western christian missions in the levant the arab ...

aram WESTERN CHRISTIAN MISSIONS IN THE LEVANT THE ARAB RENAISSANCE MANDAISM

volume 25-1&2

2013

ARAM 25:1&2 (2013), 231-260

BEGINNINGS OF ARABIC PRINTING IN OTTOMAN SYRIA (1706-1711). THE ROMANIANS’ PART IN ATHANASIUS DABBĀS’S ACHIEVEMENTS IOANA FEODOROV (Romanian Academy, Bucharest)

Abstract Printing in Arabic types was a major aspiration for the Christian Arabs of the Ottoman provinces, particularly from the second half of the 17th century, when several Patriarchs of the Antiochian Church set this goal for themselves, as part of their mission to support the spiritual and social advancement of their flock. Patriarch Athanasius Dabbās (1685-1694, 1720-1724) travelled to the Romanian Principalities in 1698-1705, in search of political and financial support, after temporarily renouncing his See in favour of his competitor Cyril V. His princely friend Constantin Brâncoveanu (1688-1714), ruler of Wallachia, appointed Antim Ivireanul (‘the Georgian’), the most gifted typographer, engraver, and member of the clergy, to help Dabbās in printing church books in Arabic types. My paper sums up the available data on this printing enterprise and its significant outcome for the Christians of the Antiochian patriarchate: eleven titles printed in Aleppo (1706-1711), the first books printed in Arabic types in Ottoman lands, which circulated all over the Middle East. This major cultural event inspired the progressive movement embodied in the Nahḍa (the ‘Arab Renaissance’), contributing to forge the modern Levantine societies.

The topic of this paper was suggested to me by an article in the Journal of Semitic Studies, supplement 28 for 2012, comprising the Papers of the BRISMES conference at the University of Manchester in 2009. A contribution by Otared Haidar, ‘Aleppo: The First Ground for Arab-European Cultural Encounters’, convinced me that while the Syrian testimonies concerning the first Arabic books printed at Aleppo are being researched more carefully by Near Eastern scholars, the Romanian side of the story still awaits discovery.1 I shall start by agreeing with this author’s assertion that ‘The history of Arab print culture that preceded the establishment of Arab press and journalism is completely absent from most of the major resources of modern Arabic literature and culture and is discussed briefly and hurriedly in the rest’ (p. 129). Surveys of the first books printed in Arabic are few, and they mostly date from the last century.2 After a first version in French, Le Début de l’imprimerie arabe à Istanbul et en Syrie: Évolution de l’environnement culturel (1706-1787) (Tunis, Institut Supérieur de Documentation, 1985), Wahid Gdoura published in Arabic a revised edition of his work, with slight improvements that do not concern our topic. Romanian scholars were interested in the first Arabic printed books, as part of the story that I am discussing here, and a couple of descriptions are available. Joseph Nasrallah briefly 1 I am grateful to Dr. Geoffrey Roper (London) for helping me ascertain certain facts and get access to some sources, as well as for his advice on the paper that I presented at this ARAM Society conference. 2 The two Greek and Arabic books printed in 1701-1702 in Wallachia were described in Émile Picot, ‘Notice biographique et bibliographique sur l’imprimeur Anthime d’Ivir, Métropolitain de Valachie’, in Nouveaux Mélanges Orientaux (Paris, 1886), pp. 515-560, reprinted in Vivliotiki istorikon meleton (Athens, 1972); BRV I: 422-433, 442-447; P. Cyrille Charon, Le Rite Byzantin dans les Patriarcats Melkites. Alexandrie – Antioche – Jérusalem (Rome: Imprimerie de la Propagande, 1908), pp. 539-560; Georg Graf, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, III (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1949). After fundamental comments by Nicolae Iorga and Marcu Beza in the 1930’s, Constantin I. Karadja published in 1940 Brâncoveanu’s coat of arms in the Aleppo Psalter of 1706. Dan Simonescu had a fruitful collaboration with Emile Murakadé, who had come from Damascus to Bucharest for studies, and they researched together the Greek-Arabic books printed in Wallachia and Moldavia. The codicological descriptions of the books printed by Patriarch Sylvestros of Antioch included in BRV IV are due to Murakadé. The most recent contribution to the topic is my inventory: Christian Arabic texts printed with help from the Romanian Principalities in the 18th century – An annotated record, Istros, XX, In honorem Professoris Ionel Cândea (Muzeul Brăilei „Carol I” – Editura Istros, Brăila, 2014, p. 651-688 in Romanian, pp. 689-729 in English).

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commented on the printing activities of two Patriarchs of the Antiochian Church, Athanasius Dabbās (1647-1724) and Sylvestros (1680-1766).3 Carsten Walbiner recounted the story of the ‘pioneers of book-printing in the Arab world’ in an introduction to the description of 5 books produced in Middle Eastern workshops (Walbiner, 2001) and briefly discussed the liturgical texts that were printed at Aleppo (1706-1708), from a doctrinal point of view (Walbiner, 2012). The most substantial contribution in recent years is that of Dagmar Glass and Geoffrey Roper in Arabic Book and Newspaper printing in the Arab World, where most issues concerning the Aleppo books are mentioned.4 As far as the bibliography in Arabic is concerned, ‘Isā Al-Iskandar Ma‘lūf wrote an article on Arabic printing by the Orthodox Romanians in Syria, a century ago.5 One should also mention the book of Anṭuwān Qayṣar Dabbās and Nahla Raššū, Tārīh al-tibā‘at al-‘arabiyya fī l-Mašriq. AlBaṭriyark Atanāsīyūs al-tālit Dabbās (1685-1724) (Beirut, 2008), which provides first-hand information on Patriarch Athanasius III’s life and works, including his printing activity, and is accompanied by an interesting family genealogy.6 Other contributions have recently come from Suhayl al-Malādī, Mahā Farah Hūrī and Ignatius Dīk (all cited by Haidar). The significance of printing for the cultural progress of 18th century Syria is not the topic of this paper: this was already surveyed starting a century ago. In the article that I mentioned, Ma‘lūf first discussed the role of printing for the national and literary awakening in Syria. More comments on the topic were put forward by Marūn ‘Abbūd, in his Ruwwād al-Nahḍa al-Ḥadīṯa (Beirut, 1966), and Albert Hourani, in Arab Thought in the Liberal Age (Oxford, 1967). It is acknowledged nowadays that, as stated in L’imprimé dans le monde arabe, a presentation on the website of Bibliothèque Nationale de France: ‘Le développement de la typographie accompagne les mouvements de renouveau culturel, de modernisation politique, d’ouverture sur l’Occident et d’éveil des indépendances.’ As Haidar states, ‘the choice of the first wide-ranging contact with the West as a historical and cultural milestone in Arab modern history is meant to recognize the role of the West in providing the early incentive for the project of the literary and cultural Renaissance.’ I shall only add a couple of elements in support of this point of view. In her book The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1983), Elizabeth L. Eisenstein comments on ‘the theme of printing as proof of spiritual and cultural superiority, first sounded by Rome in its crusade against “illiterate” Turks [...]’ (147). Referring to the Bible versions, the author notes that: ‘The desire to spread glad tidings, when implemented by print, contributed to the fragmentation of Christendom. [...] It is no accident that nationalism and mass literacy have developed together. The two processes have been linked ever since Europeans ceased to speak the same language when citing their Scriptures or saying their prayers.’ (162) The subject has particular relevance in a discussion about the birth of the national idea in countries of the Near and Middle East. Fr Samīr Khalīl Samīr commented that Al-Nahḍa, the ‘Arab Renaissance’ of the 18th century, promoted by the Christian clergy, was born in Syria, precisely in the cosmopolitan and modern metropolis of Aleppo.7 Ma‘lūf stated in his above-mentioned article that the introduction of printing in Syria and Lebanon had significant consequences not only for the national and literary revival of the peoples concerned, but also for the ease of access to knowledge and education. In his introduction to the Proceedings of a colloquium held in Strasbourg in 1992 (Turquie: Livres d’hier, livres d’aujourd’hui, p. VIII), Paul Dumont remarked: ‘Si Evlyia Çelebi visitait la Turquie d’aujourd’hui, c’est assurément cette production de masse, signe d’une spectaculaire démocratisation de la lecture, qui l’ébahirait le plus. Que les clercs n’aient plus le monopole des choses de l’esprit, quoi de plus inconcevable!’ 3 Nasrallah, 1949: p. 14-15, 17-25; Nasrallah, 1979: 144-146; Nasrallah, 1983: 218-219; Nasrallah, 1989: 87-89; idem, ‘Les imprimeries melchites au XVIIIe siècle’, Proche Orient Chrétien (Jérusalem, 1986), t. XXXVI, fasc. III-IV, pp. 232-241. 4 Hanebutt-Benz – Glass – Roper, 2002: 177-226. 5 Al-Ni‘ma (Damascus, 1911), no. 3, pp. 44-56. 6 See my review in Revue des Études Sud-Est Européennes (RESEE) (Bucharest, XLVI, 2009), pp. 362-364 (in English), online at: www.resee.ro. 7 Samīr 1997: 98.

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Archival proof is still needed to support the theory that the Sublime Porte totally banned printing in Arabic types before 1700.8 In the same volume of Proceedings, Sinan Kuneralp declares: ‘Il semble que l’interdiction de l’imprimerie ne fut que formelle et ne parait pas avoir été entérinée par un acte officiel. Du moins, aucun document à cet effet n’a été découvert à ce jour’.9 André Thevet, a traveller to the East in 154910, Paul Ricaut, who visited Istanbul in the 1660s, and Giovanni Donado, author of a survey of Turkish literature (printed in 1688) all mentioned that printing was forbidden by the Ottoman rulers. Thevet claimed that Sultan Bayezid II (1481-1512) issued a decree in 1483 stipulating the death penalty for those who dared print books, and that the succeeding sultan, Selim I (15121520), confirmed that decree in 1515. The more likely version is that offered by count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730), who travelled to the East and reported in a book published in 173211 that the Turks did not print not because there was a ban on this activity, but because of the threat this posed for the copyists’ trade. This opinion was confirmed around 1780 by Muradja d’Ohsson, an Armenian living in Istanbul. Printing had been done in Istanbul since 1493, when Sultan Bayazid II authorized the increasing Jewish community, dislodged from Spain by the Inquisition, to print their sacred texts, provided they did not print in Arabic types. The decree (hatt-i šerīf) of 1485 issued by Sultan Bayazid II to limit printing did not refer to dimmīs12. A firman issued in 1587 allowed the distribution and trade in ‘certain printed Arabic, Persian and Turkish books and writings’ printed in Europe, except religious books.13 The Orthodox Patriarchate founded the first Greek printing workshop in 1627, and the Armenians in 1567, enjoying a relative freedom until the Ottoman Press Act of 1866, since they were neither subjected to the Catholic censorship, nor to Ottoman state control.14 Picot remarked that Dositheos Notaras (1641-1707), the Patriarch of Jerusalem, complained in the foreword to his History of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem, printed in Greek in Bucharest in 1715, that: les frari, c’est-a-dire probablement les jésuites, qui entouraient l’ambassadeur de France à Constantinople, poussèrent cet ambassadeur à intervenir pour empêcher le patriarche de Jérusalem de faire imprimer des livres; qu’ils essayèrent de tous les moyens pour arriver à leurs fins; mais que le grand vizir, qui était un homme prudent, repoussa leur prétention.15 Insight can be gained from the activity of Ibrahim Müteferrika (1674-1742), a Hungarian born in the Transylvanian city of Cluj, who was taken prisoner by the Turks and entered the service of the Sultan, embracing the Muslim faith (he then wrote a eulogy of Islam that made him popular at the Ottoman Court).16 The time was right for his project: printing was no longer considered ‘an instrument 8 For comprehensive surveys of the topic see Christoph K. Neumann, ‘Book and newspaper printing in Turkish, 18th-20th century’, in Hanebutt-Benz – Glass – Roper, 2002: 227-248; Orlin Sabev (Orhan Salih), ‘A Virgin Deserving Paradise or a Whore Deserving Poison: Manuscript Tradition and Printed Books in Ottoman Turkish Society’, in Friars, Nobles and Burghers. Sermons, Images and Prints, Studies of Culture and Society in Early-Modern Europe, In Memoriam István György Tóth, Jaroslav Miller and László Kontler (eds.) (Central European University Press, Budapest – New York, 2010), pp. 389409. 9 Kuneralp, 1992: 2. 10 André Thevet, Histoire des plus illustres et savans hommes de leurs siècles (Paris: Éditions Manger, 1671), t. 2, p. 111. 11 Signor Conte di Marsigli, Stato militare dell’Impero Ottomanno incremento e decremento del medesimo (The Hague – Amsterdam: Pietro Gosse et al., 1732), p. 40. 12 Glass – Roper, 2002: 177. 13 For a detailed survey of the circumstances surrounding the first attempts to print in Istanbul see Gdoura, 1985: 83-122; Christoph K. Neumann, op. cit., pp. 229-232. 14 Meliné Pehlivanian, Mesrop’s Heirs: the Early Armenian Book Printers, in Hanebutt-Benz – Glass – Roper, 2002: 57. 15 Picot, 1886: 559. 16 The most recent and substantial contribution on the life and activities of this pioneer of printing in Turkey is that of Vefa Erginbaș ‘Enlightenment in the Ottoman Context: İbrahim Mūteferrika and His Intellectual Landscape’, in Historical Aspects of Printing and Publishing in Languages of the Middle East. Papers from the Symposium at the University of Leipzig, September 2008, Geoffrey Roper (ed.) (Brill, 2013), pp. 53-100. For a survey of the topic from a Hungarian

