The Catholic Archipelago

An arid, semidesolate place located in the heart of the Cycladic archipelago, 17th-century Antiparos was a spatial counterpoint to Athens, Corinth, and other celebrated centers of antiquity on the mainland (Figure 2).⁵ As one traveler later put it, the island would have been ‘condemned to obscurity’ had it not been for the accidental discovery of its subterranean splendor (Choiseul-Gouffier 1782: 71). This is not to suggest that the Cyclades were considered devoid of antiquities during this period. Even when monuments in the archipelago were acknowledged by Western travelers, they were often interpreted through the lens of their mainland counterparts. A telling example is 17th-century Flemish artist Jan Jansen Struys’s (1683: 110–111) description of the ruins of Delos as belonging to the ‘Island of Delphi’, a description that conflates the Cycladic sanctuary of Apollo with its more renowned namesake on the northern slopes of Mount Parnassus in central Greece (Figure 3).⁶

Figure 2: Location of the archipelago on a 17th-century map of Greece (Randolph 1687). Antiparos can be seen right under the letter C in ‘arches’, grouped with the larger islands, Paros and Naxos, towards the east. On the lower left side of the map, a vignette represents Constantinople, underscoring its influence in the area.

Figure 3: The island of Delos (Struys 1683).

While the imagination of Western artists and architects visiting Ottoman Greece was largely captivated by the architectural remains of classical antiquity, an appeal reflected in the illustrated travel accounts widely published in central Europe from the 17th-century onwards, locals were seemingly more attentive to the architectural expression of their religious heritage.⁷ The English merchant Bernard Randolph, who toured the archipelago around the same time as Struys, relays an anecdote in his travelogue about the Greek Orthodox church Panagia Ekatontapiliani in Paros that speaks to this sensibility:

They [the islanders of Paros] give you a pleasant story, viz. The Master workman that built St. Sophia, had a Servant that was of Paros, whose industry had brought him to that perfection in his art, as that he was resolved to shew his skill in his own Country. When he had finisht the Church he invited his Master to view it, upon which his Master takes a Voyage from Constantinople, and having well survey’d the Building, he finds a fault in the maine. Upon which, the man casts himself down from the top and broke his neck. His tomb they shew you at the entrance of the Church. (1687:22)

Bernard references Hagia Sophia in Constantinople – perhaps the most emblematic temple of Eastern Christianity – to elevate the status and craftsmanship of Panagia Ekatontapiliani. To this day, this story is materially manifested on the western entrance of the church where two figures carved in high relief are identified as those of the architect ‘Master’, kneeling in remorse, and the ‘Apprentice’, holding his broken head after the fall (Figure 4). Another local legend attributes the founding of Panagia Ekatontapiliani to Saint Helena, who, the legend goes, vowed to construct a church on the island of Paros after receiving a divine vision during her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a promise reportedly fulfilled by the Byzantine emperor Justinian (Jewell, Hasluck 1920: 1–3).

Figure 4: The reliefs in the west entrance of Panagia Ekatontapiliani in Paros reportedly showing the ‘master’ (left) and the ‘apprentice’ (right) in the story recorded by Bernard Randolph. Photographs taken by Panos Niarchos in 2025, reproduced with permission.

Surviving in multiple variants, such tales do not simply mythologize the church’s origins; they inscribe it into a larger architectural imaginary that stretches from Constantinople to the Cyclades, collapsing geographical and temporal distances through embodied storytelling and built form. The tomb of the anonymous workman who brought labor and architectural expertise from Constantinople to Paros, for example, concretizes the cultural and aesthetic heritage of the site, turning that heritage into a monument to be showcased in its own right. A token of local pride, it also points to long-lasting commercial, cultural, and religious networks that still bound the Christian Orthodox communities of the Ottoman provinces of the eastern Mediterranean together at the time of Randolph’s visit. As Ünver Rüstem (2019: 46–49) has shown, throughout the 17th century, Christian artists, builders, and craftsmen –particularly those of Greek and Armenian origin – were active not only in the Aegean but also in the corps of imperial architects in Constantinople and so influenced the shape of architectural production across the empire.

