a range of
first-person accounts of their experiences and lives in Europe scattered across
different types of sources. We still lack a useful language for describing these
first-person works, not least because they differed from each other in many
important ways. Some comprised lengthy, narrative accounts — hundreds of
folios in Arabic — while others consisted of little more than short, anecdotal
passages scribbled into the margins of manuscripts. These texts included works
written in Arabic and Syriac, to be sure, but there are also instances of first-
person accounts being written in European languages. Most of these sources are
found today in European archives, even the most local archives: for example, a
diary kept by an Eastern Christian alms-collector, written in Garshuni, and
recently discovered in a canton archive in Switzerland.58 However, these texts
can sometimes also be found in the libraries of monasteries and churches in the
Middle East, suggesting that they somehow circulated among Christian com-
munities in the Ottoman Empire. In one case, an Eastern Christian even sat for
a self-portrait, which has tragically gone missing even though it was recorded as
hanging in the Ashmolean as late as 1790.59
Elsewhere in this volume, Jason Scott-Warren has described how the struc-
ture and form of a record conditioned the way individuals expressed them-
selves in it, and he goes so far as to call into question the value of using such
records to search for the self. In this context, it is worth noting the importance
of the colophon as a structure for self-expression. This is not the place for a
full discussion of the use of the colophon in Arabic, which dates back at least
to the ninth century.60 It usually takes the following form: ‘I the humble scribe
Paul, son of Simon, completed the copying of this manuscript in Mosul with
57
For a good example, see Ralf Elger and Yavuz Köse (eds.), Many Ways of Speaking about
the Self: Middle Eastern Ego-documents in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish (14th–20th
Century) (Wiesbaden, 2010).
58
Monika Winet, ‘Religious Education on the Road: An Anonymous Christian Arabic
Diary (Garshuni Manuscript)’, Parole de l’Orient, xxxix (2014).
59
See the reference to ‘Salomon Negri, of Damascus, by Hill’ in A Catalogue of the Several
Pictures, Statues, and Busts, in the Picture Gallery, Bodleian Library, and Ashmolean
Museum, at Oxford (Oxford, 1790), 6.
60
Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 71–6; but see also Rosemarie Quiring-Zoche, ‘The Colophon
in Arabic Manuscripts: A Phenomenon without a Name’, Journal of Islamic Manuscripts,
iv (2013).
the help of God in 1687’. Through such dependable structure and formulae,
colophons confirm the authenticity of a manuscript by linking it to a par-
ticular scribe. Yet much like the diary entries described by Scott-Warren,
colophons are ‘at once formulaic and highly various’ and they often surprise

readers with ‘local variations and unexpected extras’.61 Colophons could be
used as a way of recording other information, for example public events such
as political developments or natural disasters, as well as private events, births,
marriages, deaths and even emotions. In this way, the colophon remains one
of the most ubiquitous forms of first-person writing in Arabic and certainly
among Eastern Christians.
In the life of a single record-keeper, incidental acts of recording could be
scattered across a wide selection of manuscripts preserved today in multiple
repositories. In this way, the archive itself becomes a source for writing the
history of its keepers. At the boundaries between formulae and improvisa-
tion, this sort of history demands a different way of working. It requires
scholars to reassemble these colophons and piece together what are essentially
momentary snapshots of an individual’s life. In one example of such an ap-
proach, Samir Khalil Samir has gathered together colophons from two dozen
manuscripts held at the Vatican in an attempt to reconstruct the life of a
copyist named Muh·ammad Ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-S· a‘ı̄dı̄ al-‘Adawı̄, otherwise
known as Clemente Caraccioli, which is the name he took upon his baptism
in Rome.62 Caraccioli was an Egyptian imam who had been captured by
corsairs in 1706, converted to Christianity, and spent the remainder of his
life copying Arabic works for his patrons in the Vatican. Surveying colophons
scattered across the treatises copied by a Muslim convert to Christianity en-
ables Samir to retrieve something of the experience of the copyist in ways that
are impossible otherwise, not least because Caraccioli left no other accounts
of his life nor was he ever described in the writings of his contemporaries. Like
the fragmentary sources that remain so central to the history of slavery, with-
out the colophons, we would know nothing about the life of this man.63
Similarly, the study of colophons offers a history of oriental collections
‘from the inside’, and this cannot be obtained solely from the study of a
library’s contents. It may even promise to change our understanding of the
61
Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Early Modern Bookkeeping and Life-Writing Revisited:
Accounting for Richard Stonley’, in this volume.
62
Samir Khalil Samir, ‘Un Imam égyptien copiste au Vatican, Clemente Caraccioli, 1670–
1721’, Parole de l’Orient, xxi (1996).
63
James Amelang, ‘Slave Autobiography from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic’, in Stefan
Hanss and Juliane Schiel (eds.), Mediterranean Slavery Revisited, 500–1800 / Neue
Perspektiven auf mediterraner Sklaverei, 500–1800 (Zurich, 2014).
impulses and agendas of early modern orientalism. In his study of the