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of the devil’,17 and sultan Ahmet III (1706-1730), together with his Grand Vizir Ibrahim Pasha, was interested in bringing modernity to the capital, as a way of overcoming the decadence of the Empire.18 The Ottoman ambassador in France, Yirmisekiz Mehmet Çelebi, visited a printing house in Paris with his son Said Bey, who, back in Istanbul, joined with Müteferrika to open the first press, in the latter’s house in Yavuz-Selim.19 They first obtained a firman from Sultan Ahmet III, afterwards they requested a fatwa from Șeih-ul-Islam Yenișehirli Abdullah Efendi, and only then did they request the consent of Grand Vizir Damat Ibrahim Pașa. Financial support came from the Ottoman administration, to which Müteferrika had delivered a mémoir in support of the press. The new press received technical assistance from foreigners like Father Holdermann, a Jesuit from Strasbourg, who manufactured Latin types necessary for a Turkish grammar, which he had written for the French merchants in the Ottoman Empire.20 Istanbul then had six to seven thousand manuscript copyists; to avoid making them jobless, Müteferrika was allowed to print only secular books and maps that would have been difficult or costly to copy, and no religious texts whatsoever.21 After a slow start in 1728, over sixteen years the press produced seventeen books on lexicography, geography and history – in Arabic types – 500 to 1,000 copies each.22 The request for printed books was limited, because of the conservative attitude of the readers, who preferred rich, unique manuscript works as late as the 19th century.23 Only 436 titles were printed in Istanbul before the Reforms (Tanzimāt) of 1839.24 An early attempt to print in the Levant was made by the Maronites in 1610, at the monastery of St Anthony in Quzḥāyya (N. Mount Lebanon), by editing a Book of Psalms in Syriac and Arabic, printed in Karshūnī script.25 The initiative was launched and financed by the Bishop of Damascus Sarkīs alRizzī (1600-1638). There is no known explanation for the early end of this venture.26 Although subjected to the Ottoman pressure in a different form, Romanians and Near-Eastern Christians shared the same issues and aims. Since the 16th century, Christians of the Patriarchate of Antioch27 aspired to replace the Church language, Greek, with the vernacular one, as a deliberate

perspective see L. Hopp, ‘Ibrahim Müteferrika (1674/75? – 1746), fondateur de l’imprimerie turque’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, t. XXIX (1), 1975, pp. 107-113. 17 “During his visit to Istanbul in 1844 Charles White observed that the Istanbul booksellers considered that manuscript copyists deserved to go to paradise after their demise, while the printing press was made of the poisonous plant oleander”, according to Orlin Sabev (Orhan Salih), ‘A Virgin Deserving Paradise’, p. 389. 18 For reasons that blocked the establishment of printing houses in Istanbul see Kuneralp, 1992: 1. 19 Kuneralp, 1992: 3; Nedret Kuran-Burçoğlu, ‘Osman Zeki Bey and His Printing Office the Matbaa-i Osmaniye’, in History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East, Philip Sadgrove (ed.), Journal of Semitic Studies, Suppl. 15 (Oxford, 2004), p. 37. 20 Müteferrika was also the first to produce copperplate engravings in Istanbul, according to Janet Starkey, in James Rennell and his Scientific World of Observation, in Knowledge is Light. Travellers in the Near East (Oxford – Oakville, 2011), p. 48. 21 “According to the accounts of a contemporary of Ibrahim Müteferrika, the Swiss nobleman César de Saussure, Ibrahim’s intention to launch a printing venture met with a severe reaction from the religious and as well from the copyists, who appealed to the Grand Vizier to put a stop to such an undertaking which threatened their livelihood”, cf. Sabev, ‘A Virgin Deserving Paradise’, p. 393. 22 According to Johann Strauss, ‘Les livres et l’imprimerie à Istanbul (1800-1908)’, in Turquie, livres d’hier, p. 5, even in the 19th c. “il était très rare de trouver les livres en turc dont l’édition dépassait 2000 exemplaires. Un tirage de trois ou quatre mille exemplaires était, selon [the editor and printer] Ahmed Ihsan (in his Avrupa’da ne gördüm (Ce que j’ai vu en Europe, France, Angleterre, Belgique, Hollande, Allemagne, Suisse, Italie, Autriche et Hongrie) (Istanbul, 1891), pp. 115-116, pratiquement inconnu”. 23 According to Kuneralp, 1992: 2, a book by Ibn Sīnā printed at Rome in 1593 did not sell well, compared to the manuscript version which, although more expensive, was always in demand. 24 See Strauss, op. cit., p. 6. For the slow transition from scribal to print culture see Sabev, op. cit., pp. 390-391. 25 Also known as garšūnī, this refers to the Syriac script used by Christians of Syria and Mesopotamia in writing Arabic. It was used from the 10th century on by some of the Syrian Christians (Maronite, Jacobite and Nestorian), but never by Melkites. 26 See Walbiner, 2001: 22-23; Glass – Roper, 2002: 177-178; Kuneralp, 1992: 2. 27 This is the only Eastern Patriarchate where Arabic has been used continuously as the official language.

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acknowledgment of their Arab spirit.28 At the same time, Romanians were striving to achieve a definitive transfer from Church Slavonic and Greek to the Romanian vernacular. They had already replaced the old, faulty manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures with unified versions, based on reliable Greek texts, made more accessible to church priests by additional explanations in Romanian. In Wallachia and Moldavia the first liturgical texts in Romanian were printed in the first decades of the 17th century29, while in 1688 an epic edition of the Bible was printed in Romanian, at Bucharest. In 1690, the Manual against the Schism of the Pope’s Followers (Manual în contra schismei papistașilor) by Maxim of Peloponnesus was printed in Greek. Around 1700, Constantin Brâncoveanu was following the plan of the Metropolitan of his country, Theodosius, who declared: ‘We shall not borrow these [books] from others anymore, as we did before, but we shall have our own, and we shall diligently share them with others who are also in need of such.’ Books printed between 1680 and 1720 did not only answer the needs of the Wallachian and Moldavian Churches, they also followed a greater plan of defense of the Orthodox spirit against the Catholic missionary assault.30 News about the greater religious freedom and autonomy in South-East Europe reached Syria through travelers and merchants. The Orthodox princes’ munificence and solidarity to other Orthodox Churches were famous. In 1652, Macarius III Ibn al-Zaʻīm, patriarch of the Antiochian church (16471672), headed for Wallachia, Moldavia, Ukraine and Russia to obtain financial and political help, on a first journey that kept him away from his See for seven years and four months (1652-1659). One of the aims that he and his son Paul of Aleppo had in mind was to collect Greek manuscripts and books, and to convince the foreign princes to help them print church books in Arabic.31 They admired the Romanian princes’ willingness to set up printing houses, endow them and have printing done in the vernacular language. Constantin Brâncoveanu was writing to Hrisant Notaras in 1709 about a new printing workshop that he projected for the St Sabas monastery in Bucharest. Paul of Aleppo comments in his Journal, referring to Vasile Lupu, the Prince of Moldavia: In his time, he had a lot of church books printed, theological texts and comments, at his Court in Moldavia, in Romanian,32 for his people did not read Serbian, i.e. Russian [Slavonic]. For in the countries of the Bulgarians, the Serbs, in Wallachia and Moldavia, and further on in the Cossacks’ country and as far as Moscow, everyone reads Serbian [i.e., Slavonic] and all their books are [written] in this language, while the language of the people of Moldavia and Wallachia is Wallachian [Romanian], therefore they do not understand what they read. Thus, he had a great school built of stone near his monastery [Trei Ierarhi] and he had books printed for them in their own language.33

28 For a discussion of the liturgical language of the Melkites see Karalevsky, Histoire des patriarcats melkites, t. III, pp. 136-149. 29 Varlaam, Metropolitan of Moldavia, Carte românească de învățătură. Dumenecile preste an și la praznice împărătești și la svenți mari (Cazania) (Iași, 1643). See the latest edition by Stela Toma and Dan Zamfirescu (Ed. Roza vânturilor, Bucharest, 2012-2013). In Wallachia, under Matei Basarab, Pravila de la Govora, 1640, Evanghelia Învățătoare, Dealu, 1642, Imitarea lui Christos, 1647 (Udriște Năsturel), Îndreptarea legii, 1652. 30 For a comprehensive survey of printing in the Romanian principalities (Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania) and a chronological list of titles see Dennis Deletant’s two-part article in The Slavonic and East European Review: ‘Romanian Presses and Printing in the Seventeenth Century’, I, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Oct., 1982), pp. 481-499; II, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Oct., 1983), pp. 481-511. 31 The notion of “printing” is seldom mentioned in Paul’s Journal. The verb ṭaba‘a only occurs 4 times (in the longest manuscript, Arabe 6016 of BnF, Paris). Obviously, most of the “books” mentioned by Paul – kutub, tawārīẖ, nawāmīs – are manuscripts, maẖṭūṭāt. The very absence of this last word in most passages proves that the time had not come to indicate precisely if the reference was to a manuscript or to a printed book, for generally, in Syria, texts circulated in manuscripts. 32 Bi-l-fallāhī, the name of the Romanian language, equally used by Paul of Aleppo when referring to the Wallachians and the Moldavians. 33 Ms. Arabe 6016, BnF, fol. 33v-34r.

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Paul’s interest in the Romanians’ situation came from its similarity to that of the Syrian Christians who, except for those who had had a proper monastic education, did not read Greek.34 Having copied with great trouble the unique manuscript of the Comments to Prophet David’s Psalms, collected by Niketas of Remesiana, Metropolitan of Serres, from the works of 40 Church scholars and Saints (including Theodoret, Bishop of Cyr)35, Paul notes that they had the intention to print this book ‘in the European countries, for our benefit and that of all the Christian people.’36 Another book that they wished to print was the Greek and Arabic Missal (Liturgikon) that Patriarch Makarius had brought with him from Damascus, which he quoted in support of his options on doctrine and ritual37 during the synod of Moscow, in 1656.38 An outcome of the old Arabic translations revised by Eastern scholars and theologians, Biblia arabica preserved the local liturgical traditions of Arab Christianity. According to Dabbās and Raššū, Arab Christians welcomed the art of printing and agreed with its benefits, based on the books printed in Europe that reached them. However, their interest in the printing-press did not prevent them from rejecting the contents of the books sent to them from Rome and Paris, because [...] they enclosed texts that reflected the Catholic teachings. The Church of Rome was trying hard to bring the Eastern Churches to the Catholic faith [...].39 Vatican theologians only accepted a new Arabic translation of the Vulgate, elaborated under the supervision of Catholic hierarchs and scholars. Sent as a gift to the Eastern communities, Arabic religious books40 that had received the approval of the Sacra Congregatia de Propaganda Fide, the Pope’s institution charged with spreading the Catholic faith, were meant to replace the old manuscripts that had been used by many generations of Arab priests and monks. Meletius Karme (Metropolitan of Aleppo, 1612-1634, and Patriarch of the Antiochian Church, 1634-1635) tried to unify the Bible versions that were in circulation in his time, blaming the corrupted and inconsistent translations from Coptic, Armenian, Syriac or Greek. In his endeavor to promote a correct version of the Arabic Bible, he sent the first five chapters of the Old Testament to the Sacra Congregatia, which he himself had revised, and pleaded in the accompanying letter for the publication of a unified Biblical text that would observe the Arabic manuscript tradition.41 According to Abdallah Raheb, ‘in a meeting held on July 4, 1633, Cardinal Ubaldini, prefect of the province of Syria, showed the other cardinals that the Arabic version of Genesis which was sent by the Greek metropolitan of Aleppo contained improper