These anecdotes sketch a Janus-faced archipelago: one directed toward the West through the imagination of antiquity, the other anchored in local traditions of Orthodox Christianity. Yet these orientations were not mutually exclusive. The layering of the past in the Cyclades produced built environments where antique fragments coexisted with Christian devotion. Like other architectural and decorative elements of Panagia Ekatontapiliani, for example, the reliefs flanking the western entrance are most likely antique spolia that in this case portray satyrs or Dionysian figures.⁸ These fragments were absorbed into a living tradition that privileged continuity with Orthodox religious identity rather than simply put on display, as Western travelers often preferred.

Historians of Ottoman Greece like Hamilakis (2011) and Anderson (2015) have shown how such differences in focus were exaggerated and instrumentalized by Western travelers to affirm the authority of their own gaze. The locals’ selective attention to different layers of the past was interpreted as a cultural deficiency, an indifference to antiquity that marked them as intellectually stagnant, suspended in what Michael Fotiadis (1995) has described as an unchanging ethnographic present. Central to this discourse was the pervasive authority of the Eastern Orthodox Church across the territories of the ‘Rūm millet’. Commonly translated as ‘Roman nation’, the term denoted the broad jurisdiction granted by Ottoman authorities to Christian Orthodox subjects in the empire (Clogg 2013: 109–132) through which their religious communities were able to exert control over a wide range of civil and ecclesiastical matters.

Foreign observers tended to be critical of this arrangement (Barkey and Gavrilis 2016). They routinely portrayed Christian Orthodox clergy as corrupt, unlettered, and obstructionist, as figures who fostered a backward-looking religious attitude that impeded the proper veneration of classical heritage. An eighteenth-century depiction of the quarry of the nymphs in Paros (Figure 5), is compositionally split to dramatize this contrast: on the right side a group of Western observers admire a classical relief, while on the left an Orthodox priest on a donkey departs the scene, pushed by Western subjects to the edge of the frame.

Figure 5: The entry to a quarry in Paros (Choiseul-Gouffier 1782: pl. 34).

Such characterizations also rested on a broader misreading of Ottoman Greeks as a self-enclosed and homogenous community that was defined by the legal autonomy of the millet system and disconnected from the broader workings of the empire. As historian Molly Greene has shown, this simplification unravels once we attend to the multifaceted communities that Ottoman Greeks inhabited, and to the shifting affiliations, networks, and diplomatic allegiances that held them together (2015: 1). The 17th-century Cyclades offer a clear case, where Catholic islanders played a prominent and often overlooked role in these hyperlocal interactions (Sinarellis 2007).

These Catholic communities were established in the aftermath of the fourth crusade, when the Cyclades were divided into Latin seigneuries, one of which was the Duchy of Naxos founded by Marco Sanudo in 1207 (Dugit 1874; Miller 1908; Slot 1982). The feudal structures established during this period were then grafted onto local systems of governance, yielding hybrid arrangements, often referred to in notarial records as ‘customs of the place’ (‘osanze del loco’) (Slot 1982: 40). Latin bishoprics serving the diverse Catholic communities in the islands likewise persisted for centuries. By the end of the 17th century, these communities comprised descendants of early Latin settlers (many integrated into the Greek-speaking world), local converts, and new immigrants – especially sailors and merchants based in port towns like Parikia and Naousa in Paros (Laurent 1934: 357–358; Slot 1982: 14–16, 30). Even though they were largely Greek speaking and locally rooted, their Orthodox neighbors regarded them as a distinct ethnoconfessional group and often referred to them as ‘Franks’ (‘φράγκοι’) (Frazee 1983: 7; Kousouris 2021: 4; Kousouris 2025: 1).

Ottoman rule, established after Hayreddin Barbarossa’s 1537 conquest, allowed many of these Latin structures to remain in place. Perceived as lacking strategic or economic value, the Cyclades were subjected to a policy of indirect governance, and so members of the Latin aristocracy often retained their authority as tributaries to the sultan (Slot 1982: 78; Greene 2015: 90–91). There were very few Muslims on the islands; no more than 150 individuals were recorded in the 17th century, and many of these were local converts (Slot 1982: 14; Zachariadou 1993: 329). The vast majority of the Cycladic population continued to be Christian and was divided between the Orthodox and Catholic rites, though the boundary between the two communities was often fluid (Slot 1982: 14). Certain Orthodox Christians were referred to as ‘Catholics of the Greek rite’, and Catholic subjects were often allowed to follow the Orthodox liturgy so long as they acknowledged papal supremacy (Greene 2010: 157–160).

