Faithful Encounters

Christian clergy, along with missionaries from Austria, England, France, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Italy, and the Vatican resided in the Ottoman Empire from its beginning. As representatives of their respective churches, they served the spiritual needs of their coreligionists, ran schools and hospitals, and—in the case of European clergy—sometimes acted as unofficial diplomats. Autocephalous Eastern Orthodox churches such as the patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Serbia, Bulgaria, Armenia, and Georgia were governed by their own synods and appointed their own prelates. Having supported Protestant princes of the Germanies since the sixteenth century against Habsburg Empire rivals, Ottomans were not strangers to Protestants. In fact, Queen Elizabeth I had sought alliances with Muslim monarchs, including the Ottomans. By the nineteenth century, however, an unprecedented rush of American evangelical missionaries, under guidance from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, began to settle in the Ottoman Empire. Faithful Encounters focuses on the relations those missionaries had with that empire or issues that arose in the absence of registration, land purchase, and building schools and hospitals without obtaining license from state authorities. Chapters 2 through 5 cover these topics by utilizing Ottoman archives, an important missionary dimension not previously explored from the administrative angle. Management of these improprieties necessarily had implications for diplomatic relations between the United States and the Ottoman Empire

Ancient history · Archaeology · Christianity · Empire · Holy See · License · Ottoman empire · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · State (computer science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law

• Christian Communities in the Contemporary Middle East

  Deanna Ferree Womack•Exchange•2020

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