The Patriarch and his son saw service books, maps of cities and lands, holy icons, and lay texts printed at the monastery (Lavra) Petcherska (“of the Cave”). They were filled with joy when they managed to have letters of absolution printed there: they obtained them in three sizes (for princes, common men, and women, respectively), with the signature of Patriarch Macarios in Slavonic types, printed in red ink, next to the icon of St Apostle Peter (MS BnF, fol. 107r). Their appreciation of printing became thus even greater. 35 While in Wallachia, at the Monastery of Cozia, Paul visited the Postelnic and obtained the Commentaries, in order to have them copied. For details on this interesting episode see Virgil Cândea, ‘Sources byzantines et orientales concernant les Roumains’, RESEE, XVI, 1978, 2, pp. 311-312. 36 Ms. Arabe 6016, BnF, fol. 270r-271r. 37 In 1650, after an exchange of letters between Joseph, Patriarch of Moscow, and Parthenios, Patriarch of Constantinople, certain improvements were achieved in the service books, aiming to a return to a more solemn ritual, closer to the spirit of early Christianity. 38 In his article ‘On the Missal of Patriarch Macarios preserved at Athos’ (in Russian), published in Drevnosti Vostočnye, Trudy Vostočnoj komissii Imperatorskogo Moskovskogo arheologičeskogo Obščestva, vol. II (Moscow, 1896), p. 1, G. A. Murkos states that he saw at the Monastery of Vatoped on Mount Athos a Greek and Arabic Missal copied in 1647, with an Arabic foreword, which Patriarch Macarios had carried with him while travelling. 39 Dabbās – Raššū, Tārīh al-tibā‘at al-‘arabiyya, pp. 33-34. 40 Such as Bellarmino’s Arabic Catechism, first printed in 1613, and reprinted in 1627 by the Sacra Congregatia de Propaganda Fide, the first publication after its foundation. 41 Walbiner 2001: 55-56. 34

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words and some notable differences with that of the Vulgate’.42 The Secretary of the Congregation read a speech on the translation of the Vulgate in Arabic in front of Pope Urban VIII, stating that: ‘the Bible printed in France could not respond to the needs of the Eastern Churches represented by the Metropolitan Karme, Archbishop of the Melkites of Aleppo; its price would be so high that only an insufficient number of copies could be sent to these Churches’.43 Towards the end of the 16th century, Father Eliano was collecting old Arabic manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures, which he considered ‘filled with heresies’, in order to burn them.44 Religious books had become a weapon in the inter-faith clash. Referring to books printed at Rome, the Maronite Patriarch of Jerusalem Isṭifān Al-Duwayhī noted in 1700: ‘Maronites are also superior to the other Oriental Christians because they are the only ones who print freely, and have always been printing, the true beliefs of the Catholic faith’. (Heyberger 1994: 447). The Romanians’ connection to printing in Arabic dates from the time Athanasius Dabbās visited Wallachia, at the threshold of the 17th and 18th centuries. Born in Damascus, Būloṣ (Paul) Dabbās was the offspring of an old family in Hawrān.45 His predominantly Greek education also included studies of Arabic, Syriac, Latin and Italian. He was the abbot of St. Sabas monastery in Bethlehem, where he had joined the orders. Living in monasteries in and around Jerusalem, he came in contact with Western missionaries active in the Holy Land. He was elected Patriarch of Antioch, on August 25 in 1686, as Athanasios III46, but since he was not accepted by all the flock, he temporarily relinquished the See in 1694 to Cyril V Ibn al-Za‘īm.47 Until 1720, when he resumed his mission as a Patriarch, he remained Metropolitan of Aleppo. Gabriel III, Patriarch of Constantinople, designated him Archbishop of Cyprus in 1704. Dabbās continued the pastoral work of his eminent predecessors Meletius Karme (1572-1635) and Macarios III Ibn al-Za‘īm (1597-1672), promoting the Orthodox values reflected in his numerous homilies and liturgical commentaries, texts on the significance of confession, translations and interpretations of Greek canonical, ascetic and polemical works. After Athanasios’s death in 1724 the Antiochian Church divided, following long-lasting disputes among Syrian Christians, and a part of the faithful entered in full communion with the Roman Church, to be known thenceforth as Melkite.48 After 1694, in search of political, spiritual and financial help for the Near-Eastern Orthodox, Dabbās travelled to Constantinople and then to Wallachia, several times. Dabbās’s visits to Bucharest took place during a difficult period for the Christian Churches of the Near East, under Ottoman rule since 1516.49 In the Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire Christians held the status of a minority, subject to a discriminatory legal system. In their vast majority, Arab Christians have lived, ever since the Ottoman conquest, in Muslim lands, inside the borders of the ‘House of Islam’, Dār al-ʼIslām. Increasing taxes, stern bans, such as the one addressing the construction of new churches, drove more Christians to isolation in certain parts of the big cities (Aleppo, Damascus and Mosul), or on Mount 42 A. Raheb, Conception of the Union in the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch (1622-1672). Historical Part, Beirut, 1981, p. 46. Ubaldini had first presented before the Congregation on May 13, 1622, a verbal request by Karme ‘for the printing of some Arabic books and especially the Bible, the translation of which Karme wanted to unify because partial versions were found in the East here and there’, see ibidem: 39, n. 133. 43 Ibidem : 46-47. 44 Gérard Duverdier, ‘II. Livres pour le Liban. Défense de l’orthodoxie et lutte des influences’, in Aboussouan 1982: 265. 45 A family where two patriarchs of the Orthodox faith (Rūm) had previously been born: Athanasius II (1611-1618) and Cyril IV (1619-1628). Some authors have referred to him as Athanasios IV (including, more recently, Bruce Masters, in the cited work). Another Athanasius Dabbās (d. 1797) is mentioned in Nasrallah 1989: 339. 46 He “was ironically given the community’s established preference for one of its own, a native of Damascus”, cf. Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews, p. 85. For the whole story see ibidem: 85-86. 47 According to Radu – Karalevsky, ‘Synopsis’, p. 857, the succession was: Cyril V Ibn al-Zaʽīm, 2 July 1672 – November 1672; Neophitus of Chios, 1672-1682; Cyril V Ibn al-Zaʽīm, 1682 – 15 January 1720; Athanasius III Dabbās, 25 June 1685 – October 1694, then January 1720 – 13 July 1724. See also P. Cyrille Charon, Le Rite Byzantin, pp. 539-540. 48 This name, originating from the Syriac word melek, “emperor”, with reference to the Emperor of Byzantium, had previously been used for all Chalcedonian Christians, seemingly in derision, as “the Emperor’s servants”. 49 This is the year Sultan Selim I conquered the lands that were under the pastoral guidance of the Eastern Patriarchates (Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria).

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Lebanon and in Kurdistan. Dabbās declared in the Foreword to the Psalter that he printed at Aleppo in 1706: ‘Brothers of the faith in the Arab lands who kept their devotion were weakened by the subjection and the violence into which they were forced by the Ottomans.’ The Neos Epistolarios printed in 1764 at Leipzig states that the Orthodox clergy lived in poor conditions, the Eastern Patriarchates were oppressed by the Turks and several Metropolitan Sees and Bishoprics in Asia and Africa had been annulled.50 Dabbās first arrived in Bucharest in March 1700. Romanian chronicles mention that on 12 May 1700 he participated in the wedding service of one of the Prince’s daughters, Safta, with Iordache Cretzulescu, the Great Logothetes, who kept the Prince’s registers.51 When the prince received a new hatt-i šerīf from the Sultan, confirming him as ruler of Wallachia, Dabbās joined in the celebrations of 11 July 1703. Like the other Eastern hierarchs who had stayed at the Court of Wallachia, Athanasius was the Court’s preacher, also charged with the ordination of priests and bishops. On September 20, 1702, Brâncoveanu signed a deed granting the patriarchate of Antioch, for as long as the prince lived, 500 talers per year, to be collected by the Patriarchate’s envoy from the salt mines at Ocnele Mari on the feast of St Demetrius (26th of October). The explanation went as such: ‘Hearing that this saintly and Godly Patriarchate of Antioch [...] is weakened and without an income, and seeing that His Holiness Father Athanasios, who was a Patriarch of this Holy Patriarchate, came and brought blessing and prayer to us, asking us to support and to give something to this Saint Patriarchate, from our gains, [...] we did this charitable deed towards the Patriarchate so that it remains firm, unwavering, and untouched, as long as my lordship is alive’.52 Constantin Brâncoveanu was famous for his generosity towards the Eastern Churches. In January 1692, he had issued an act endowing 17 churches and monasteries in the Orthodox East with a total amount of 109,000 bani (approx. 840 talers).53 At the prince’s request, Dabbās wrote in Greek a History of the Patriarchs of Antioch (7 + 83 pp.) that he completed in June 1702 and dedicated to his protector.54 Brâncoveanu was also more open to requests for cultural acts directed towards the preservation of Orthodoxy in the East, as an official act was issued in 1702, sanctioned by Emperor Leopold I, which forcibly united the Orthodox Romanians of Transylvania with the Church of Rome. Brâncoveanu was writing on 20 September 1703 to David Corbea, his ambassador at the Tsar’s Court, in Moscow: ‘A book will soon be printed here against those who pretend to be Orthodox, but in reality have embraced the Pope’s creed. [...] We shall then translate it into Serbian [i.e., Slavonic]: scholars say that it will be beneficial for all the Orthodox’.55 In Aleppo, the Latin Catholics had established their headquarters for Apud Constantin Erbiceanu, Bibliografia greacă sau Cărțile grecești imprimate în Principatele Române în epoca fanariotă și dedicate domnitorilor și boierilor români. Studii literare (Bucharest: Tipografia cărților bisericești, 1903), p. 104. 51 Cf. Ștefan D. Grecianu, Viața lui Costandin Vodă Brâncoveanu de Radu Vel Logofăt Grecianu (Bucharest, 1906), pp. 98, 100; N. Iorga, Istoria Bisericii românești și a vieții religioase a românilor, II (Văleni-de-Munte, 1909), pp. 10-11; Giurescu, Anatefterul: 367, passim. 52 Decree published by T. G. Bulat, ‘Daniile lui Constantin-vodă Brâncoveanu pentru Orientul ortodox’, Biserica Ortodoxă Română, nr. 9-10 (1964), p. 940; Condica Marii Logofeții (1692-1714) (Bucharest: Ed. Paralela 45, 2009), pp. 362-363. The amount was paid to the Antiochian Patriarchate all through the 18th century, based on several confirmation decrees issued by the Wallachian rulers, which are preserved in the National Archives of Rumania (Bucharest). 53 N. Iorga, Studii și documente, t. V, 363. 54 Atanasie Dabbas, ‘Istoria Patriarhilor din Antiohia (Synopsis peri ton hagiotaton patriarchon Antiocheias)’, transl. Pr. V. Radu and Cyril Karalevsky, Biserica Ortodoxă Română, XLVIII, 1930, no. 10, pp. 851-864, 961-972, 1039-1050, 11361150; XLIX, 1931, no. 2-3, pp. 15-32, 140-160. The original manuscript of 46 pp. is now in the National Library in Vienna (Ms. Suppl. Graec. LXXXV, Coll. Kollár LXXI, col. 451-460). Dabbās’s foreword was translated into Latin and printed in Kaiserlich-Kö nigliche Hofbibliothek (Vienna) Petri Lambecii Hamburgensis Commentariorum de augustissima Bibliotheca Caesarea Vindobonensi liber primus(-octavus) ... Editio altera. Opera et studio A. F. Kollarii, Supplementorum liber primus posthumus (Vindobonae, 1766). The Greek manuscript was described, and passages were translated into Romanian, by N. Iorga, in ‘Manuscripte din biblioteci străine relative la istoria românilor’, Analele Academiei Române. Memoriile Secțiunii Istorice (Bucharest, 1899), pp. 224-234. See also Karalevsky, Antioche, col. 697. 55 V. Andrei Pippidi, ‘Á propos des débuts de l’imprimerie en Géorgie’, in Impact de l’imprimerie et rayonnement intellectuel des Pays Roumains (Bucharest, 2009), p. 39. 50