French-supported Catholic orders, especially the Jesuits, played a central role in sustaining these communities (Slot 1982: 109–113). Having been granted papal permission, Jesuits settled in Naxos in 1627 and took over the former ducal chapel known as Capella Kazatza (Καπέλλα Καζάτζα)—a small, single-nave church with five altars and elaborate marble decoration (Carayon 1864; Hofmann 1938: 132; Laurent 1934: 360–367). Their correspondence describes persistent outreach efforts to rural Naxos and the neighboring islands of Paros and Antiparos, where they at times preached and heard confessions with the blessing of Orthodox priests, especially when Greeks were hesitant to trust their own ministers (Frazee 1983: 114–117; Dugit 1874: 263–264; Laurent 1935b; Greene 2010: 163).⁹

These missionary efforts were successful. By the end of the 17th century, Catholics made up roughly 20 percent of the Cycladic population, though distribution varied significantly by island (Slot 1982: 15). Naxos alone housed 42 Catholic churches at that time – a tenfold increase from the beginning of the century – even though only a tenth of its population identified as Catholic (Hofmann 1936: 397–400). These communities, bolstered by support from Venice and France, created a distinct form of Catholic Indigeneity in the region (Borromeo 2004; Sinarellis 2007).¹⁰ Antoine des Barres, who traveled with Nointel in 1673, notes that the islanders were ‘all Christians, Greeks and Latins, some even priding themselves as descendants of noble Venetian families’ (1678: 137). A few decades later, Jean Pitton de Tournefort echoed Barres’s observations, reporting that ‘one … hears talk of nothing but family trees; some claim descent from the Palaiologos or the Komnenos, others from the Justiniani, the Grimaldi, the Sommaripa’ (1717: 215).

Tournefort’s account points to a growing concern with lineage as a marker of status in a shifting diplomatic landscape (Hofmann 1936: 400). Around the same time, Robert Saulger, a Jesuit priest who was the superior of the order in Naxos and who was also an associate of Nointel, composed a genealogical history of the Latin dukes of the archipelago (1698). Presented to the French secretary of state on behalf of ‘the Catholics of the Islands of Greece’, the work sought to formalize claims of descent at a time when older structures of authority were under pressure. These pressures were most visible in mounting disputes over landholding and ecclesiastical patronage (Dugit 1874: 247–263; Greene 2015: 87–94). Although notarial archives suggest that many of these conflicts cut across confessional lines—pitting commoners against landowners regardless of rite—Western observers often interpreted them as signs of sectarian hostility, especially after the Orthodox patriarchate intensified its efforts to reassert control in the islands following the Ottoman conquest (Greene 2016: 203–204) by appointing new bishops and founding new monasteries. On Andros alone, four monasteries were established during the 17th century, including one that became the island’s largest landholder (Greene 2015: 36–37).

Nointel’s tour of the archipelago, as official envoy of the ‘most-Christian’ king in the Ottoman Empire, brought into focus the uneasy coexistence of these communities. The title, traditionally granted by the pope, distinguished Louis XIV as the protector par excellence of Christians abroad. Beginning with the reign of Francis I, this role was formalized by what is known as ‘the capitulations’ –agreements through which the French secured trading privileges and a religious protectorate in Ottoman lands. Renewed under Nointel for the fifth time, the treaty guaranteed freedom of worship for Latin subjects and authorized French ambassadors to oversee their treatment by Ottoman officials (Frazee 1983: 67–68, 102). As the Gazette reported, Nointel’s mission aimed to ‘expand Christianity in the lands of the infidels, service the King and his glory, and reestablish the primacy of French commerce’ (1673: 1144). These goals were not abstract: they took shape in Nointel’s ceremonial interventions across the Cyclades, ritual performances that enacted royal authority, reorganized spatial relations, and positioned France within a dense field of competing claims. Nointel’s occupation of the Antiparos grotto was one such intervention where French ambitions were staged and negotiated in the presence of local actors.

