It is now known to the scholars of Ottoman history, that there were several Crypto-Christian groups in different corners of the Empire. Despite their spatial, cultural, linguistic and religious variations, in addition to differences in trajectories and myths of origin, what deemed these groups akin was their narrative of having pursued communal religious dualism for an unknown period of time under Ottoman Muslim rule. Living under Ottoman law, which had both practiced its own version of Sharia as civil and penal law and had also honored it as the source of legitimacy for imperial rule, these communities had been aware that their claims for Christianization would boldly transgress the Apostasy Law, an Islamic principle that sanctions renouncing Islam. However, after 1856 edict, when the Sultan was made to abolish the Apostasy Law under immense British pressure, the Ottoman officials were troubled by the news of several crypto-Christian groups appealing for official recognition of their hidden creed. Out of these, two Greek speaking crypto-Christian communities of Trabzon origin gave the longest and the most resilient struggle to be recognized as Christians. For Greek nationalists, these dualist communities symbolized the uprising of an enslaved Greek ethnie. For Ottoman government and later on Turkish nationalists, this was case apostasy-cum treason in the midst of homeland. Positioning itself against nationalist narratives and supporting by documents from Ottoman, British and Greek archives, missionary and other local publications, this paper will first reconstruct the microcosm of Crypto-Christianity as it was experienced by the miners of Trabzon and then explore the dynamics and implications of their struggle for recognition as Christians. This paper attempts to answer what point and why living a crypto-Christian life became neither desirable nor tenable for these dualist communities. In so doing, it offers insights to the complexities of the ethno-religious identities in the pre-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire, and their re-definition with the changing internal and external dynamics and processes of the nineteenth century. The story of crypto Christians demonstrates how blurred the distinctions across religions could be and as such problematizes the assumptions that the identities of Muslims and Christians were always clearly defined and were categorically separated from one another. My research contributes not only by bringing in such muted histories but by also asserting that the Ottoman state transformed itself at the moments and zones of encounters with its societal margins as exemplified by Crypto-Christians.

Boasting a 3,000 year history and a status as the oldest continuously inhabited city in the Americas, present-day San Pedro Cholula in the central Mexican state of Puebla has always been imbued with the sacred. As early as 500 BC, its inhabitants began laying the foundations of what would become the Great Pyramid of Cholollan. By 700 AD, the structure's size surpassed the Pyramid of the Sun in the nearby religious center of Teotihuacan. Following a period of rapid decline, Olmeca-Xicalanca invaders from the south gained political dominance in the region. Vanquished in 1168 AD by Tolteca-Chichimeca from the north, the conquerors quickly established Quetzalcoatl as the new titular deity of Cholollan. Erecting a magnificent sanctuary to the Plumed Serpent, the newcomers effectively re-centered the spiritual and political focus of the altepetl (Mesoamerican city-state) from the Great Pyramid to their newly-constructed Quetzalcoatl Temple. By 1519, when the first Spaniards arrived, the pyramid was little more than a hillside haven for rabbits and deer, whereas the sanctuary had become the focus of ritual and pilgrimage in the region, with numerous teocalli, or indigenous temples, dotting the landscape. In addition to being renowned as a spiritual hub, by the sixteenth century Cholollan had developed into a nucleus of culture and learning as well as a center of long-distance trade with a vibrant marketplace specializing in exotic goods. The friars who arrived in 1529 capitalized on Cholollan's spiritual reputation to establish what would become the most important Franciscan evangelization complex in central New Spain; this resulted in the most radical outward transformation in Cholollan's sacred history: from Mesoamerican to Catholic. Reading archival materials from state and national archives in Mexico and Spain alongside sixteenth-century ethnohistorical sources, this paper examines the site-specific conversion methodologies employed by the early friars among a people long accustomed to regional spiritual domination. As overseers of the Quetzalcoatl cult, the native Cholulteca had also enjoyed pre-hispanic secular importance, conducting rituals of political legitimation in the Quetzalcoatl Sanctuary for neighboring indigenous leaders. Upon the establishment of Spanish colonial rule, the local Nahuas worked to retain Cholollan's sacred identity while simultaneously capitalizing on Franciscan presence for social, political, and personal gain. Ultimately, I argue that Cholollan's continued status as a holy site is as much due to indigenous agency as to Franciscan pragmatism.

Conversion in the medieval Christian context was far from a simple matter. Historians working on the question as it was manifested in Latin Christendom have long recognized that what might appear to be a moment is in fact a process. Though a ceremony such as baptism may provide a clear dividing line between the old faith and the new, examples abound of people who were evidently Christian before they were baptized and of those who retained ties to their prior religion long after the sacrament of initiation. If Christian preachers agreed on the necessity of baptism, they often disagreed on the methodology of catechism and the degree of discipline necessary to pronounce a person or a people "Christian." The problem of conversion can therefore be seen in large part as a problem of "correctness." Much "missionary" activity in the late-antique and early-medieval West was therefore directed not at "pagans," but at Christians perceived to be undisciplined in their faith and practice; a notable example is Boniface of Mainz, the great eighth-century Carolingian missionary saint. While this rigorist strain of "conversion" methodology has been studied by a handful of scholars, historians have yet to trace the ways in which this notion - that conversion meant not baptism but proper catechism - continued in the High Middle Ages (ca. 1050-1350). Although committed paganism had been eradicated in Europe at this point, a reform movement (often associated with Pope Gregory VII, though it was a much wider phenomenon) emerged that saw resistance to reform not simply as a problem of obedience, but a reiteration of the older problem of "paganism" among the improperly catechized. This discourse of religious deviance was particularly acute on the periphery of Latin Europe. This paper will discuss the relationship between the idea of "reform" and the discourse of conversion by looking at two saints' lives from the mid-twelfth to the early thirteenth centuries, the Life of St. Malachy of Ireland (written by Bernard of Clairvaux) and the anonymous Life of St. William of AEbelholt (Denmark). Situating these figures within the reform movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the history of the high-medieval periphery, I will explain how each of these holy men was cast as a missionary. Rather than living and working among actual pagans, however, their role was that of "apostles of rigor" whose task was to convert deviant Christians to the gospel of reform.

In March 1637, the galleasses of the Venetian Mediterranean fleet docked in the port of the small island of Milos in the Cyclades. While there, a widow and her three daughters were spirited onto the great galley of the fleet commander, and fled the island for the Venetian stronghold of Corfu. These were far from normal passengers, however. The mother was the widow of the a?a of Milos, and the oldest daughter, Aisss ,was married to Mustafa Effendi, the island's kadi. Despite her elevated status, however, it was ultimately serious dissatisfaction in AissA's marital relationship that precipitated the women's flight. Based on archival sources in Venice, Rome and Greece, as well as Ottoman chronicles, this case opens a window onto the under-studied phenomenon of conversion and apostasy among Muslim women in the early modern Mediterranean. In this paper I will use Aiss 's experience as a window onto the fluidity of Mediterranean women's religious identity, and the ways in which they used the spaces of the sea, as well as its political and religious boundaries as a means of asserting agency.