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the Syrian mission, present there since 1627. A Catholic school was opened by the Jesuits in 1629, encouraged, at first, by the Metropolitan Meletius Karme.56 As mentioned in the forewords to his books, Dabbās addressed the Wallachian prince: ‘Priests in Syria are indigent and poor, in many places; they hardly have what they need for their subsistence. They cannot properly perform the Mass, for Arabic books, available only in manuscripts, are very expensive’. He also offered other good reasons, similar to those of the European promoters of printing: manuscript copies of the Holy Scriptures were filled with orthographic and grammatical errors, the texts were altered from one copy to another, and their quality depended too much on the copyists’ degree of education. Brâncoveanu appointed for this job his most expert printer: Antim the Iberian (‘the Georgian’, born Andrei, lived 1650-1716). Antim arrived in Wallachia sometime between 9 November 1688 (the day Constantin Brâncoveanu acceded to the throne) and October 169157, when the first book printed by him at the princely workshop in Bucharest was ready: the translation of a book by Hrisant Notaras, nephew of Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem, himself a future Patriarch.58 A skilled master of engraving, known as ‘Father Antim the Typographer’, Antim was designated abbot of Snagov Monastery, near Bucharest. He headed the printing house of Snagov between 1696 and 1705, when he left for Râmnic, following his election as a Bishop. He took with him the printing shop and continued to produce books in Râmnic. As witnessed by Anton Maria Del Chiaro, Brâncoveanu’s Italian secretary, Antim had ‘Arabic, Greek, Wallachian and Latin types’ in his workshop.59 He was a skilled engraver, capable of carving matrices that imitated manuscript decorative elements.60 Produced in large numbers, his books were adorned with Saints’ icons and beautiful artistic features – pillars, arches, stylized garlands of leaves and flowers – some reproduced in the stone carvings of the church dedicated to the Feast of All Saints that he built in Bucharest. In 1715, right before he died, Antim opened a new printing workshop at the Monastery that enclosed this church. His book production amounts to 59 books supervised by him, whereas 38 printed by himself: 22 in Romanian (whereas 4 his own works), 27 in Greek (and Romanian), 8 in Slavonic (and Romanian), and 2 in Greek and Arabic. These books were intended both for the clergy and for the common reader; they were readable and low-priced. Antim translated into Romanian several church service books: the Hieratikon, the Octoechos, the Horologion, the Prayer Book, etc. He supported church service in the Romanian vernacular, stating in the Preface to a Prayer Book, which he translated from Greek and printed at Râmnic in 1706, that it is not forbidden to serve Mass ‘to every believer in his own tongue’.61 He was also eager to enrich the knowledge of Romanian clerics, especially the priests, who were entrusted with the guidance of the ordinary people: his sustained printing work testifies to this worthy aspiration. Antim’s achievements were of immeasurable service to the Romanians, who had adopted him, to the Georgians, his people, and to others as well. However, his death was tragic: summoned to Istanbul in 1716, he avoided having his head cut off, only to be assassinated on the road to his exile destination on See Nasrallah 1989: 35-36; Heyberger 1994: 391-392; Masters 2004: 81-82. Some data on the early life of Antim Ivireanul can be found in a letter written by Patriarch Hrisant Notaras, published in Πηνελόπη Στάθη, Χρύσανθος Νοταράς Πατριάρχης Ιεροσολύμων. Πρόδρομος του Νεοελληνικού Διαφωτισμού (Athens, 1999), pp. 297-305. I am grateful to Mihai Țipău for this information. 58 The old printing house of Târgoviște was moved to Bucharest in 1678, at the Metropolitan palace, while Varlaam was holding the office and Gheorghe Duca was ruling (Teodorescu 1959: 839-840). This printing-shop first published books that did not mention the printers’ names. In 1691 Antim signed as „hieromonk Antim” on a Greek book printed at Bucharest – the first proof of his presence in Wallachia. In the Church service of St. Paraskevi, printed in June 1692, “the humble monk Antim of Ivir” is mentioned as printer. 59 On an incense burner that was made anew in 1694 by order of Antim Ivireanul, abbot of Snagov Monastery at the time, the engraved donation inscription is written in Romanian, in Cyrillic script, while the names of the makers and the year are in Latin script. 60 His artistic skills are reminiscent of this assertion by Digby Wyatt: “I need scarcely remind the reader, that the earliest woodcut and printed books were made to imitate manuscripts so closely as to deceive the inexperienced eye” (The Art of Illuminating as Practised in Europe From the Earliest Times, London, 1860, p. 47). 61 See Gabriel Ștrempel, Antim Ivireanul la 250 de ani de la moartea sa (Bucharest, 1966), p. 681. 56 57

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Mt Sinai62. He was sanctified by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1992, celebrated every year on 27 September. Assisted by Dabbās,63 Antim carved and cut the punches for Arabic types, certainly by the same technique that is documented for his Greek and Cyrillic types. He first used these types in printing in 1701, at the Snagov monastery, a Liturgikon (Kitāb al-qudusāt al-thalātha al-ilāhiyya, 252 pp.).64 The book contains the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, that of St. Basil and that of the Presanctified Gifts, preceded by the services of vespers and matins, in Greek and Arabic. The printed versions were the Greek edition in Venice, 1663, and the Arabic translation reviewed, before 1612, by Meletius Karme, Bishop of Aleppo65. Language was very important for the intended public: ‘You granted us your favor [...] by ordering that not only ekfones, but all prayers and sermons are printed as such, with no alteration, in both languages, Greek and Arabic, so that our Greek and our Arab priests may use it easily and the book is useful not only for those who know Arabic or both languages, but also by the Greek priests who have not learned our Arabic language. Thus, the book will be disseminated among as many people as possible.’ There followed in June 1702, at the princely printing workshop of Bucharest66, the Horologion (Kitāb al-Urūlūğiyūn, 731 pp.),67 which includes the Troparion and the Kontakia in Greek and Arabic, and several texts only in Arabic: the Theotokia (hymns to the Saint Virgin Mary), several Troparia, a hymn (Canon) to Jesus Christ, and a prayer for the Communion. Icons, decorative borders and floral elements were also added, as customary in books printed in Romanian workshops at the time. This kind of adornment is absent from early printed books of the Near East, like those of Ibrahim Müteferrika. According to a note dated February 1702 on a Greek book, Antim’s types were also meant to be used in 1702 for a third book in Arabic, a translation of Theofilactos’s Commentary on the Evangels by Ioan Cantacuzino, at the request of prince Brâncoveanu.68 A beautiful portrait of Athanasius III, written right after his death in 1724, was included by Radu Popescu (Rom. Vornic, i.e., Chancellor of the Court) in his History of the Princes of Wallachia: ‘(Athanasius) was a man of God, he was good, kind, modest, he kept away from all sins, to the point that he exceeded in selflessness everyone I met in my life. He also achieved Orthodox church books in Arabic types, which he printed here, in our country, and then His Holiness took them to the lands of Antioch; and when he distributed them to the churches, they were all filled with joy, thanking His Holiness, for they had never seen such a thing...’.69 As far as printing expenses are concerned, detailed indications as to the printers’ pay, workshop management and maintenance are included in Antim’s Teachings on the governance of the Monastery of Antim, dated 24 March 1716 (the day his church began to be built), Ch. 17, ‘Concerning the printing workshop’: 62 After many conflicts with the ruling prince of Wallachia Nicholas Mavrocordat, in August 1716 Antim was arrested, accused of witchcraft, treachery, and Satanist activities, then excommunicated (gramata issued by the Patriarch of Constantinople Jeremiah III) and finally sent in exile to the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. Leaving the city at midnight, in a chariot, under Turkish guard, he arrived in Gallipoli, where he was killed and thrown in the river. The story is reported by Anton Maria del Chiaro and Radu Popescu, see Boghiu 2005: 29 and Ștrempel, op. cit., pp. 683-684. The excommunication was lifted by Patriarch Athenagoras in 1966, at the request of the Romanian Orthodox Church. 63 Connections between Athanasius Dabbās and Antim the Iberian are insufficiently documented. It is highly possible that the copy of Dimitrie Cantemir’s Divan (Iaşi, 1698), translated by the Syrian Patriarch into Arabic in 1704-1705, came from Antim’s library. It is documented that he had received a copy of the Divan from one of the printers in Iaşi, and definitely Dabbās translated the Greek text while in Wallachia. 64 Recorded and described by Ch. Fr. Schnurrer, Bibliotheca arabica (Halle, 1811), pp. 266-272 (no. 266). Picot notes that C. F. Schnurrer was the first to write in the West about this precious volume (Picot 1886: 538-539). 65 Cf. Cyril Karalevsky, Histoire des patriarcats melkites, t. III, pp. 47-49, 96. 66 Antim was a church priest (prêtre régulier) at the time. 67 This book, which was not mentioned by Ch. Fr. Schnurrer (Bibliotheca arabica, Halle, 1811), was described by Sylvestre de Sacy in “Magazin encyclopédique”, I (1814), pp. 198-203. 68 Hurmuzachi, XIV, I, DCCXL, p. 757. 69 Radu Popescu, Istoriile domnilor Ţării Româneşti, ed. C. Grecescu (Bucharest, 1963), pp. 273-274.

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When the printing shops work, either the Romanian one or the Greek one, with money from the outside or at the expense of the [monastic] house, the printer needs to be paid, as well as his help (as many as work with him): 3 talers per sheet for himself, and 10 books will be his, while for the help, one book each. The sheet will be paid 6 talers, so that half is paid as a wage to the printers, and half is kept by the house. And if anything breaks in the printers’ workshop, the house is responsible to repair it. If there is no foreign or home work to do and the printer desires to print a book at his own expense, he is allowed to do this, after informing the abbot and the stewards70; and out of the amount that he gets for that book he will give the church every fourth ban. The printer will not dare, though, print any book that is against our creed, were he to get 100 gold coins per sheet. And if he disobeys this order, anathema will fall on him! And if it is ascertained that he did this, the prince should be informed, so that he punishes him as harshly as he can. I also leave this command, under punishment of curse: printers are bound to learn the printing trade one after another, so that this skill is not lost from our country, nor the work on books is abandoned, and this for the benefit of the people and the [monastic] house. As to the costs of the two Greek and Arabic books, the most trustworthy information is found in the forewords written by Athanasius himself for the books that he wrote and printed. In his foreword to the History of the Patriarchs of Antioch Dabbās mentions the ‘useful new Arabic types’ that Brâncoveanu ordered for the benefit of the Antiochian Christians.71 In this same foreword Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu’s financial contribution is mentioned several times: ‘When His Lordship learned from Athanasius that the churches of the devout in those lands lack books, for theirs are handwritten and printing for church books was never available to the Orthodox, he was pressed by his Godly drive [...] to bring to light, through wonderful print, some books in Arabic, at his own expense [...]. Thus, at his order, Arabic types were procured, and first the Holy Liturgy in Greek and Arabic was placed in the press, with expenses covered by his Lordship, and then the Horologion’.72 In his dedication to Brâncoveanu in the Liturgikon, dated January 1701, Athanasius states that the Arabic types were manufactured ‘at the order and the expense of the most faithful, most enlightened and most gentle Lord and Master of all Ungro-Wallachia, Kir Kir Constantin Basarab [Brâncoveanu] Voivode’, who ‘graciously enquired about the misery of the Antiochian Christians and had the charitable thought of having their service book printed in Arabic, to be freely distributed to all priests, in his name’.73 In his second introductory text, Athanasius declares that the Prince ordered the monk Antim, the most skilled printer in the country, to manufacture Arabic types for the Liturgikon.74 The beautiful leather binding was also paid for by Brâncoveanu.75 In the foreword of the Horologion Athanasius compares Brâncoveanu with King David, he praises him for having ordered first a Liturgikon and then a Horologion for the Antiochian Christians. He mentions that the Prince requested Antim ‘to carefully carve the Arabic characters’, and that the printing costs were covered by Brâncoveanu. In 1700, Metropolitan Theodosius of Bucharest was writing in a letter to Patriarch Adrian of Moscow that the 70 Epitropi, those who were responsible for preserving the donations and grants received by the monastery (similar to a waqf administrator). Antim appointed by the same act 5 stewards, chosen from the most noble and dignified merchants of Bucharest. 71 Ed. Radu – Karalevsky, p. 861. 72 N. Iorga, ‘Manuscripte din biblioteci străine relative la istoria românilor’, Analele Academiei Române. Memoriile Secțiunii Istorice (Bucharest, 1899), S. II, t. XX, 1897-1898, p. 234. 73 This is confirmed in a note by the owner, Stolnic Constantin Cantacuzino, on the front page of a copy preserved at the Library of the Romanian Academy, in Bucharest (CRV 130): “These Gospels in Greek and Arabic, His Holiness Father Proin Antiochias asked his lordship Constantin-Voivod, and he had them printed”. 74 For a full description see Karalevsky, Histoire des patriarcats melkites, t. III, pp. 103-105; BRV I: 424-433, 442-447. 75 Charon, Le rite byzantin, p. 542.