Ceremonial Geographies

Nointel’s arrival in the Cyclades was marked by a staged reception that underscored his dual role as royal emissary and Catholic protector. According to Barres (1678: 136), he and the members of Nointel’s crew disembarked in Naxos to the sound of ‘canons and swivel guns [boëtes]’ and were welcomed by the Catholic bishop, clergy, and local notables. They proceeded to the Capella Kazatza, the former ducal chapel then used by the Jesuits, before heading to the cathedral to sing the ‘Te Deum’. This ceremonial itinerary—receptions, processions, shared rites—was repeated throughout the ambassador’s Mediterranean tour. In Chios, for example, Nointel’s entrance culminated in a Jesuit-led mass. According to the Gazette, the crowds gathered to see the procession, and local women were encouraged to touch the ambassador and his garments (1674: 76–77).

In such descriptions locals are represented as either passive spectators of public ceremonies or as guides to the islands, the latter of which affords these often-anonymous figures a semblance of agency. Sometimes they are depicted as assisting the foreign crew, as in the case of the person who informed Nointel of the ‘statue’ in Antiparos, while at other times, they are portrayed as withholding knowledge or refusing to cooperate. In a letter from 1673, Cornelio Magni, for example, recounts that the islanders in Antiparos denied knowledge of any grotto, claiming that as far as they knew, ‘nothing more than a reservoir of water’ was to be found underground (1774: 183). In 1717, Tournefort (194) echoed this account, adding that the locals only descended in the grotto after being pressured by the Knights of Malta, who held a prominent place in Nointel’s entourage. It is not known whether this ignorance was genuine or if these testimonies were reliable. In his own narrative, Nointel casts the moment as providential, suggesting that the grotto had remained concealed from all previous conquerors only to be revealed to him by divine favor (1893: 27–28).

Yet such portrayals of islanders obscure the political engagement, negotiation, and resistance that structured Cycladic governance at the community level. Across the archipelago, collective input in civic matters was formalized under Latin and Venetian rule, allowing for the shared participation of both cittadini (urban elites) and contadini (rural commoners) in local councils (Slot 1982: 49–54). During periods of unrest – especially in the 16th century – islanders challenged aristocratic authority, pressing for reforms that in some cases produced more representative arrangements (Slot 1982: 69). In Naxos and Paros, uprisings secured administrative concessions, while a deputation from Tinos traveled to Venice to denounce aristocratic abuse (Slot 1982: 69–70).¹¹ Such episodes, which Western narratives by and large don’t mention, challenge the assumption that islanders were passive and suggest that the silence of the guides in Antiparos may have been a protective strategy rather than a symptom of ignorance or superstition.

A drawing of the entrance of the grotto attached to Nointel’s dispatch depicts a modest vernacular structure standing at the grotto entrance that indicates that the site was already known and possibly ritually integrated by the 17th century, undermining Nointel’s claim that he discovered it (Figure 6). Whether the ‘cot’ was a shepherd’s shelter or a residence for clergymen interpreting the stalagmite’s oracles is uncertain. In later depictions—such as Richard Dalton’s 1751 drawing (Figure 7)—the structure appears more permanent and includes Orthodox priests (Figure 8), indicating that the unusual cult surrounding the stalagmite had over time become embedded in local religious practice. A letter from the first quarter of the century published in the Mercure de France (1725) supports this visual evidence, describing a small building near the stalagmite where priests received pilgrims and interpreted signs. Similarly, a report from the second quarter that appeared in the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure (1752) mentions a modest shelter inhabited by a ‘caloyer’ (a Christian Orthodox monk) who specialized in descending into the cave. To this day, a small chapel still stands near the entrance, underscoring the site’s enduring religious resonance (Figure 9).

Figure 6: The ‘cot’ at the entrance of the Antiparos grotto, detail of the exterior view the Antiparos grotto, attachment to manuscript copy of Nointel 1673 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits. NAF 5391).

Figure 7: Richard Dalton, ‘Entrance of the Grotto at Antiparos’ (1751).

Figure 8: Details from Richard Dalton, ‘Entrance of the Grotto at Antiparos’ (1751) (left) and ‘The Grotto of Antiparos’ (1751) (right).

Figure 9: The Church of Agios Ioannis Spiliotis (St. John of the Grotto) at the entrance of the Antiparos grotto. The church is connected to a second, smaller church dedicated to Zoodochos Pigi (the Mother of God of the Life-Giving Spring). On the left side of the photo the colossal stalagmite, mistaken for a statue, is visible. Photo courtesy of the author, 2023.

