Abstract

Relying on heretofore untapped archival documentation stored in multiple archives, this chapter provides a “global micro-history” of a remarkably mobile Catholic Armenian alms collector named Father Andreas Ouzounean from Mount Lebanon to ask larger questions about the very nature of early modern mobility in general and about eighteenth-century religious fundraising networks in particular. The chapter follows Father Andreas’s fundraising voyages from Lebanon to Moscow, Lvov, Vienna, Trieste, Rome, Malta, Istanbul, Isfahan, Baghdad, Basra, and especially to Madras and Calcutta and argues that the mobility of such itinerant men and their success as alms collectors were very much predicated on early modern “infrastructural public works projects” and the effective use of special certificates and credit instruments such as bills of exchange and respondentia loans.

Keywords: Eastern Christianity; alms collecting; bills of exchange; communication; Transport

At that time, a Lebanese friar named Father T‘umas, who was away from his congregation, resided there [i.e., in Madras]. After leaving his congregation, this [monk] had received a kondak [a kind of certificate or bull issued by a recognized church authority] from bishop Petros in Merdin [today’s Mardin in eastern Turkey] to go to India for begging and having begged for eight years in the Indies had left for other parts to do the same. When he had collected 15,000 rupees from begging, he went back to Merdin, and from there to Amid [Diyarbakir] and thence to Lebanon, and from there to Basra where he boarded the ship again for India and threw himself into the sea and perished.