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Prince of Wallachia ‘takes care of the Church issues, and he is printing books in Greek, Romanian, Slavonic and Arabic’.76 This statement was interpreted by all commentators as a testimony that the Romanian prince covered the financial costs of the two Greek-Arabic books produced in Snagov and Bucharest.77 Having searched the account registers78 and the correspondence of Constantin Brâncoveanu,79 I could not find any mention of costs incurred in printing activities. However, they would not necessarily be covered from the state treasury: Brâncoveanu had his own resources, which he spent as he pleased. Antim managed at the time two printing presses: one at the princely court in Bucharest, the other his own, in Snagov, which he moved to Râmnic in March 1705, when elected a bishop, taking with him all the printers and the implements. He then moved it again to Târgoviște in 1708, when he was elected Metropolitan of Wallachia. He seemingly did not keep records of his expenses: he was writing on 9 August 1714 to Hrisant Notaras, patriarch of Jerusalem, regarding books that he had printed for him: ‘As for the expenses we incurred for types that were cast anew and for the printers’ wages, we neither wrote them down, nor is there any need for us to tell you more about them; great or small, we make a gift of them all to your Beatitude, out of devotion’.80 Antim asked for financial support when needed: one of the first books printed at Râmnic was paid for by Father John, Archimandrite of the Hurezi Monastery. Another sponsor was the rich Spatar Mihai Cantacuzino, who founded in 1705 a hospital in Bucharest (Colțea), endowing it with 20 farm plots and other sources of revenue.81 He paid for the printing in Râmnic of a large Anthologion and an Octoechos (1705). When leaving Bucharest in 1704, Dabbās apparently received the Arabic types and other printing implements (probably without the type foundry) as a gift. One proof that is presented is that the Snagov printing-house never printed in Arabic again, whereas Dabbās installed a printing workshop at the Antiochian Bishopric in Aleppo, where eight books were printed in Arabic between 1706 and 1711, with Arabic types, several with second editions.82 The first print at Aleppo, ready in 1706, was the Psalter (Kitāb al-Zabūr al-Šarīf), showing Brâncoveanu’s coat of arms on the back of the first page. A second edition was made in 1709.83 In 1706, the Gospels were also printed at Aleppo (Kitāb al-Inğīl al-Šarīf al-Ṭāhir wa-l-miṣbāḥ al-munīr al-ẓāhir), ending in a table of contents providing the time and circumstances when each Gospel fragment was to be read. In 1707, there followed the Book of the Chosen Pearls (Kitāb al-durr almuntahab), enclosing 34 homilies by St. John Chrysostom. In 1708, a second edition of the Gospels ‘was printed again at the expense of the noble Ivan Mazepa the Hetman (of the Cossacks84)’. This Silviu Dragomir, ‘Contribuţii privitoare la relaţiile Bisericii româneşti cu Rusia în veacul XVII’, Analele Academiei Române. Memoriile Secțiunii Istorice (Bucharest, 1912), S. II, t. XXXIV, p. 1138. 77 See, for instance, Walbiner 2012: 58. 78 Condica de venituri și cheltuieli a Vistieriei de la leatul 7202-7212 (1694-1704), ed. C. D. Aricescu, București, 1873; see also Panaitescu 1997; Giurescu, Anatefterul: 352-493 (for 1695-1702). 79 N. Iorga, Documente privitoare la Constantin vodă Brîncoveanu, (Bucharest, 1901); N. Dobrescu, C. Giurescu, Documente privitoare la C. Brîncoveanu (Bucharest, 1907); Constantin Şerban, ‘Contribuţie la repertoriul corespondenţei Stolnicului Constantin Cantacuzino’, Studii, t. 19, nr. 4 (1966), pp. 683-705; Paul Cernovodeanu, În vâltoarea primejdiilor. Politica externă și diplomația promovate de Constantin Brâncoveanu (1688-1714) (Bucharest: Silex, 1997), etc. 80 Hurmuzaki, XIV, t. III, LXXIII, p. 116. 81 He also financed the construction of several churches, including the Sinaia church, built after his travels to Mount Sinai and the Holy Land. 82 The assumption that Dabbās “learned the craft of printing” (Walbiner 2012: 58-59) does not seem to be supported by facts. 83 The book was reprinted by Paul de Lagarde in Göttingen in 1876, under the title Psalterium Job Proverbia arabice. 84 Ivan Stepanovitch Mazepa (1644-1709), hetman of the Cossaks, received from Brâncoveanu letters that he then sent to the Russian Tsar Peter I (Cernovodeanu 1997: 87). The Romanian Academy Library has 2 copies of the book, one brought from Syria by Cyril Karalevski, the other from the library of Deacon Coresi. The latter is nicely bound, see Analele Academiei Române. Memoriile Secțiunii Istorice (Bucharest, 1921), S. II, t. XXXIX (1916-1919), Partea administrativă și desbaterile, p. 72. For details on Mazepa see Demetrius Dvoichenko-Markov, ‘Hetman Ivan Mazepa in Romanian Literature’, in Romania between East and West. Historical Essays in Memory of Constantin C. Giurescu, Stephen FischerGalați, Radu R. Florescu and George R. Ursul (eds.) (New York: Boulder, 1982), pp. 147-158. 76

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version contains the hetman’s coat of arms and a second foreword dedicated to him, rich in flattery, with verses in Greek and Arabic.85 Also in 1708, the Book of Prophecies (Kitāb al-nubū’āt al-šarīf) and the Apostle were printed. In 1711, there followed Al-Mawāʻil al-šarīf, a collection of 66 homilies by Patriarch Athanasius II of Jerusalem, accompanied by a eulogy composed by Hrisant Notaras; also in 1711, a sermon by St. John Chrysostom on the celebration of Easter, then the Octoechos (Kitāb alBaraklitīkī) in two volumes, and a Treatise on Confessions (Risāla wağīza tūḍaḥu kayfiyyat al-tawba) written by Dabbās.86 It is likely that Athanasius also intended to print his Arabic version of the Divan by Demetrius Cantemir, prince of Moldavia, which he had finished translating in 1705. This translation was revised by the Maronite monk Germanos Farḥāt (Ğibrā’īl Farḥāt, named Germānūs when elected Maronite bishop of Aleppo in 1725).87 The Aleppo press stopped working in late 1711, possibly for lack of financial support. Dabbās could not secure the necessary funds from the Antiochian Patriarchate, although the costs of two books (the Book of Prophecies and the Octoechos) had been covered by the Patriarch Cyrill Ibn al-Zaʻīm.88 Dabbās had sent messages requesting funds to Moscow and the Ukraine, to no avail. Mazepa died in 1710 at Tighina, and in 1711 the RussianTurkish war broke out, drawing all regional attention and resources to the political and military turmoil. As shown by Vera Tchentsova89, Dabbās wrote repeatedly to Tsar Peter I, in December 1706 and February 1707, requesting financial help for his printing activities in Aleppo. He addressed the Russian Ambassador in Constantinople Peter Tolstoy, asking him to intercede in his favour and to aid the safe journey of his messenger, Leontios, to the Moscow Court, bearing one copy of the recently printed Aleppo Psalter, as a gift for the Tsar. Dabbās wrote a second letter to the Tsar, which reached Moscow in March 1707, accompanying a letter by the Russian Ambassador announcing the death of Patriarch Dositheus of Jerusalem and the election of his nephew Hrisant as a successor (1707-1731). The two letters received a polite answer by Gabriel Golovkin, the Russian Secretary for foreign affairs, but no substantial help was offered by the Tsar. The Syrian delegation left Russia in April 1710 with a small grant from Peter I (a total of 90 rubla), which probably allowed Dabbās the printing of several books the next year. On 5 August 1714 Dabbās wrote again to Peter I, as well as to Chancellor G. Golovkin and Prince Dimitri M. Golitzin, asking for financial help to keep the Aleppo printing-shop going. These messages, also endorsed by Ambassador Tolstoy, were probably written at the metochion of the Holy Sepulcher in Constantinople, as inferred by Vera Tchentsova.90 This renewed plea seemingly remained unfulfilled, as the Russian Court was not interested in getting involved in the Syrian Christians’ plans. In 1714, Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu was brought to Constantinople in chains and had his head cut off on August 15, on the Feast of St Mary the Virgin, alongside four of his sons and his son-in-law Ianache Văcărescu. After Brâncoveanu’s demise, Dabbās could not find financial support in Syria to continue the printing activity, an expensive one, according to the contemporary testimony of Ya’qub Saġatī (Gdoura 1985: 152). 85 A copy of the Aleppo Gospels preserved in Moscow bears the coat of arms of Colonel Daniel Apostol (RGADA, BMST, inv. nr. 2927). For the description and differences of the two editions (1706 and 1708) see Dimitri A. Morozov, ‘Arabskije Evangelije Daniila Apostola (K istorii pervoj arabskoj tipografii na Vostoke)’, Arhiv russkoi istorii, nr. 2 (1992), pp. 193-203; idem, ‘Vifleemskij ekzemplar arabskogo Evangelii Daniila Apostola’, Arhiv russkoi istorii, nr. 8 (2007), pp. 645-651; Walbiner 2001: 24-25; Walbiner 2012: 59-60. 86 For the complete and detailed list see I. Feodorov, ‘Christian Arabic texts printed with help from the Romanian Principalities’ (Brăila, 2014); Gdoura 1985: 249-251; J. Nasrallah, ‘Les imprimeries melchites au XVIIIe siècle’, Proche Orient Chrétien, t. XXXVI, fasc. III-IV (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 232-233. 87 For features of the Arabic version suggesting that the text was prepared for printing see Ioana Feodorov, ‘The Arabic Version of Dimitrie Cantemir’s Divan: A Supplement to the Editor’s Note’, RESEE, XLVI, no. 1-4 (2008), pp. 195-212. 88 J. Nasrallah, loc. cit. 89 Vera Tchentsova, ‘Les documents grecs du XVIIe siècle: pièces authentiques et pièces fausses. 4. Le patriarche d’Antioche Athanase IV Dabbâs et Moscou : en quête de subventions pour l’imprimerie arabe d’Alep’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 1 (2013), pp. 173-195. Dabbās’s letters of December 1706 and February 1707 are published in the Greek original, with a French translation and comments, on pp. 185-194. 90 Based on her analysis of the filigree of the paper used for the letter addressed to Golovin, see ibidem, p. 183.

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The Aleppo books were used as a basis for further editions for a whole century.91 A new Arabic Missal, prepared in Rome, was only printed in 183992: according to Kiril Karalevsky (Antioche, col. 692), the 1701 Missal of Snagov was used for this new edition, collated with the Greek Euchologion of Benedict XIV (of 1754). Thus, after the division of the Antiochian Church in 1724, the Syrian Christians who were united with the Roman Church continued to use the editions of Snagov, Iași and Aleppo in their church services.93 These are now rare books, so much so that Wahid Gdoura confessed the limitations of his study, since he could only see two books, the 1706 Missal and the 1711 Sermons.94 Soon after he moved to Snagov monastery in 1694, transferring there the printing-shop of Bucharest, Antim the Iberian opened a school for printers and engravers where Gheorghe Radovici, Dionisie Floru and Mihail Ștefan were trained, among others. Several of the 14 books printed at Snagov were signed by these apprentices.95 Mihail Ştefan travelled in 1698-1699 in Transylvania, sent by Prince Brâncoveanu to help Romanians there print Orthodox church books: Mihail mentions on the back binding of a registry at the Metropolitan church of Bălgrad (Alba Iulia) that he received from his master Antim, before leaving, 167 types (‘12 of them useless’) (Bădără 1998: 53). Afterwards, Mihail Ștefan was sent to Georgia by his master96, at the request of Vakhtang VI the Scholar (also called the Lawgiver), King of Kartli, in order to set up in Tbilisi the first press using Georgian script97. In 1713 Antim promised to send implements, and his apprentice Mihail Ștefan, to help the new Greek printing house of Jerusalem, set up by Patriarch Hrisant Notaras.98 In the meantime, Mihail was travelling to Lvov and Holland, leaving the printing work to the apprentices whom he had trained in Tbilisi. It seems that after 1722, when the Georgian printing-house closed, Mihail Ștefan’s apprentices scattered in the Middle East – Damascus, Bagdad, and Tehran, where they resumed their work.99 It is possible that some of Antim’s apprentices, trained at Snagov, travelled to Aleppo, together with the press implements presented to Athanasius Dabbās. The connection between the Arabic printing activities in Wallachia and those of Aleppo has been discussed ever since Picot’s description of Antim’s books in 1886. The identity between the types used in Snagov and Bucharest, manufactured by Antim, and those used in Aleppo was first stated by Schnurrer, and was supported afterwards by Cyrille Charon100 and Georg Graf.101 Dabbās and Raššū conclude: ‘The improbable theory that the Arabic types were made in Aleppo is rejected by the authors, who describe the difficulties of carving such types, also concluding that they must have been brought from Wallachia.’102 Doru Bădără, an expert in Antim Ivireanul’s printing technique, expressed For a record and comments on later editions see also Karalevsky, Histoire des patriarcats melkites, t. III, 55-96, and Maʽlūf 1919: 44-56. 92 Pope Benedict decreed in 1743 the printing of a new Arabic Missal for the united Churches, which the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide prepared: this was the Snagov edition, stripped of Dabbās’s texts, Brâncoveanu’s mention, and the names of the Orthodox patriarchs. Certain alterations were made, according to the 1738 (Catholic) edition of Rome. But in 1758 Pope Benedict died, and his succesor, Pope Clement XIII, abandoned this project. 93 Virgil Cândea, ‘În 2008 – cinci secole de tipar românesc’, in Logos Arhiepiscopului Bartolomeu al Clujului la împlinirea vârstei de 80 de ani (Cluj-Napoca, 2001), p. 310. 94 Gdoura 1985: 146, n. 104. 95 Boghiu 2005: 17. 96 The Georgians called him Ungrovlakheli, “from Wallachia”, or Iştvanovici, Stepanesdze, Stepanes Shvili, “son of Stephen”. 97 As stated in the foreword to the Missal of Tbilisi, 1709, signed by Antim: ‘the first print in the Georgian language. [...] This land is blessed with the types of its own language – the same as Arabia was enriched with Arabic types, Hellada with the Greek, and Ungro-Wallachia with the Romanian ones.’ 98 Hurmuzaki, XIV, III, LXVI, p. 107. 99 Dan Dumitrescu, ‘Activitatea tipografică a lui Mihail Ștefan în Gruzia’, Studii, XI, nr. 4 (1958), p. 138, based on information from Georgian sources. 100 ‘Les autres livres imprimés, soit en Valachie, soit à Alep, avec les caractères fondus en Valachie’, in Antioche, col. 692; see also Radu – Karalevsky , ‘Synopsis’: XLIX, 169. 101 GCAL: I, 117. 102 Dabbās – Raššū, Tārīh al-tibā‘at, p. 68-73. 91