As Benjamin Anderson (2015) has argued, figures who guided foreigners through ritual or mythic landscapes in early modern descriptions may be understood as ‘local interpreters’ whose authority derived from their spatial proximity to and embodied knowledge of those landscapes. Their presence in Nointel’s visual and textual records suggests the Antiparos grotto already belonged to a multilayered, sacred landscape. Although rooted in a syncretic form of Orthodox devotion, these symbolisms were also legible within local Catholic traditions. Jesuit missionaries on nearby Naxos, for instance, had dedicated an altar in the Capella Kazatza to ‘our Lady of the Chapel,’ an icon associated with miraculous interventions in times of crisis (Frazee 1983: 114–115). According to their accounts, the Virgin appeared in dreams—sometimes requesting architectural changes to the chapel (hence her nickname, ‘Panagia i zitoula’, ‘the demanding Virgin’), at other times intervening in spiritual, familial, or even commercial matters (Laurent 1934: 363–364; Laurent 1935a).

Nointel perhaps reframed his curiosity over the stalagmite as sacred revelation owing to this resonance between Catholic and Orthodox beliefs. In his dispatch, he recounts that the decision to celebrate Christmas mass in the grotto was prompted by a sudden eclipse, followed by light shimmering on stalactites that also graced the grotto (1893: 24–25). Moved by the spectacle, he resolved to create a nativity scene that merged nature and artifice. He ordered more than ‘five hundred wax candles, twenty torches, and a number of lamps’ to be brought from neighboring islands to illuminate the grotto from within. Sailors climbed the precipices and distributed the lights along the walls and vaults, transforming the cavern into a simulation of a starry sky. As a final scenographic gesture, a hollow and a rock were lit by lanterns to represent, respectively, Christ’s manger and the star of Bethlehem (Barres 1678: 153–154, Tournefort 1717: 193–194, Kempe, Naumann, and Dunsch 2013: 63).

Nointel’s description reflects this scenography, carefully merging the material qualities of the grotto with what Sylviane Bokdam (2012: 20–22, 627–637) has called an ‘interpretative simulacrum’; in this case, a metaphorical reworking of natural forms into a nativity scene. This logic recurs throughout the writings of the ambassador and his companions. For example, Nointel likens the grotto’s cavernous entrance to the portico of Saint Peter’s in Rome (finding both lacking in beauty), observes ‘masses of buildings’ forming ‘towns’ and ‘villages’, and imagines the crystals as draperies and flags celebrating the victories of the king (1893: 7, 18, 28). Barres (1678: 153–154) notes that mineral formations take on human, animal, and architectural shapes in the vaults, while Magni (1774: 184) describes the interior as ‘a magnificent theater’ that had a floor ‘consisting of solid marble’ and that was adorned with ‘columns, thrones, and altars’.

As Alain Guyot (2012: 215–287) points out, such architectural analogies were a common rhetorical device in early modern travel writing. Casting the Antiparos grotto interchangeably as a Christian or classical monument, for example, allowed the crew to navigate the layered legacies of the site while also responding to practical constraints. Catholic churches in the Cyclades were often small, vernacular, and heavily inscribed with Orthodox iconography, which did not make them particularly well suited to Bourbon spectacle (Slot 1982: 64). By choosing a natural setting instead, Nointel sidestepped these limitations. The grotto offered a neutral space for staging a rite that included both Catholic and Orthodox clergy and that projected French spiritual patronage. The mass, according to Nointel, was intended to ‘mark a partial union of the two rites’ and express ‘the desire that it would please God to soon completely unite them’ (1893: 26).

Throughout his Aegean tour, Nointel proved skilled at using spatial choreography to project royal authority. Each ceremony was saturated with Bourbon symbolism that he used to enact royal presence through his own figure. The Gazette reported that when the entourage visited the church in Chios ‘it totally felt [in that church] as if we were in France, in the middle of Turkey […] such was the respect and deference for his Majesty shown in the person of his ambassador’ (1674: 78). It is important to note here that the ‘as if’ realization of monarchical presence in foreign settings finds a parallel in late 17th-century diplomatic theory. In one of the first treatises on permanent embassies, Abraham de Wicquefort (1690: 415) states that ‘the ambassador’s house must be respected as if it is the Prince’s own Palace. It is, in effect, or at least it is in his particular protection, just as is his person’. The layered phrasing of the original – ‘comme si, en effet, aussi bien que’ – reveals both the juridical fragility and the representational precision of this newly established analogy between the embassy and the palace of the king. To place the ambassador’s residence under the monarch’s protection was to give spatial form to delegated sovereignty: the envoy embodied the authority, while his dwelling echoed, in ritual and form, the palace from which that authority emanated.

