Anglo-Hellenism in religious form: Anglicans and the Orthodox Part IIa. Diplomacy, commerce and scholarship after the Reformation

Before the creation of the Greek state in 1830, there were two periods, separated by a thousand years, when Greek and English interests in Christianity overlapped. In the seventh century, Theodore of Tarsus was appointed and consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Vitalian, arriving in England to take possession of his diocese in 669AD. Part IIb of this blog takes a brief look at his career and his importance to the English church. In this piece I consider the contacts that arose in the immediate aftermath of the English Reformation and the particular forms that they took in the seventeenth century, a period of active, mutual interest between the Anglican and Orthodox churches. 

It is diplomacy that gives us the first window into English perceptions of Orthodoxy and Orthodox perceptions of Anglicanism. The earliest accounts by a Greek and an Englishman of travel to each other’s lands both come from the sixteenth century. In 1545-1546, Nikandros Noukios of Corfu visited England as member of a diplomatic mission from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to the English king, Henry VIII; in 1599, the organ-maker Thomas Dallam made a long trip to Constantinople, with the diplomatic objective of bestowing a magnificent and costly gift from Queen Elizabeth I and the City of London on Sultan Mehmed III. Both men wrote about their diplomatic missions, and their wonderful accounts still survive. 

Nothing is known about Nikandros Noukios beyond what he tells us in the three books of his Travels / Ἀποδημίες. He was a Corfiot, living under Venetian rule. At Venice, sometime around 1545, he met Gerardus Veltuyckus, rector at Louvain University, who was heading towards Constantinople as ambassador of Charles V. Noukios managed to get himself attached to the mission, accompanying Gerardus to the Sublime Porte and returning with him across Europe to debrief Charles at his court in Brussels. Gerardus was then sent on diplomatic business to Henry VIII in London and Noukios once more managed to attach himself to the mission. 

 

The 1540s were a period of religious ferment across Europe and, as an Orthodox Greek with no personal investment in the turmoil, he took a keen interest in religious developments. In book 1 he writes - in a crabbed form of classical Greek - about the reforms of the Lutherans: their abolition of monasticism, liturgical simplification, abolition of holy days and so on. He also reports on the activities in Munster of the Anabaptists: the radical protestants who held all property in common. 

 

Book 2 of his travels deals primarily with England, but he also went to Scotland, in the company of Greek mercenaries from Argos, and had time to absorb the prejudices of Englishmen about Ireland. His account of religious developments in England isn’t always accurate and is told entirely from the perspective of the reform party in Henry’s court, but it throws light on how the English reformers presented and explained their actions to foreigners. It’s a very different account from Noukios’ report of the Reformation in German lands. The political opposition of the Papacy to Henry’s annulment; the alleged abuses and profanities of the English and Irish monasteries; the purportedly deceitful and corrupt religious cults and ‘superstitions’: all these targets of the king’s commissioners - whether or not overblown and self-serving - are recounted by Noukios in surprisingly neutral terms: surprising in that Noukios rarely even hints at the particular perspective an Orthodox outsider might be imagined to have on the events described. One could be a little unkind and say it’s all rather gossipy and short of breath. 

 

Perhaps only in the account of the dissolution of the cult of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury, which had happened ten years earlier, does Noukios allow a small note of censure to appear. He also relates a detail, which may or may not be true, about the dispersal of the saint’s remains that is not reported elsewhere. Given the laudable Becket exhibition currently being mounted at the British Museum, I quote this passage in full:

 

'Henry, as being successor to the kings of former ages, condemned Thomas as a rebel and a pest of his country, and gave orders to commit to the fire the coffin which contained his remains. Whence those appointed to this quickly fulfilled the order they had received. Wherefore one might see the remains, formerly honoured as those of a saint, and consecrated, both dragged along the public road and exposed to the gaze of the populace; and treated with every indignity, one might say, and committed to the fire in the middle of the city, and reduced to ashes; and, having put the ashes into a cannon, they discharged them into the air. And a decree was promulgated throughout England that no one should dare, as heretofore, to speak of him as a saint, but as Thomas the rebel, and one who had been disloyal and disobedient to the kings of England.’[1]

Noukios was, as we can see above, immersed in the Zeitgeist of English reform and he absorbed a lot of Henrician propaganda: nowhere is he more credulous than in relating what he heard from the court about where the wealth expropriated from the monasteries was going. But the whole account, however naïve and unquestioning it appears, is fascinating (copies can be found in second-hand bookshops). The manuscript in which it was written was unearthed by 1841 and had been owned by Archbishop Laud, whose interest in Greeks will concern us shortly. 

 

Five decades after Noukios’ trip to Britain, Thomas Dallam, an organ-builder, found himself heading to Constantinople on an unusual mission. In 1598, wishing to obtain trading concessions in the Ottoman Empire, merchants in the City put up funds to pay for a costly present, in the form of a pipe-organ that could be played both manually and, through a clock mechanism, automatically. The present was offered as a personal gift from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmed; it was dismantled and stowed on board the merchant ship Hector. The ship left Gravesend in February 1599 and arrived in Constantinople six months later, in August. Dallam was accompanied by the organ’s engineer, painter and carpenter, but it is his diary that has immortalised the journey and the successful presentation of the gift. 