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his conviction that such types could be manufactured in his workshop. Antim knew Ottoman Turkish written in Arabic letters and, as a skilled printer, he was able to manufacture the types. He could write, paint, engrave and carve wood beautifully, as proven by many of his works, including the woodcut engraving of St Luke’s icon in the Snagov Liturgikon, signed by him (with his initials). Antim also cast lead types: in July 1714 he wrote to Patriarch Hrisant Notaras that ‘more than 50 oqā of lead were used in order to cast new types, because the old ones were broken during the transfer [of the printing press] from Târgoviște to Bucharest.’103 Anton Maria del Chiaro noted that Antim used ‘wood and brass types in his workshop’104. Also, Antim asked forgiveness from the Arab readers for any mistakes he may have made, ‘because the language was foreign to him, as he was from Georgia.’ It was quite common for printers in those days to print in languages that they did not master: in 1698, the printer who produced the polemical books against Latins by patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem did not know Greek, but he used types with the so-called ‘signature’, a semi-cylindrical gully parallel to the letter, marking the right position of the imprint.105 Similarly, Mihail Ștefan brought punches from Wallachia to Tbilisi in 1709 and iron-cast types for the Nuskhuri and the Mrglovani (or Asomtavruli) alphabets, and the next year he was able to carve new matrices and cast types for the Mkhedruli alphabet, used by him for the first time in 1710, to print a Missal.106 It is certain that the iconography of Antim’s books ‘migrated’ to the Arabic ones, both those printed in the Romanian lands and those of Aleppo and Tbilisi. The coat of arms in the Psalm Book of Aleppo (1706) is a variation of the one in Antim’s Greek Psalter of 1700, his New Testament of 1703, and the Snagov Liturgikon.107 The icon of St Basil in the 1701 Missal was created in 1698 by the monk Demetrios, after a prototype from 1652, before Antim’s beginnings as a printer. It would be included afterwards in the Missals of Buzău (1702), Râmnic (1706), and Târgovişte (1713). The icons engraved in the first Aleppo print come from the same matrices as those used for Antim’s books: St John Chrysostom, St Gregory, St Basil, the Deisis, etc.108 He may have presented these old matrices to Dabbās in 1705, when he was moving his printing workshop and producing new iconography. A rigorous inventory and comparison of these illustrations would prove the extent of Antim’s contribution to the endowment of the Aleppo press. A relevant piece of evidence is the transfer of ornamental and iconographic matrices from Wallachia to Tbilisi by Mihail Ștefan, who used in the Georgian liturgical books engravings created by Ioanichie Bacov, one of the skilled engravers and binders trained by Antim. This iconography is also present in books previously printed by Antim in his printing-shops.109 However, as far as the Arabic books are concerned, a simple comparison of pages printed at Snagov and Bucharest with pages printed at Aleppo shows that there are major differences. As Sergey Frantsuzov declared after studying the copies of the Aleppo printed books preserved in St Petersburg: ‘Les beaux types réguliers gravés par Antim Ivireanul (l’Ibérien) qu’on peut contempler dans les livres imprimés à Snagov en 1701 (Liturgikon avec le texte parallèle grec et arabe) et à Bucarest en 1702 (Livre d’Heures en arabe) diffèrent trop des caractères maladroits propres au Psautier d’Alep.’110 Émile Picot stated in 1886, after comparing the types of the two books printed in Wallachia to the Aleppo Gospels (1706) and the Book of Prophets (1708): ‘Je puis assurer que les caractères d’Alep Hurmuzaki XIV, III, p. 115. See the comments of Bădără on these particular implements, Tiparul românesc, p. 64. 105 Ibidem, p. 55. 106 Dumitrescu, Activitatea tipografică a lui Mihail Ștefan, p. 138. 107 See Ana Andreescu, Cartea românească în veacul al XVIII-lea (Bucharest, 2004), p. 22, 24. 108 J. Nasrallah states that the copy of the Gospels of 1708 that he saw also comprised „[les] tableaux des 4 Évangélistes au début de chaque série”. He does not mention them in his description of the first edition, of 1706 (loc. cit). The copy of the 1706 edition preserved at the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha (Theol. 2 F 58/3) does enclose them, see Walbiner 2001: 24-25 (fol. 4b, the icon of St John the Evangelist). The copies of both editions held at the Romanian Academy Library in Bucharest are missing these engravings. 109 Such as the Missal of Snagov, 1697. 110 Sergey Frantsuzov, ‘Les Psautiers arabes imprimés conservés dans les bibliothèques de St. Pétersbourg’, RomanoArabica (Bucharest, 2016, in print). 103 104

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sont totalement différents de ceux de Bucharest et leurs sont fort inférieurs. J’ignore si l’on a imprimé à Bucarest autre chose que le Missel et le Bréviaire; mais vraisemblablement les caractères qui ont servi à l’impression de ces deux livres ont été détruits, puisque, dans cette même ville, vers le millieu du XVIIIe siècle, on en a gravé d’autres, bien moins bons, avec lesquels on a imprimé le Psautier de 1747 (...)’ (Picot 1886: 544). Sylvestre de Sacy and Louis Cheiho also noticed significant differences between the types of Snagov – Bucharest and those of Aleppo. In Glass – Roper 2002 two other sources are mentioned, the Arab historian Al-Malādī and the Aleppo Church authority Al-Būlusī, who believed that the types were manufactured in Aleppo, probably cut from wood by ‘Abdllāh al-Zāhir.111 They must have bothered Athanasius Dabbās too, since one of the tasks that Gabriel Farḥāt had, when travelling to Rome in 1711, was to bring back newly cast Arabic types and other printing implements.112 ‘Abdallāh al-Zāhir (d. 1748), a Greek-Catholic monk who worked with Athanasius Dabbās in the Aleppo press, manufactured new types for a press that began its activity in 1733, with Jesuit support, at the monastery of St John the Baptist in Šuweyr (Lebanon). A theory was launched that ‘Abdallāh alZāhir engraved the first Arabic types without any previous experience or any assistance whatsoever’113. Joseph Nasrallah was one of the champions of this theory114, opposed by Virgil Cândea, who was wondering in his contribution to Le Livre et le Liban jusqu’à 1900: „[...] nous nous demandons comment il était possible que quelqu’un eût pu fonder une imprimerie de toutes pièces, depuis la gravure des matrices jusqu’à la presse, sans en avoir jamais vu une (ʻAbdallāh n’ayant jamais voyagé en Europe), et sans qu’on lui eût au moins décrit cette installation tellement sophistiquée pour les non-initiés”.115 The idea that Al-Zāhir was the independent initiator of Arabic printing was convincingly disputed even by Arab authors. Contemporary reports reveal that the new press borrowed types and other implements from the Aleppo one116, after ‘Abdallāh al-Zāhir left the city, in 1711, unable to continue his collaboration with Athanasius Dabbās because of dogmatic disagreements.117 It is hardly conceivable that al-Zāhir, without having studied a master’s models and without proper training by an experienced printer and engraver (either Dabbās himself or Wallachian printer apprentices sent over to Syria), was able to become, so soon, skilful enough in woodcutting so Glass – Roper 2002: 179. ‘In oltre procuri con il R(everend)o Padre [Gabrielle Maronita] di farci fondere quasi quarantamila lettere secondo questi esemplari, che vi capitano con d(ett)o Padre, perchè sappiamo per certo che le lettere che fanno appresso di loro sono più sicure e di meno spesa’, on fol. 139r of vol. 1, Coll. „Greci Melchiti”, Archivio Storico, Scritture Riferite nei Congressi, Congregazione per l’evangelizzazione dei popoli (De Propaganda Fide), Rome. The entire letter, addressed (in 1713?) by Dabbās to the Damascus-born Pietro Damuses, who resided in Rome, was published by Tchentsova, op. cit., p. 194-195. See also ibidem, p. 181-182. 113 The most far-fetched opinion is that of Joseph Elie Kahale in his book Abdallah Zakher, Philosophe, théologien et fondateur de l’imprimerie arabe en Orient. Son époque, sa vie, ses oeuvres (Paris, 2000), p. 68: „Quant à nous, nous nions tout cela et nous disons que, lors de sa visite en Roumanie, le patriarche Dabbās a visité une imprimerie dont il a observé le fonctionnement et noté les instruments. De retour à Alep, il la décrivit à Abdallah Zakher qui, par son ingéniosité et son imagination, créa la première imprimerie arabe en Orient”. Such a way of setting up a printing workshop, without any previous training, would seem impossible to anyone familiar with typesetting and printing techniques. This book contains so many misconceptions and errors that it is practically of no use in a rigorous research of this topic. 114 As reported by Zāher’s biographer: “Il fit une grande imprimerie à Alep avec son frère. Il en grava les matrices, les caractères et tous les instruments. Ils y imprimèrent plusieurs livres et cela sans qu’ils eussent vu d’imprimerie et sans être guidés par quelqu’un dans ce travail”, in the Harissa manuscript, p. 45, printed in Al-Masarra, (1948), p. 387. See J. Nasrallah, L’imprimerie au Liban, pp. 18-19. 115 Virgil Cândea, ‘Dès 1701: Dialogue roumano-libanais par le livre et l’imprimerie’, in Camille Aboussouan (dir.), Le livre et le Liban jusqu’à 1900 (Paris, UNESCO – AGECOOP, 1982), p. 286. 116 ‘Isā Ma‘lūf declared that he had found in the monastery of Balamand, in Lebanon, wooden implements which could have belonged to the Aleppo press, possibly made after Antim’s ones. 117 Cf. Walbiner 2001: 11. Aurélien Girard notes the good relations, before 1722, between ‘Abdallāh Zāhir and Athanasius Dabbās, “qui, à cette époque, ne s’était pas officiellement prononcé contre Rome”, v. ‘Quand les “GrecsCatholiques” dénonçaient les “Grecs-Orthodoxes”: la controverse confessionnelle au Proche-Orient arabe après le schisme de 1724’, in Énoncer/dénoncer l’autre. Discours et représentations du différend confessionnel à l’époque moderne, Chrystel Bernat, Hubert Bost (dirs.) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 159. 111 112