These analogies found concrete expression in Pera, Constantinople’s diplomatic quarter. ‘If in other capitals ambassadors lived like princes,’ writes the historian Philip Mansel (1996: 191–199), ‘in Constantinople they lived like kings’, with their residences – known as ‘palaces’ –fashioned as royal courts embodying the identity of their respective nations. This was especially true of the Palais de France, the city’s first permanent embassy, which included a throne room adorned with portraits of French monarchs and envoys (Casa 1995: 19–35) (Figure 10). Between 1670 and 1679, Nointel oversaw substantial renovations to the palais that mirrored architectural developments at Versailles. He added a galerie des glaces, a hall of spectacles, and a garden of follies while also staging performances that echoed Bourbon court ritual (Vandal 1900: 203–213). In keeping with the political theology of French absolutism, he inaugurated the renovated palais on the religious holiday of Saint Louis with an extravagant celebration which he enjoyed seated on a throne bearing the insignia of the king, overlooking his ephemeral, replicated kingdom.

Figure 10: Jean-Baptiste Hilaire, ‘Vue de Constantinople prise des Jardins du Palais de France’ (Choiseul-Gouffier 1822: pl. 76bis).

During his travels, Nointel had far fewer resources at his disposal to evoke royal presence than he did over the course of the renovation of the Palais de France in Pera. In Constantinople, a mirror-lined palace could stabilize and amplify his monarchical persona, but in the Aegean, that edifice had to be conjured anew through what might be described as a ‘scenic apparatus’ (‘dispositif scénique’). Coined by literary critic Stéphane Lojkine (2008), the term evokes the 17th-century understanding of scene as a site of staged transcendence whether in the form of a royal spectacle or biblical reenactment. Scene in this sense functions to enact a symbolic ordonnance through the coordinated interplay of media and form.

Through royal emblems, pyrotechnics, or staged reenactments of Louis XIV’s victories, Nointel consistently placed himself at the center of these orchestrations so as to emphasize his diplomatic bond with the monarch. As the Gazette, reported from Nointel’s visit in Chios, ‘all the world constantly had its eye fixed on the Comte de Nointel, because, given the place where he was seated and the elevated position in which he appeared, he had the honor of representing the King’ (1674: 77). Nowhere did this apparatus take more elaborate form than in Antiparos. Here, natural splendor allowed the transcendent source of political obligation to ‘appear’ without relying solely on the ambassador’s embodied performance.

Nointel’s Bethlehem

A ‘Bethlehem, artificial and natural at the same time’. This is how Nointel described the scene he orchestrated in the grotto (1893: 25). His vision was recorded in a drawing that was attached to his dispatch (Figure 11)—the earliest known visual record of the Antiparos grotto and the only surviving depiction of the ceremony. The image is usually attributed to Jacques Carrey, whose later drawings of the Parthenon, compiled in the Album de Nointel, provided the last visual record of the monument before it was bombarded by Venice in 1687 (Omont 1898: 4–5). Yet as scholars such as Albert Vandal (1900: 280–83) and Irini Apostolou (2002: 63–87) have argued, Carrey likely joined the mission only after the Cycladic leg. Whoever the artist was, he clearly carried out Nointel’s (1893: 24) instructions to depict the ‘grand spectacle of nature pleasurably spreading her riches’ and ‘the variety of the principal activities’ taking place on site.

Figure 11: Interior view of the Antiparos grotto, attachment to manuscript copy of Nointel 1673 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. NAF 5391).

The drawing shows some visitors descending with ropes and ladders and others hauling supplies or distributing torches. At its center, a tablecloth, a tabernacle, and candlesticks are arranged atop a pyramidal stalagmite that served as the altar for the Christmas mass (Figure 12). Nointel (1893: 25) notes that these ritual objects, along with icons not depicted, were brought from Naxos with the help of Father Saulger. Given that Jesuit reports indicate that at the time the Catholic churches of Naxos shared a single tabernacle (Laurent 1934: 366), its presence in the Antiparos grotto underscores the logistical and symbolic investment of a wider Catholic infrastructure sustained by Jesuit missions and French patronage in the ceremony and the ties of this community to the site.

