ABSTRACT
Since late sixteenth century an impressively productive and popular stream emerged in the Eastern Church among Ottoman but also Venetian Greeks. It concerned, on the one hand, the diffusion and interpretation of oracular literature related to the expected end of the Ottoman Empire seen in an eschatological frame and, on the other, exegesis of the Revelation of John, the borders between the two branches or genres often being crossed and blurred. Certainly this did not lead to the emergence of a genuine messianic or millenarian movement comparable to contemporary phenomena in different religious contexts; it remained mainly a textual, a “scribal phenomenon” (after Bernard McGinn), although certain anti-Ottoman revolts and practically all pertinent political projects did seek and find inspiration in apocalyptic imagination.
These phenomena were products of a complex process of cultural transfers. Transfers on the time axe: selective reinterpretation and re-contextualization of inherited and occasionally invented traditions. And transfers in space, since it reacted and responded, often explicitly, to developments in Western Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. This chapter seeks to highlight some of the most characteristic cases, situate them in their contemporary context, interpret them as part of a connected history of early modern apocalypticism, but also to reflect on the limits of such transfers.