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as to carve matrices for the beautiful engravings reproduced by J. Nasrallah in his book L’Imprimerie au Liban, on pp. III (title page), 17, 45-47, 142, 143, 152, and 158. Arabic printing resumed in the Romanian provinces before the middle of the 18th century. In 1735, Patriarch Sylvestros of Chios, a pupil and successor of Athanasius III Dabbās who took over the Antiochian See after the division of the Syrian Church in 1724, travelled to Moldavia,118 where he was hosted at the St Sabas monastery in Iași. He returned there in May 1744, when he wrote a note in Greek on the 12 volumes of the Menaia, printed at Vienna in 1731-1732, that he presented to the monastic community of St Sabas in recognition of their kind welcome and help to him. In 1747 he was in Wallachia, where he served Mass in a church in Urziceni: a note about his prayer against the locusts was jotted down in a local diary (Cronograf).119 He is also mentioned in the history of Paisie Veličkovskij written by Basil, a monk of the Poiana Mărului monastery (S. Moldavia, near Buzău), who mentions that Sylvestros took part in a discussion at the Wallachian Court about the Orthodox interdiction to eat meat during fast.120 He was in correspondence with several aristocrats in the Romanian Principalities after 1750121, and in 1752-1753 he received from Romanian princes money grants, presents for himself and the Church, and political support before the Sublime Porte.122 He also received, as metochion of the Patriarchate of Antioch, the monastery of St Spyridon in Bucharest and the monastery of St Nicholas in Botoșani (Popăuți).123 In his letters to Romanian princes and noblemen he constantly requested written deeds for the lands and assets that he had been granted or promised. The Antiochian Patriarch obtained an approval from Prince Ioan Mavrocordat of Moldavia (17431747) to print several Arabic books at the monastery of St Sabas in Iaşi. The difficulty of getting Arabic types explains the reason for the delay in printing the books. It is not clear where these types came from: the French consul in Bucharest, Ledoulx, receiving Sylvestre de Sacy’s questions (letter of 30 July 1811) about the Arabic books printed by Patriarch Sylvestros in the Romanian Principalities,124 answered (letter of 12 February 1812),125 based on data obtained from the local Metropolitan (Ignatios the Greek), that the types had been brought ‘de Dadone ou de Mome’, and that Sylvestros ‘avait établi dans son couvent une imprimerie à ses propres frais’, ‘à 20 lieux d’ici’ (in Snagov, again?). It is possible that one of the sets of types manufactured using the model of Antim’s types was brought by Patriarch Sylvestros from Syria to Moldavia. Another more unlikely theory is that he asked Constantin Mavrocordat, prince of Wallachia, for the old types manufactured by Antim, received them (punches? types?) and used them in Iași. After a Greek-Arabic Liturgikon (Kitāb al-qudūsāt al-thalātha al-ilāhiyya, completed on 19 July 1745), financed by Ioan Mavrocordat, the prince of Moldavia (June 1743 - May 1747), for which Patriarch Sylvestros had revised the Snagov edition of 1701, on 13 July 1746 he finished printing, under the title Qaḍā al-ḥaqq wa-naql aṣ-ṣidq (The Proof of Truth and Transmission of Justice), a book by Patriarch Nectarios of Jerusalem (1661-1669) against the Pope’s primacy126, which Patriarch According to his assertion in the foreword to Qadā’ al-Haqq (BRV IV: 64). Gabriel Ștrempel, Catalogul manuscriselor românești, II, 1921, p. 104. 120 BRV III: 148, doc. nr. 908. 121 The library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch in Damascus holds a collection of letters, dated between 1748 and 1754, to and from Patriarch Sylvestros. His correspondents were Grigore II Ghica, prince of Wallachia, Ştefan Racoviţă, prince of Moldavia, Smaranda Ghica, Grigore Ghica, Prince of Wallachia, Anna, wife of a local nobleman (May 1750) etc. See Ghenadie M. Arabazoglu, Phôetieios Bibliothêkê, 2, Constantinopolis, 1935, p. 168–169; Marcu Beza, ‘Biblioteci mănăstireşti în Siria, Atena şi insula Hios’, Analele Academiei Române. Memoriile Secțiunii Literare (Bucharest, 1937), S. III, t. 8, 1936–1938, p. 7, 11-15; idem, Urme româneşti în Răsăritul ortodox, pp. 163-165. 122 N. Iorga, Textes post-byzantins, II. Lettres des Patriarches d’Antioche aux Princes Roumains du XVIIIe siècle (Bucharest, 1939), 33-52 (Greek), 59-79 (Romanian). 123 Iorga, op. cit., 74. 124 De Sacy asserted that he had received from the French consul in Aleppo a copy of a Psalter printed by Sylvestros in 1747, possibly in Bucharest. 125 Both letters are preserved at the Institut de France in Paris, paquet no. 2377, and were edited by T. Holban in ‘Tipografii și cărți armenești (i.e., arăbești) în Țările Române’, Arhiva (Bucharest, 1936), pp. 111-115. 126 Known as Περὶ τῆς ἀρχῆς τοῦ πάπα Ἀντίρρησις, it was printed in Greek at the Cetățuia monastery (Moldavia) in July 1682, translated into Latin as De Artibus quibus missionari latini, praecipue in Terra Sancta degentes, ad subvertendam 118 119

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Sylvestros had translated from Greek and adapted in 1733 (Book I, pp. 1-265). Bound in the same volume is the Argument against the Pope’s Infallibility, a translation of Peri tis psevdhous apsevdhias tou Papa Romis by Eustratios Argentis of Chios, achieved in 1740, while in Cairo, by the priest Mas‘ad Našū of Damascus (Book II, pp. 1-56). These two works were printed at the expense of the Patriarch of Antioch.127 In the Foreword, Sylvestros gives a detailed report of his sojourn in Moldavia (1744-1747)128 and the circumstances in which the books were printed.129 The book comprises, placed under the Moldavian coat of arms, a rare example of Greek text written in Arabic script, a dedication to Ioan Nicolae Voievod. The Slavonic initials of John Mavrocordato’s full title (‘Io Ioan Nicolae voevod Mavrocordat domn țării Moldovii’) are hidden in the flower garland that adorns the dedication. In February 1747 there came out of the press in Iaşi, with Sylvestros’s Foreword, Masʽad Našū’s translation of Syntagma kata ton azymon (The Divine Cene) by Eustratios Argentis of Chios. Again in 1747, Sylvestros printed the Acts of the Synods of Constantinople in 1723 and 1727, followed by five brief polemical treatises concerning the distinctions between the dogma of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. The volume is concluded by a Declaration of the Orthodox Faith.130 The Patriarch then travelled to Bucharest, in Wallachia, where he printed in 1747 a new edition of the Aleppo Psalms of Dabbās, that he had revised himself in 1744.131 His presence in Wallachia is documented by church services performed in Urziceni in 1747 (a Mass, a prayer for a local lady, a prayer against the locusts) and by his doctrinal dialogue at the Wallachian Court, presumably in 1749, with archimandrite Basil of the sketes of Poiana Mărului (on rules that governed meat consumption). After his return to Syria that same year, the printing of Arabic books in Iaşi and Bucharest stopped. The establishment by the Orthodox Arabs of the first press in Beirut, seemingly by transferring the old one from Aleppo, was also connected by some scholars to the Romanians’ contribution to the first Arabic books.132 In a letter addressed to Patriarch Maximos Maẓlūm in 1840,133 Fr. Augustin Maqṣūd reported that Patriarch Sylvestros transferred the press from Aleppo to Beirut, in order to be able to print anti-Catholic works. The press was installed by Yūsif Nīqūlā al-Ğabaylī, a šayh of Beirut also known as Abū ʽAskar,134 in the presbytery of the church at the monastery of St. George, where the residence of the Greek-Orthodox Bishopric and the Diocese council were located. Fr. Augustin declared that he saw two volumes printed there in 1751: the Psalter (new edition of the 1753 print, 367 pp.) and a Horologion (Kitāb al-sawā‘ī, Book of Hours). Other books that were seemingly printed at Beirut were the second edition of the Psalter and a Book of Mass (Liturgikon).135 Damaged by the earthquake of 1759, the church collapsed while being repaired in 1767, when 87 people and the whole printing workshop were buried under the rubble. It was stated that the press was recovered from the debris and resumed its activity under the name The St George Typography. Several books seem to have been printed there before 1878, when the press stopped working, as several modern printing workshops had become active in Beirut, founded by Western missionaries. The theory that types Graecorum fidem untur, et de quamplurimus Ecclesiae Romanae erroribus et coruptelis libri tres, and published in London in 1729. Nectarius was ‘strictly Orthodox, and a zealous opponent of Cyril Lucar and the „Calvinistic” movement’, see Samuel Macauley Jackson e.a. (eds.), The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, New York – London, t. VIII, p. 98 (article by F. Kattenbusch). 127 As confirmed by the information gathered by Ledoulx, see above. 128 Simonescu 1967: 61. 129 The final lines enclose a note on the two clerics who accompanied the Patriarch and helped him print the book: Deacon Ğirğis al-Ḥalabī and monk Mihā’il of Kurat al-Dahab (near Tripoli, Lebanon). 130 Reprinted in A. Rustum, Kanīsat madīnat Allāh Anṭākiya al-‘Ulmā, III (Beirut, 1928), pp. 146-148. 131 Cf. Ms. Patr. Orth. Damas, 18th c., and C. F. Schnurrer, Bibliotheca Arabica, p. 515. 132 J. Nasrallah unsurprisingly holds that the founder “prit pour modèle les caractères de Šueïr”, see his L’Imprimerie au Liban, p. 46. 133 Published by Fr. Athanāsiyūs Ḥāğğ, Al-Rahbāniyya al-Bāsīliyya al-Šuwayriyya fī tārīh al-kanīsa wa-l-bilād, t. I (Ğuniyya, 1973), pp. 549-550. See also Dabbas – Récho 2008: 126-129; Walbiner 2001: 12. 134 J. Nasrallah, ibidem. 135 Schnurrer, Bibliotheca arabica, pp. 383-384.

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manufactured by Antim the Iberian, brought to Aleppo from Bucharest, survived so many decades of usage and were used in the Beirut workshop is simply impossible. Most of the books printed by Dabbās include forewords signed by him, insightful as to the lofty aims that pressed him, first and foremost, to spread knowledge of the Divine Word to as many Arab Christians (clerics and laymen) as possible. One of the reasons given by Dabbās for his efforts to continue printing Christian books in Arabic was precisely the enlightenment of his flock, a task that he had taken over from previous Antiochian Church hierarchs, ever since the times of Meletios Karme, the Metropolitan of Aleppo who wrote in the foreword to the Kitāb al-Sawāʽī that the Orthodox Christians’ greatest need is ‘to understand the prayer and to do it’.136 Walbiner’s uncertainty as to ‘the reasons for al-Dabbās’ obvious aim to make the Bible a book read by all strata of people’, an idea that ‘sounds very Protestant’,137 receives a second answer if we recall that the Dabbās spent quite a long time in Wallachia, where he witnessed the increasing access of the common people to Biblical texts, encouraged by the ruling Prince and Church hierarchs. Romanians were the first Europeans to replace, as early as the end of the 15th century, the old Church language, Slavonic, incomprehensible to the common people, with the Romanian vernacular.138 Antim the Iberian was the scholar and printer who established the leading role of Romanian in Church books. The first complete Romanian version of the New Testament, made by the monk Silvestru and supervised by Metropolitan Simion Ștefan of Transylvania, was printed at Alba Iulia in 1648.139 Alongside the traditional liturgical texts, books intended for a largely lay public were also printed in Romanian since the first half of the 17th century: in 1639, at Govora, Paraclisul Precistei (Prayer to the Virgin Mary), a collection of prayers (with parallel Slavonic text), in 1640 a Code of law (Pravila), in 1642 a miscellany of Teachings for Every Day (Învățături preste toate zilele), in 1646 and 1652 two other Codes of law (Carte românească de învățătură, at Iași, and Îndreptarea legii, at Târgoviște). The number of printed copies of the 1701 and 1702 books is unknown, since Athanasius Dabbās did not give any indication. We know that Antim printed books in numbers that were well distributed over the territories inhabited by Romanians. It is only in the edition of Iaşi, in 1746, that a number is clearly mentioned, 1,500 copies ‘that would be spread out among Christians’. This last information, recurrent in forewords, proves the intention of the editors to give these volumes for free to priests and churches of the Levant. Therefore, the destination of these printed books was altogether different from that of the ones brought to the Near East by Catholic and Protestant missionaries to be used in preaching, or those brought by Western merchants to be sold as rarities (Glass – Roper 2002: 178). The spread of the first books printed in Syria is not certain, since besides the survey of Malūf in 1911 no focused research was undertaken.140 Virgil Cândea recorded several of them in Syria and Lebanon in the late 1960’s, when he visited a number of monasteries, convents and churches (Deyr Šārūbīm and Our Lady in Saydnāyā, St John in Šuweyr, St John the Baptist in Aleppo, St Thekla in Maʽlūla, St Elian and St George in Ḥoms, etc.). Owing to the new catalogues of Christians’ libraries in NearEastern countries, today the odds are more favourable to putting together a good record of the first Arabic printed books. To give but one example, 8 copies of such books are recorded in Dayr Sayyidat Ṣaydnāyā al-baṭriyarkī. Waṣf li-l-kutub wa-l-maẖṭūṭāt Damascus, 1986.141 ’Inna ḥāǧati-him al-quṣwah wā hiya ’ilā fahm al-ṣalāt wa-l-qiyām bi-hā, in Ms. 46 of Saydnāyā library, see Dayr Sayyidat Ṣaydnāyā al-baṭriyarkī. Waṣf li-l-kutub wa-l-maẖthūṭāt (Damascus, 1986), p. 48. 137 Walbiner 2012: 61. 138 The Romanian Psalter copied in Șcheii Brașovului, the Miscellany of Voroneț (a collection of Biblical texts), the Hurmuzaki Psalter; see George Ivașcu, Istoria literaturii române, I (Bucharest, 1969), p. 93-94; Mircea Tomescu, Istoria cărții românești de la începuturi până la 1918 (Bucharest, 1968), p. 11. 139 For details on the first books printed in Rumania see especially Deletant, ‘Seventeenth-Century Romanian Printing’, I, pp. 486-487, 492-494. 140 Among the few exceptions, see Carsten-Michael Walbiner, ‘Die Bibliothek des Dair Mār Yūḥannā ašŠuwayr/Libanon’, in Orientalia Christiana. Festschrift für Hubert Kaufhold zum 70. Geburstag, Peter Bruns, Heinz Otto Luthe (eds.) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013), pp. 521-535. 141 Vol. V of Mărturii românești peste hotare (Romanian Traces Abroad) (Bucharest – Brăila, 2014), a record, initiated by Virgil Cândea, of Romanian cultural items preserved in collections, libraries and museums abroad, comprises a chapter on 136

