The documents edited by H. Şükrü Ilıcak in Those Infidel Greeks comprise the English translations of select documents from the Ayniyat Registers on the Greek War of Independence preserved in the Ottoman State Archives. The primary importance of these documents is that they are a clear testimony of the larger imperial context in which the Greek War of Independence evolved and proved successful. The mass of information they contain is immense and allows the reader to follow on an almost day-to-day basis how an empire tried to suppress a national uprising—the first of its kind in the early nineteenth century. Contributors: Çağrı Erdoğan, H. Şükrü Ilıcak, Nikola Rakovski, Mehmet Savan, Kahraman Şakul, and Aysel Yıldız. This is a co-publication with the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation.

A sweeping global history of the birth of modern Greece In 1821, a diverse territory in the southern Balkans on the fringe of the Ottoman Empire was thrust into a decade of astounding mass violence. The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism traces how something new emerged from an imperial mosaic of myriad languages, religions, cultures, and localisms—the world’s first ethnic nation-state, one that was born from the destruction and the creation of whole peoples, and which set the stage for the modern age of nationalism that was to come. Yanni Kotsonis exposes the everyday chaos and brutality in the Balkan peninsula as the Ottoman regime unraveled. He follows the future Greeks on the seaways to Odesa, Alexandria, Livorno, and the Caribbean, and recovers the stories of peasants, merchants, warriors, aristocrats, and intellectuals who navigated the great empires that crisscrossed the region. Kotsonis recounts the experiences of the villagers and sailors who joined the armed battalions of the Napoleonic Wars and learned a new kind of warfare and a new practice of mass mobilization, lessons that served them well during the revolutionary decade. He describes how, as the bloody 1820s came to a close, the region’s Muslims were no more and Greece was an Orthodox Christian nation united by a shared language and a claim to an ancient past. This panoramic book shows how the Greek Revolution was a demographic upheaval more consequential than the overthrow of a ruler. Drawing on Ottoman sources together with archival evidence from Greece, Britain, France, Russia, and Switzerland, the book reframes the birth of modern Greece within the imperial history of the global nineteenth century.

Using a variety of methodologies from multi-disciplinary backgrounds, this volume is the first to present an in-depth analysis of the life and times of Laskarina Bouboulina, the legendary heroine of the Greek Revolution and one of the most important figures in modern Greek history, the Mediterranean, and indeed, the world. At the age of fifty and mother to ten children, Bouboulina commanded a fleet of ships from the island of Spetses and became the first female admiral in world naval history. But her success on the battlefield is only part of the story – by considering her three-century impact on feminism, cultural production, and as a touchstone of diasporic Greek identity, the contributors to this volume also expand our understanding of her far-reaching and under-recognized contributions.

Delving into a traditionally underexplored period, this book focuses on the treatment of Greek Jews under the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas in the years leading up to the Second World War. Almost 86% of Greek Jews died in the Holocaust, leading many to think this was because of Metaxas and his fascist ideology. However, the situation in Greece was much more complicated; in fact, Metaxas in his policies often attempted to quash anti-Semitism. The Fourth of August Regime and Greek Jewry, 1936-1941 explores how the Jews fit (and did not fit) into Metaxas's vision for Greece. Drawing on unpublished archival sources and Holocaust survivor testimonies, this book presents a ground-breaking contribution to Greek history, the history of Greek anti-Semitism, and sheds light on attitudes towards Jews during the interwar period.

Mămăligă, maize porridge or polenta, is a universally consumed dish in Romania and a prominent national symbol. But its unusual history has rarely been told. Alex Drace-Francis surveys the arrival and spread of maize cultivation in Romanian lands from Ottoman times to the eve of the First World War, and also the image of mămăligă in art and popular culture. Drawing on a rich array of sources and with many new findings, Drace-Francis shows how the making of mămăligă has been shaped by global economic forces and overlapping imperial systems of war and trade. The story of maize and mămăligă provides an accessible way to revisit many key questions of Romanian and broader regional history. More generally, the book links the history of production, consumption, and representation. Analyses of recipes, literary and popular depictions, and key vocabulary complete the work.

From Apostle Andrew to the conclusion of Soviet authority in 1990, Daniel Shubin presents the entire history of Christianity in Russia in a 3-volume series. The events, people and politics that forged the earliest traditions of Russian Christianity are presented objectively and intensively, describing the rise and dominance of the Russian Orthodox Church, the many dissenters and sectarian groups that evolved over the centuries (and their persecution), the presence of Catholicism and the influx of Protestantism and Judaism and other minority religions into Russia. The history covers the higher levels of ecclesiastical activity including the involvement of tsars and princes, as well as saints and serfs, and monks and mystics. This, the first volume, deals with the period from Apostle Andrew to the death of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, just prior to the election of the first Russian Patriarch, a period of almost 1600 years.

The conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade shattered irreversibly the political and cultural unity of the Byzantine world in the Greek peninsula, the Aegean and western Asia Minor. Between the disintegration of the Byzantine Empire after 1204 and the consolidation of Ottoman power in the fifteenth century, the area was a complex political, ethnic and religious mosaic, made up of Frankish lordships, Italian colonies, Turkish beyliks, as well as a number of states that professed to be the continuators of the Byzantine imperial tradition. This volume brings together western medievalists, Byzantinists and Ottomanists, combining recent research in the relevant fields in order to provide a holistic interpretation of this world of extreme fragmentation. Eight stimulating papers explore various factors that defined contact and conflict between Orthodox Greeks, Catholic Latins and Muslim Turks, highlighting common themes that run through this period and evaluating the changes that occurred over time. Particular emphasis is given on the crusades and the way they affected interaction in the area. Although the impact of the crusades on Byzantine history leading up to 1204 has been extensively examined in the past, there has been little research on the way crusading was implemented in Greece and the Aegean after that point. Far from being limited to crusading per se, however, the papers put it into its wider context and examine other aspects of contact, such as trade, interfaith relations, and geographical exploration.