 

Zakynthos Town

In April, the ship and its crew reached the Ionian Islands. On 20 April, the ship anchored off Zante (Zakynthos), which was then ruled by the Venetians, and the crew and passengers went ashore. It was Orthodox Easter. Dallam’s diary is the first account we have by an Englishman on Greek soil and it gives us the first report in English of Easter as celebrated in Greece. Dallam and his friends headed inland where they encountered Greeks commemorating the Resurrection and were made welcome, despite their lack of familiarity as protestants with the Orthodox liturgy - and particularly with the segregation of sexes at worship:

 

‘[Our host] bowed to me and took my hand and led me around the end of the house and through a little cloister into a chapel where we found a priest saying mass and wax candles burning. He sat me down in a pew, where I watched what the people did. There were about twenty men but no women, who were in a lower chapel by themselves, but they could still hear and see what was going on. Ned Hale came in but he didn’t see me and knelt down near the women, whom he didn’t notice. But they saw him and were surprised at what he was doing. I got up from my knees to look for him and saw two women laughing at him, as well they might, for he was making a fool of himself. Neither he nor I had ever seen any part of a mass before and we were none the wiser now. The chapel was very elaborately painted and decorated in a way I had never seen before.’ [2]

 

After the liturgy ended, the men were taken into the house to have lunch: ‘good bread and excellent wine and red eggs’. As a result of their curiosity, Dallam was thus the first Englishman to witness and record for posterity the Greek custom of dyeing eggs red for Easter. I will leave it to my readers to discover what happened when the group reached Constantinople: needless to say, more surprises lay in store for them.

 

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Dallam’s diplomatic visit to Ottoman lands in 1599 owed much to the foundation seven years earlier (1592) of the Levant Company in England: this was an early attempt by English merchants to muscle in on and exploit trade opportunities in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the following century, the activities of this company caused commercial contacts between England and the Greek-speaking world to grow; the company’s charter was subsequently confirmed and renewed by King James I in 1606 and King Charles II in 1661, respectively. 

 

Levant Company Arms

Out of its own revenues the Levant Company paid the salary of the Ambassador in Constantinople (he was appointed, formally at least, on behalf of the British monarch), and established consulates in key trading posts, particularly Aleppo, Smyrna and Constantinople itself. In Venetian-held Greek territories, the company appointed consuls in Zante (Zakynthos) and Cephalonia; in Ottoman-occupied Greek lands the company’s consuls operated in the Morea and on Chios, and, at later dates, on Crete and at the Piraeus. The Levant Company also appointed chaplains: one post was based at Constantinople and would, as we shall see, play an important role in Anglican-Orthodox contacts; the other chaplaincies were at Aleppo and Smyrna. 

In the Morea the consuls were usually based in Patras, where they superintended the large and important trade in currants (the English word ‘currant’ is a corruption of ‘corinthiaka’: meaning ‘from Corinth’). But between 1638-43, the consul Sir Henry Hyde established himself at Chlemoutsi, the site of the great Frankish castle of the Villehardouins. There he is reported to have ‘lived in great state, built a small church, and a fair house with many gardens and vineyards about it’.[3] Although its whereabouts is not, I think, now known, this ‘small church’ must have been the first Anglican church established in mainland Greece. It would be fascinating to know more about this church: what form it took, what services took place there.

 

The activities of English merchants in Venetian and Ottoman lands offered employment to Greek mariners, and the Greek merchant fleet was itself active in English ports, including London. Only a few years after the building of Henry Hyde’s small church in the Morea, the Greek community established in the English capital took its first steps to build an Orthodox church there. 

 

The efforts were begun in 1674 by Daniel Voulgaris, an Orthodox priest, who petitioned the king’s privy council for permission to build a church. Permission was granted within a year but the project languished. Efforts were boosted in 1676 by the arrival in London in exile of the Archbishop of Samos, Joseph Georgirenes; he set about raising funds and securing broad support for the building. The Bishop of London, Henry Compton, also supported the Greek initiative, while the king and his brother, James Duke of York, both contributed money to it. Land was acquired in Soho, in the Anglican parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, between what are now called Greek Street and Charing Cross Road (then Hog Lane), and building work commenced in 1677. Shortly after, Archbishop Georgirenes dedicated the church to the Dormition of the Mother of God (the dedication plaque is now in the Cathedral of the Divine Wisdom in Bayswater). 