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There is no evidence that books printed by Athanasius Dabbās in Snagov, Bucharest and Aleppo were ever used as an instrument in anti-Catholic or anti-Protestant polemics. A copy of the Horologion of Bucharest, preserved in Istanbul, belonged to Germanos Farḥāt, according to a handwritten note inside.142 The copy of the Kitāb al-Paraklitikī (Octoechos) of 1711 preserved at the Library of the Romanian Academy (CRV 161A) was once owned by the Greek-Catholic church of the Holy Virgin in Aleppo143. Maʽlūf found 3 copies of Sylvestros’s Qūndāq in Syrian monasteries, a Psalter in the monastery of Nābī Elyās Šuʽayya (Lebanon), and, in Damascus, two copies of The Divine Cene (Syntagma kata ton azimon) by Eustratios Argentis, printed in 1747 at Iași. Other copies were brought to Western Europe by diplomats and travellers, and are now present in all major libraries. It is a known fact that Christian Arabic literature, both religious and lay, circulated widely after 1724 in Orthodox as well as in Catholic communities,144 despite tensions generated by the Western missionaries’ efforts directed towards the attachment of the Oriental Christians to the Roman Church. This is confirmed in a note added by Gabriel Farḥāt on a copy of the Book of Hours preserved in Aleppo, as well as another one, on the Octoechos of Aleppo, stating: ‘This book belongs to the Holy Cathedral of the GreekCatholic in the city of Aleppo, during the tenure of His Holiness Kir Demetrios, 11 May 1851’.145 In times of trouble for the Syrian Church Athanasius was invoking his readers with a gracious formula of reconciliation: ‘The fraternity of the priests and devout lay-people living in Arab lands’ (Gospels, Aleppo, 1708). The Aleppo Psalter was repeatedly reprinted, as there was a high request for it both in Orthodox circles and in Catholic ones. On the other hand, the pastoral activities of Patriarch Sylvestros, the successor of Athanasius Dabbās, were profoundly marked by his anti-Catholic attitude, revealed, among other things, by his editorial program.146 Therefore, we may formulate two answers to the questions above: 1. The ‘idealistic’ one: Athanasius Dabbās used Antim’s types for all the books that he himself printed in the Aleppo workshop after 1705. These were the model for Zāher’s new set, which he used in Šuweyr. The Romanian types and implements were later used in order to set up a workshop in Beirut. 2. The ‘realistic’ one: the Arabic types manufactured by Antim, used for the two books printed at Snagov and Bucharest, were then employed as a model in the reproduction of another set of types in Syria, presumably by Abdallah Zāher, which were used for all the Aleppo books. Other types used in the early printed books of Syria and Lebanon then emerged from Zāher’s types, or his apprentices’. Based on the data that was ascertained so far, I am inclined to accept the latter answer. Whatever version of the story we agree with, the fact remains that while in Wallachia, Athanasius Dabbās participated in the printing of two books in Greek and Arabic in 1701-1702, and in 1706 he set up in Aleppo the first Arabic printing house in the realm of the Ottoman Empire, using iconography very similar to that created in Antim the Iberian’s workshop. Forty-five years later, another five books were printed at Iași and Bucharest, with technical and financial help from Romanian princes and hierarchs. Specialists in Arabic printing expect new evidence to be produced before admitting the Romanians’ contribution to the initiation of Arabic printing in Ottoman Syria.147 It is worth recalling here that Joseph Nasrallah, the most committed supporter of the Catholics’ role in the initiation of printing in the Levant, admitted after a great deal of hesitation that a Greek-Orthodox, Athanasius Dabbās, was the one who initiated Arabic printing in Syria, with help from the Romanians.148 Wahid Gdoura Syria that mentions all copies known to be preserved there. The chapter on Lebanon was published in vol. III (Bucharest, 2011), including data on the presence of such books in monasteries and collections, based on information from visitors there and from catalogues published locally in the last decades. 142 Simonescu 1967: 55. 143 Note of 11 May 1851, see BRV IV: 38. 144 E.g., the Arabic version of Cantemir’s Divan was preserved in Ottoman Syria in manuscript copies belonging both to Orthodox Christians and to Catholics, see Cantemir 2006: 58, 66-67. 145 Simonescu 1967: 73. 146 BRV IV: 61-67; Nasrallah 1989: 85-88; Dabbās – Raššū 2008: 121-125. 147 Glass – Roper 2002: 178-179. 148 Nasrallah 1949: 17, 20.

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resolutely declares: ‘Les imprimeurs d’Alep eurent le mérite d’implanter la première typographie arabe au Proche-Orient dès 1706. [...] Elle servit de modèle pour l’imprimerie de Shuaïr et de Beyrouth et forma les imprimeurs et les graveurs qui allèrent travailler au Mont-Liban. L’art d’imprimer obtint le droit de cité en Syrie grâce à elle.’149 BIBLIOGRAPHY ABOUSSOUAN 1982 Aboussouan, Camille (dir.), 1982. Le livre et le Liban jusqu’à 1900, Paris, UNESCO – AGECOOP. BĂDĂRĂ 1998 Bădără, Doru, 1998. Tiparul românesc la sfârşitul secolului al XVII-lea şi începuul secolului al XVIII-lea, Brăila: Muzeul Brăilei – Editura Istros. BRV I Bianu, Ion, and Hodoş, Nerva, 1903. Bibliografia românească veche, 15081830, t. I, Bucharest: Socec. BRV III Bianu, Ion, and Hodoş, Nerva, 1912. Bibliografia românească veche, 15081830, t. III, fasc. I-II, 1809-1817, Bucharest: Socec. BRV IV Bianu, Ion, and Hodoş, Nerva, 1944. Bibliografia românească veche, 15081830, t. IV, Bucharest: Socec. BOGHIU 2005 Boghiu, Arhim. Sofian, 2005. Sfântul Antim Ivireanul și Mănăstirea Tuturor Sfinților, Bucharest: Ed. Bizantină. CANTEMIR 2006 Cantemir, Dimitrie, 2006. The Salvation of the Wise Man and the Ruin of the Sinful World (Salāḥ al-Êakīm wa-fasād al-‘ālam al-damīm), Arabic edition, English translation, Editor’s Note, notes and indices by Ioana Feodorov, Introduction and comments by Virgil Cândea, Bucharest: Romanian Academy Publishing House (2nd ed. in print, E. J. Brill). CÂNDEA 1972 Cândea, Virgil, 1972. ‘La diffusion de l’oeuvre de Dimitrie Cantemir en Europe du Sud-Est et au Proche-Orient’, Revue des études sud-est européennes, Bucharest, 10, nr. 2, pp. 345-362. CÂNDEA 1974 Cantemir, Dimitrie, 1974. Divanul sau gâlceava Înţeleptului cu Lumea sau giudeţul Sufletului cu Trupul [The Divan or the Wise Man’s Dispute with the World or the Litigation between Soul and Body], introduction, edition, comments by Virgil Cândea, Greek text ed. by Maria Marinescu-Himu, Bucharest: Romanian Academy Publishing House. CERNOVODEANU 1997 Cernovodeanu, Paul, 1997. În vâltoarea primejdiilor. Politica externă și diplomația promovate de Constantin Brâncoveanu (1688-1714), Bucharest: Ed. Silex. DABBĀS – RAŠŠŪ 2008 Dabbās, Anṭwān Qayṣar, and Raššū, Nahla, 2008. Tārīh al-tibā‘at al‘arabiyya fī l-Mašriq. Al-Baṭriyark Atanāsīyūs al-tālit Dabbās (1685-1724), Beirut: Dār al-Nahār. GIURESCU, ANATEFTERUL GIURESCU, DINU C., 1962. ‘Anatefterul. Condica de porunci a vistieriei lui Constantin Brâncoveanu’, in Studii și materiale de istorie medie, vol. V, Bucharest, pp. 353-493. GLASS – ROPER 2002 Glass, Dagmar, and Roper, Geoffrey, 2002. ‘Arabic Book and Newspaper printing in the Arab World’, in Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glass, Geoffrey Roper (eds.), Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution. A CrossCultural Encounter, Westhofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima, pp. 177-226.

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Gdoura, Wahid, 1985. Le Début de l’imprimerie arabe à Istanbul et en Syrie: Évolution de l’environnement culturel (1706-1787), Tunis: Institut Supérieur de Documentation. GRAF, GCAL Graf, Georg, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, I (1944), II (1947), III (1949), IV (1951), V (1953), Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. HANEBUTT-BENZ – GLASS – ROPER 2002 HANEBUTT-BENZ, EVA, AND GLASS, DAGMAR, AND ROPER, GEOFFREY (eds.), 2002. Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution. A Cross-Cultural Encounter, Westhofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima. HEYBERGER 1994 Heyberger, Bernard, 1994. Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique (Syrie, Liban, Palestine, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle), Rome: École Française de Rome. HURMUZAKI XIII Hurmuzaki, Eudoxiu, Documente privitoare la istoria românilor, Bucharest, 1909. KARALEVSKY, Antioche Karalevsky, Cyril, 1924. ‘Antioche’, in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie éclésiastiques, Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie éclésiastiques, t. III, Paris, pp. 563-703. KUNERALP 1992 Kuneralp, Sinan, 1992. ‘Les livres et l’imprimerie à Istanbul au XVIIIe siècle’, in Turquie: Livres d’hier, livres d’aujourd’hui, Istanbul: Isis Press, pp. 1-4. MASTERS 2004 Masters, Bruce, 2004. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World. The Roots of Sectarianism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MA‘LŪF 1911 Ma‘lūf, ‘Isā Aliskandar, 1911. ‘Arabic Printing by the Orthodox Romanians in Antakiyya’, Al-Ni‘ma, Damascus, no. 3, pp. 44-56. NASRALLAH 1944 Nasrallah, Joseph, 1949. L’Imprimerie au Liban, Beirut – Harissa: Imprimerie St. Paul. NASRALLAH 1979 Nasrallah, Joseph, 1979. Histoire du mouvement littéraire dans l’église melchite du Vème au XXème siècle, Louvain: Peeters – Paris: Chez l’auteur, vol. IV, T. 1. NASRALLAH 1983 Nasrallah, Joseph, 1983. Histoire du mouvement littéraire dans l’église melchite du Vème au XXème siècle, Louvain: Peeters – Paris: Chez l’auteur, vol. III, T. 1. NASRALLAH 1989 Nasrallah, Joseph, 1989. Histoire du mouvement littéraire dans l’église melchite du Vème au XXème siècle, Louvain: Peeters – Paris: Chez l’auteur, vol. IV, T. 2. PICOT 1886 Picot, Émile, 1886. ‘Notice biographique et bibliographique sur l’imprimeur Anthime d’Ivir, Métropolitain de Valachie’, in Nouveaux Mélanges Orientaux, Paris, pp. 515-560; reprint, Vivliotiki istorikon meleton, Athens, 1972 (facsimile). SAMIR 1997 Samir, Samir Khalil, 1997. ‘Les communautés chrétiennes, membres actifs de la société arabe au cours de l’histoire’, Proche-Orient Chrétien, 47, pp. 79102. SIMONESCU 1939 Simonescu, Dan, 1939. ‘Tipar românesc pentru arabi în secolul al XVIII-lea’, in Cercetări literare publicate de N. Cartojan, t. III, Bucharest: Imprimeria Națională. SIMONESCU 1967 Simonescu, Dan, 1967. ‘Impression de livres arabes et karamanlis en Valachie et en Moldavie au XVIIIe siècle’, Studia et Acta Orientalia, Bucharest, nr. 56, pp. 49-75.

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Walbiner, Carsten-Michael, 2001. ‘The Christians of Bilād al-Shām (Syria): Pioneers of Book-Printing in the Arab World’, in The Beginning of Printing in the Near and Middle East: Jews, Christians and Muslims, ed. by Lehrstühl für Türkishe Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur, Universität Bamberg – Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, pp. 11-29. WALBINER 2012 Walbiner, Carsten-Michael, 2012. ‘Melkite (Greek Orthodox) approaches to the Bible at the time of the community’s cultural reawakening in the early modern period (17th-early 18th centuries)’, in Translating the Bible into Arabic: historical, text-critical and literary aspects, ed. by Sara Binay and Stefan Leder, Beirut – Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, pp. 53-61. ZEINE, ZEINE N 1973 The emergence of Arab nationalism: with a background study of Arab-Turkish relations in the Near East (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1973)

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Fig. 1. Brâncoveanu’s coat of arms, Confession of the Orthodox Faith, Snagov, 1699 (BAR, CRV 117)

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Fig. 2. Idem, Greek-Arabic Missal, Snagov, 1701 (BAR, CRV 130)

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Fig. 3. Idem, Arabic Psalter, Aleppo, 1706 (BAR, CRV 154)

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Fig. 4. St Basil the Great, Greek-Arabic Missal, Snagov, 1701 (BAR, CRV 130)

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Fig. 5. Idem, Romanian Missal, Buzău, 1702 (BAR, CRV 132)

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Fig. 6. Deisis, Greek-Arabic Horologion, Bucharest, 1702 (BAR, CRV 137)

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Fig. 7. Deisis, Slavonic Horologion, Bucharest, 1703 (BAR, CRV 143)

BAR = ‘Biblioteca Academiei Române’, i.e., Library of the Romanian Academy (Bucharest)