On 14th January 2016 at 17:15, John-Paul Ghobrial will give a lecture at the Forschungszentrum (Seminarraum) with the title: In the Footsteps of Elias of Babylon. A Global Microhistory of Eastern Christianity
From Lebanese immigrants in Argentina to Iraqi refugees in Sweden, Eastern Christians can be found today scattered across the entire world. Too often, however, this global migration has been seen purely as a modern development, one arising from contemporary political and confessional events in the Middle East, while in fact this phenomenon had its roots in the early modern period. From the 16th century onwards, Christians in the Ottoman Empire set out for distant and foreign lands, travelling as far as Europe, India, Russia, and even the Americas.
This paper tells the story of one such individual, Elias of Babylon, who travelled from Mosul to Peru in the 17th century. An ancestor of today’s dwindling community of Iraqi Christians, Elias wrote the first Arabic eyewitness account of America. Based on a paper trail that stretched from Baghdad to Lima, this paper uses a microhistory as a window into the world of Eastern Christianity in the early modern period.
John-Paul Ghobrial is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Balliol College. He is now directing an ERC-funded project, ‚Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World‘.