Abstract
Unlike many other societies, which during the eighteenth century gradually found their way to a national constitution, the greater part of Greek society remained outside the borders of the Greek national state until well after its establishment in 1832. In fact, Greek society emerged from the setting of the Ottoman Empire as a result of re-stratifications and social changes which took place around various local centres of political and economic power. The eighteenth century was the crucial period during which Greek society refined its shape and produced the political and ideological conditions that, to a certain degree, led to the quest for a separate national identity. Nevertheless, this process was neither uniform nor linear. Different and often competing social groups, various economic interests and diverging political traditions worked out a network of communities which struggled to define a distinctive, though in many instances still vague, position within the context of the Ottoman Empire. It was this geographically scattered network, loosely unified on the basis of common educational and religious traditions — and not a well-defined structure with intrinsic hierarchies and reproductive mechanisms — which comprised Greek society of the period.
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Notes
On this subject see O. Cicanci, “Le rôle de Vienne dans les rapports économiques et culturels du Sud-Est européen avec le Centre de l’Europe,” Revue des Études sud-est européenes, 24 (1986), 3–16 and especially the thorough study of Traian Stoianovich on the territorial expansion of “The conquering Balkan Orthodox merchant,” Journal of Economic History, 20 (1960), 234–313.
Ariadna Camariano-Cioran has specifically studied the migration of Epirotes to the Romanian countries. See Ar. Camariano-Cioran, Contributions à l’histoire des relations Gréco-Roumaines. L’Empire et les pays Roumains (Jannina, 1984). On the penetration of Greek culture to these countries see the first chapter of her other significant study, Les Academies Princieres de Bucarest et de Jassy et leur professeurs (Thessaloniki Institute for Balkan Studies, 1974).
With the exception of the visits paid to Peloponnese and Athens area, which appear to be a special case, from the point of view our study. 13 scholars paid 24 visits in the region, but more than half of those visits took place after 1813 and were motivated by political pursuits related to the Greek war of independence. In this sense, the intellectual travels to the Athens area and Peloponnese that actually come under the scope of my study are very few.
HataSía-Aaaa, op. cit. (10), pp. 182–183. The positive disposition towards the Venetians, however, was not a generic feature of those societies: the positive attitude was mostly associated with the higher social classes and the intellectuals who took advantage of the Venetian administration in order to promote their interests and improve their socialposition (but they also put themselves in danger when the Ottomans took over). On the other hand, the attitude of the lower classes towards the Venetians was not always positive. Due to the despotic rule of many local governors, the poor people often favoured the advent of the Ottomans. This trend was encouraged by the (usually honest) declarations of the latter that they would secure religious tolerance and restore social justice (llama&a-A& a, op. cit. (10) pp. 183–184).
Ay. Davortokou, “Oi BsvmTOf. Kai r1 e? T1vucti rrpayttarwOTlTa: Atoucryttic j, slcxaljrnaatuc, oucovoina opyavwall” in Xp. A. Maktt ou, ed., Oyistç TIN Iuroptaç Toll BeveroKparotíuevov Apxciatcâ TEKp pta (Athens: TSpvµa Earlvtxorí Hokn i totí, 1993), pp. 277–313, pp. 288–289 and 293.
A potentially unknown word: Uniat means a trend within the bosom of the Eastern Orthodox Church aiming at union with the Roman Catholic Church. This trend — systematically encouraged by the various Catholic missions in the broader Balkan area — acknowledges the supremacy of the Roman pope in matters of faith, but maintains the Eastern liturgy, discipline, and rite.
On the causes of migration see Stoianovich, op. cit. (7), esp. pp. 260–262.
The host of most of those scholars being the community of Ottoman subjects (Aouxaroç, op. cit. (20), 304).
“To cpyaoTtiptov Trig vmaç TON Fpatxdw I û o? oyíaç” (“The laboratory of the new philology of the Greeks”), as Korais (1748–1833), an important Greek savant and publisher of the early nineteenth century, commented in 1805. Details on this issue in K. Sp. Staikos, Die in Wien Gedruckten Griechischen Bücher (1749–1800) (Athens: TSpnµa Earivtxov Ho? trtoµob, 1995).
The Greek school of Vienna was established in 1804 but it actually started working only 12 years later. Moreover, it was an elementary school aiming mostly at the offspring of Greek-speaking merchants who wished to acquire the necessary education in order to continue their fathers’ enterprises. (Aouxdîoç, op. cit. (20), 326–332). On the other hand, the University of Vienna, established in 1365, was a prestigious institution which, however, never drew the attention of Greek scholars. Notwithstanding their frequent visits to the city and their intense intellectual explorations, we have very little evidence that any of them studied systematically at the University.
See, for example, the reservations of Traian Stoianovich in op. cit. (7), 306–312.
A telling example is the friendship between Evgenios Voulgaris (1716–1806) and Johann Andreas von Segner (1704–1777) during the former’s stay at Leipzig. The contact between the two men led to the translation of Segner’s Elementa arithmeticae et geometriae into Greek by Voulgaris himself.
The remaining 11 visits in the first case, and 43 in the second, mainly concern internal travels of young people aiming to obtain elementary education in the Greek-speaking schools of the broader area. Several of these schools had quite an advanced curriculum, including philosophical and scientific lessons. Most of the scholars who studied privately in Venice, Vienna and the German cities had already been acquainted with philosophy and the sciences in such local schools. Another area that received quite a few visits for similar reasons was Athos, which belongs to the intermediate cases of our diagram above. The school of Athos became famous under the directorship of Evgenios Voulgaris, between 1753 and 1759. According to our statistics Athos received 11 visits paid by 11 scholars and the purpose of most of them was related to the function of the school — teaching or studies. What makes this limited number of visits important is that those 11 scholars were some of the most influential scholars of the Greek eighteenth century.
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Patiniotis, M. (2003). Scientific Travels of the Greek Scholars in the Eighteenth Century. In: Simões, A., Carneiro, A., Diogo, M.P. (eds) Travels of Learning. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 233. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3584-1_3
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