Bibliothèque Mazarine under the direction of Louis Picques, Francis
Richard has demonstrated how Picques maintained a team of Eastern
Christian copyists who turned their talents to the copying and management

of both Christian and Islamic manuscripts.64 From the scattered notes they
left behind as well as Picques’s own correspondence, it is clear that the li-
brary’s acquisition, translation and preservation of manuscripts advanced in
a somewhat haphazard, spontaneous fashion, dictated as much by Picques’s
own interests as by the vagaries of who happened to be passing through Paris
at one time or another. Needless to say, any notion of a purposeful, goal-
oriented orientalism remains rather difficult to maintain in the face of the
contingent circumstances that contributed in practice to the acquisition of
oriental manuscripts in Europe in this period.
Finally, a focus on the colophon opens up the study of other forms of
writing by Eastern Christians in this period, not least notebooks, miscellanies
and journals. Eastern Christians in Europe were inveterate record-keepers,
seemingly obsessed with the act of writing. Consider, for example, a priest in
Rome named Behnam, originally from Mosul, who kept a small diary in
which he jotted down for the year 1754 the name of each person whose
memory he celebrated at Mass.65 Many of these names appear to refer to
people Behnam had known in Mosul. This ‘catalogue’ of prayers was pre-
served in the same notebook in which Behnam copied recipes, laundry re-
ceipts, and some of his favourite psalms. This notebook is a testament to one
individual’s own practices of archiving and memory, and yet even such per-
sonal notebooks could be intimately wedded to the formation of oriental
collections in Europe. Copied into Behnam’s notebook are also several
scraps of writing that he had inherited from his friend, Khidr bin
Hormuzd, the translator of the Propaganda Fide described above. Here, we
find a copy of a draft of a letter that Khidr had composed on behalf of the
Vatican for the Patriarch of the Church of the East. As the letter reveals, the
Patriarch had recently submitted a testament of faith to the Propaganda Fide
to prove his loyalty to Rome. The Patriarch’s creed having been found want-
ing, Khidr responded now to explain how he should revise it to bring it into
conformity with Rome’s wishes. He asked the Patriarch to prepare and
submit a new copy to Rome. Lest there be any doubt on the specific details
of what was being requested, Khidr even went so far as to include a printed
64
Francis Richard, ‘Un Érudit à la recherche de textes religieux venus d’Orient, le docteur
Louis Picques, 1637-1699’, in E. Bury and B. Meunier (eds.), Les Pères de l‘Église au XVIIe
siècle: actes du colloque de Lyon, 2-5 octobre 1991 (Paris, 1993).
65
BnF, MS Syriaque 279, fo. 66.
copy of an Arabic testament of faith that had been sanctioned by the

Propaganda Fide. If only the Patriarch would sign it, it would be accepted
by the Vatican and, presumably, deposited into its archive. In such cases, the
creation of the archive of the Catholic Church’s dealings with the Eastern

Churches was a process rooted in the intermediation of Eastern Christians
and, therefore, in the first-person writings they left behind. Discerning these
processes, however, requires us to look beyond the administrative archives of
the Vatican or its library and towards the private, first-person accounts of
those who worked there. Indeed, the draft of this letter survives today only in
Behnam’s notebook.66
* * *
Reading Arabic manuscripts from the margins reveals as much about oriental
collections in Europe as it does about the lives of those experts who were most
intimately connected to them. Moreover, the study of individual traces left
behind in the archive of orientalism betrays at least two important aspects
about the lives of its keepers. Firstly, across all of these sources, there is an
explicit sense of the precarious position of these ‘experts’ in early modern
Europe. Their stories echo the themes of the life of Būlus al-Haddār at the
start of this essay. In other words, the life of an informant from the East was
never an easy one, and this is an important point to remember in what is
otherwise a sometimes overly triumphant history of early modern oriental-
ism. Secondly, manuscript collections offer a window into the strategies used
by these record-keepers to leave an impression of their permanence in the
new societies they encountered. For this reason on the day that Khidr bin
Hormuzd helped wash the feet of the poor at a confraternity in Rome, he
wrote in his journal that his name was now ‘recorded’ (maktūb) in the register
of the order — almost as if he were inviting his reader to confirm its presence
there.67 Eastern Christians inscribed their experiences directly into the arch-
ives in which they were working. This practice came naturally to individuals
trained in a scribal tradition that rooted the credibility of a manuscript in the
act of a scribe’s identification of himself and his relationship to a wider
community.
Like Shidiyāq’s comment on al-Haddār’s ‘indiscretions’ at the start of this
essay, colophons and marginal notes were intended to create a community of
readers linked across space and time. Not only were Eastern Christians linked
66
The copy of the letter is in BnF, MS Syriaque 279, fos. 1–6.
67
Louis Cheikho, ‘Rihla al-qas Khidr al-kaldāni [The Voyage of the Priest Khidr the
Chaldean]’, Al-Machriq, xiii (1910), 665.
to the records they worked on, therefore, but the accounts of their lives appear
to build upon each other in constitutive ways. Indeed, there is almost a cu-
mulative element to the records of these lives, inscribed as they were on the
folios of oriental manuscripts. They serve as a witness — for anyone willing to

listen — to the experience of migration across several generations in the early
modern world. More generally, the social history of archives enables us to
zoom in closer to a vision of the history of early modern orientalism as it took
place in everyday life: a world of erudite giants perhaps, but also a world sewn
together by the skilled hands of countless agents, informants, scribes and
helpers whose lives deserve to be much more than mere footnotes in the
catalogues of manuscript collections.
Balliol College, Oxford John-Paul Ghobrial

The Archive of Orientalism and Its Keepers

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The Archive of Orientalism and Its Keepers

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THE ARCHIVE OF ORIENTALISM AND ITS

KEEPERS: RE-IMAGINING THE HISTORIES

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leafing through the pages of MS 13 because he jotted down a Spanish translation

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social spaces of orientalism. Historians now recognize that knowledge of the

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collectors downplayed the contributions of the Ottoman agents and inform-

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revolved around the interpretation of such documents as crucial pieces of

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to the challenges posed by Arabic manuscripts in European collections. This is

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2013); Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between

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Such experiences highlight the importance of patronage when it came to

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Moreover, the linguistic register of Arabic used in these documents included a

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marginalia, dream narratives, conversion narratives and maqamat (short,

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impulses and agendas of early modern orientalism. In his study of the

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copy of an Arabic testament of faith that had been sanctioned by the

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Balliol College, Oxford John-Paul Ghobrial

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