Figure 12: The banquet and the altar, detail of the interior view of the Antiparos grotto, attachment to manuscript copy of Nointel 1673 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. NAF 5391).

As part of this spectacle, Nointel also prominently placed his bed, ordering it to be installed on the second level of the chamber on a plateau ‘naturally shaped like an alcove’ that offered expansive views of the vault. Cushions of gold brocade and velvet were laid out along a recessed section of rock ‘to serve as a Turkish sofa [sopha à la turque]’ (1893: 22). The arrangement, clearly marked in the drawing (Figure 13), reflects the theatrical economy that shaped earlier stops on the tour: from this elevated position, Nointel could oversee the ceremony while remaining fully visible to the crowd. With its ball-turned columns and draped hangings, the bed was a striking emblem of the industrious way the traveling court dealt with the grotto’s unyielding terrain, transforming it, if only briefly, into a space of royal command.

Figure 13: Nointel’s bed, detail of the interior view of the Antiparos grotto, attachment to manuscript copy of Nointel 1673 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Département des Manuscrits. NAF 5391).

The banquet that followed the mass elaborated on its scenography, spatially integrating liturgy, diplomacy, and spectacle in ways that echoed practices at the French court, where ephemeral grottos in royal gardens and staged entertainments such as the tragédies en musique were conceived as immersive environments designed to bring nature, artifice, and religious or regal power into a single performative frame (Kintzler 1991: 294–296; Miller 1982: 59–75). As Diana Balmori (1991) has observed, artificial grottos held a special place in such environments, functioning as ‘intermediate structures’: spaces where natural formations, architectural interventions, and symbolic imagery were integrated into a unified visual and affective program. Within Gallican political theology, these choreographed settings materialized royal authority instead of merely displaying it, embedding sovereignty in spatial experience.

In Antiparos, no architectural construct was needed: the natural features of the grotto, ‘marvelous’ according to its visitors, provided the spatial and symbolic frame for a ceremony that fused liturgical rite with diplomatic display.¹² Capturing this convergence on paper required an approach attuned to both ceremonial rhythm and spatial hierarchy. Distinct phases of the event are rendered spatially adjacent in the drawing, with the banquet positioned in close – and arguably provocative – proximity to the altar (see Figure 11). Next to the Holy Host, guests dined, servants circulated with plates, and a four-piece band played music, while torchbearers encircled the ambassador, prompting him to admire the vault. In his letter, Nointel identifies these torchbearers as members of the Knights of Malta. As the banquet progressed, their tales of maritime combat intertwined with the cavern’s crystalline formations: ‘there were Turkish saiques, Cairo-bound galleons, and other ships laden with goods, all depicted in the formations—along with Maltese vessels attacking and capturing them for the glory of the faith’ (1893:23).

The presence of the knights in Nointel’s entourage was not incidental. Many of the most active Maltese corsairs hailed from French territories, and in the absence of a strong Catholic establishment in Paros and Antiparos, they had to perform key ceremonial functions such as firing the welcoming cannons and facilitating Nointel’s crossing to Antiparos (Vandal 1900: 122–128; Slot 1982:205–206). The local population, however, had mixed feelings about the knights. After the ceremony, Greek islanders approached Nointel one by one not to pay tribute but to voice their grievances against them. ‘They came to lodge complaints,’ he wrote, ‘about the recent theft of most of their livestock’. A man from Leros reported that his compatriots had fled their homes after being forced to supply provisions to the corsairs, only to return and find that ‘a new church door had been stolen by another of these brigands’. Others reported the assassination of an Orthodox priest in Paros, while official letters presented to Nointel confirmed the theft of a chalice and other sacred objects from local churches (Nointel 1893:23–24).

These final charges highlighted the religious dimension of the violations. This aspect of the friction between locals and the corsairs was made especially clear in a complaint from Patmos: ‘The clergy and people of Patmos sent a representative,’ Nointel recorded, ‘to inform me that the sanctity of their island—consecrated by the retreat of Saint John—was daily violated by Christian corsairs, who seized everything they found there, even items belonging to the ministers of the Cave of this beloved disciple of the Lord’ (1893:24). The French would have regarded this charge as especially grave owing to the island’s exceptional standing within the Christian world. Revered as the site of Saint John’s Revelation, Patmos had long attracted pilgrims and enjoyed monastic independence, backed by guarantees of protection from both papal and Ottoman authorities (Greene 2010: 76–77).¹³ These privileges were meant to shield the island from outside interference, including attacks by Catholic corsairs. Yet such protections proved fragile. Patmian vessels often flew the flag of Malta to signal their exemption, but corsairs routinely ignored it. The monastery’s need to navigate Catholic patronage and Orthodox devotion made its position precarious (Greene 2010: 176–177).