 

The 'Greek Church' at the end of the 19th century

The experiment did not last long. The church proved to be in the wrong place for the Greek community; the Bishop of London expected the Orthodox priests to conform to the rites of the Church of England; and a case of embezzlement by one of the congregation embroiled the archbishop in unsuccessful litigation, which soon acquired an unhelpful political dimension. The Greek community gave up the church in 1682. For most of the eighteenth century, the congregation worshipped at the Russian chapel, which was under the control of Greek priests. For many years, the Greek Church in Soho (the name stuck, though the congregation had long since departed) was rented by the Anglican parish of St Anne to the French Huguenot community, then to Calvinist Independents, before being finally converted for Anglican usage in 1850. The building was demolished in 1935, its site now being occupied by Foyles bookshop. Its memory survives in the name of Greek Street.

 

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Commerce underpinned more systematic efforts to establish relations between the churches. The Levant Company’s chaplains in the East became a particular source of information and communication between the Anglicans and the Orthodox. In the second half of the century, two of the chaplains at Constantinople, Thomas Smith (1668-1670) and John Covel (1670-1676), were theologians and would go on to publish books that aimed to project authoritative views about the Orthodox Church. Runciman tells us that Smith’s account is ‘well-informed, frank but fairly sympathetic’; Covel’s much less so.[4] But this process of mutual enquiry, while slow to yield real fruit, had taken off in earnest in the first part of the century, when a correspondence began between George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cyril Loukaris, the so-called ‘Calvinist’ Patriarch of Alexandria. In 1617, the archbishop invited the patriarch to send four Greeks to England to study theology at Oxford, at the expense of the Crown. The first to arrive was Metrophanes Kritopoulos, from Verroia, who studied at Balliol from about 1621 and would himself become Patriarch of Alexandria, in 1634. 

 

Such experiments continued under subsequent hierarchs. Under William Laud’s tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury, a Cretan called Nathaniel Kanopios also studied theology at Balliol, from 1637-1648. He is famous for introducing the English to coffee, which, like Oxford students ever since, he used to brew up every morning in college. Because of his closeness to Laud, the Puritans forced him to leave Oxford, but he made a success of his ecclesiastical career, becoming in the course of time Archbishop of Smyrna.

 

Gloucester Hall, Oxford

By the time that Archbishop Georgirenes was being forced to abandon his Greek Church in Soho, relations between the Orthodox and the theological authorities in Oxford had matured sufficiently to lead to an ambitious and radical proposal. Sometime around 1682, Georgirenes wrote to William Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to propose a permanent scheme for educating a dozen Greek theological students at Oxford. At that time, Gloucester Hall in Oxford was essentially defunct (penniless and student-less); its principal, Benjamin Woodroffe, therefore took up the Greek suggestion with enthusiasm and offered Gloucester’s premises for a model Greek College. The scheme was to be funded by the Levant Company and the students chosen by the patriarchs of Antioch and Constantinople in alternation. The surprisingly enlightened scheme got off the ground and the first students arrived in 1698. But it proved short-lived and foundered on problems that sound all too modern: the Levant Company disliked paying for it (of what commercial use were these graduates?) and in 1705, the Phanar refused to send any more students owing to the ‘irregular life’ that some of them were living in London. Clearly, the attractions of the capital were more compelling to some than the grind of theological study in Oxford. 

 

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These exchanges and contacts had done much to create opportunity to deepen mutual knowledge between the churches of each other’s doctrinal and ecclesiological principles. But a little knowledge, coupled with the practical failures of the church- and college-building schemes, proved to be too much. The florescence of interconfessional relations in the seventeenth century is of great historical interest but left no real ecumenical legacy. For much of the eighteenth century, contacts between the churches cooled. It took the creation of the Greek state and the ecumenism fostered by the Oxford Movement in the Church of England to reawaken mutual interests, in the nineteenth century. And the process of creating effective institutional ecumenical structures didn’t really begin until the twentieth century. In the final piece in this blog, I will take a look at the activities of a Greek hierarch whose leadership of the English church, a thousand years before Archbishop Georgirenes arrived in London, really did leave a legacy that lasted many centuries and is still felt in the Church of England today.

 

John Kittmer

Feast of the Venerable Bede

25 May 2021

 

[1] This quotation comes from the only English edition (Greek text plus English translation) of Noukios’ travelogue: J.A.Cramer (ed.), The Second Book of the Travels of Nicander Nucius of Corcyra (London: Camden Society, 1841): 74-75. 

 

[2] This quotation is taken from an accessible, modernised transcription of the diary: John Mole (ed.), The Sultan’s Organ: The Diary of Thomas Dallam, 1599 - London to Constantinople and Adventures on the Way (London: Fortune Books 2012): 24-25.

  

[3] Robert Liddell refers to this in The Morea (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958) 69. His source is an early travel-book by an English merchant: Bernard Randolph, The Present State of the Morea (London: Wm. Notts et al. 1689³). Sir Henry Hyde would later be appointed Charles II’s Ambassador in Constantinople, but at the request of the Commonwealth Government he was sent back by the Sultan to England, convicted of treason and executed in 1650.  

 

[4] The standard account on which I have largely relied is by Runciman. For this reference, see Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968): 292-293.