Similar dynamics shaped life in Antiparos and across the Cyclades, where the Knights of Malta wintered regularly, often without interference from the Ottoman fleet. During these stays, they buried their dead, married local women, and maintained households or relationships despite their active participation in raids across the region (Earle 1970: 242–243). They were enmeshed in the community even as they worked against it. Members of the ducal house of Naxos, for example, had long-standing ties to the knights, and after they were expelled from Rhodes, there was even a proposal to relocate the order’s headquarters to the island (Slot 1982: 71) Material exchanges reinforced these ties: the same blacksmith who cast church bells for Orthodox churches in Naxos also forged cannons for the knights (Slot 1982: 205–206). Even Orthodox monks living in the islands reportedly participated in the pirate economy and facilitated the trade of enslaved people (Zachariadou 2001: 145–146).

The informal lodging of complaints with Nointel recalled familiar modes of arbitration that helped regulate such contested moral and economic landscapes. In Malta, for example, the knights maintained the Tribunale degli Armamenti, a court designed to mediate disputes among corsairs and hear complaints from their victims (Greene 2010). Although Muslims and Jews were typically excluded from its protections, Orthodox Christians were occasionally permitted to bring claims, owing to what Greene describes as their ‘enduringly liminal’ status within the Christian world (2010: 11). In the Cyclades, too, locals convened informal assemblies to deliberate on communal matters, whose outcomes were conveyed to Ottoman officials through trusted intermediaries (Laurent 1934: 356–357). What distinguished the case of the appeals to Nointel in Antiparos was the assertion of French authority within these existing frameworks. By placing himself at the center of grievance mediation, Nointel transformed a religious ceremony into a diplomatic intervention, signaling a shift in which French protection began to displace both Ottoman oversight and local custom.

By the 1690s, Louis XIV’s administration had begun to tighten control over French activities in the Aegean, targeting the informal entanglements of merchants, sailors, and exiles (Cole 1939: 395–398; Slot 1982: 236–238). New regulations governing trade, language, and social affiliation sought to reframe French authority as territorially bounded and bureaucratically legible (Coller 2010). In retrospect, the grotto ceremony may be read as a spatial prototype of this ambition: a scenographic performance that enacted the very distinctions – between native and foreign, sacred and political – that Bourbon officials would later attempt to weave more systematically into the region’s social fabric. Yet the archival record documenting the event reveals a more complex reality. Though anchored in the figure of the ambassador, the ceremony was shaped by the gestures, accommodations, and resistance of local actors. The tension between a ritual apparatus designed to create sovereign distance and the assertion of local agency within it underscores the porousness not only of ceremonial space but of the geopolitical order it sought to stage.

In the century that followed, the ceremonial imprint of Nointel’s visit to Antiparos was partially obscured by new regimes of representation. In his Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (1782), Choiseul-Gouffier recast the grotto as a geological curiosity that Enlightenment empiricism could shed light on, even supplying sectional diagrams and topographic surveys (Figure 14). Yet this reframing did not erase earlier imaginaries; rather, it layered them. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, local guides on Antiparos replayed aspects of Nointel’s spectacle for foreign visitors. Charles Saunders, writing in 1747, recalled how his guides extinguished their torches before descent to heighten suspense. In the lower chambers, hidden lights were suddenly revealed, recreating the moment of brilliance described in Nointel’s account. In other accounts, travelers reported that they were invited to contemplate commemorative inscriptions, including those left by the ambassador’s companions, and to leave their own names on the walls and thereby inscribe themselves into an evolving archive of presence (Newcastle General Magazine 1757).

Figure 14: Détails Géométriques de la Grotte d’Antiparos’ (Choiseul-Gouffier 1782: pl. 37).

Nointel may have been drawn to Antiparos by antiquarian interest, but the site he encountered was already active: ritually inscribed, spatially familiar, and locally interpreted. Unlike episodes of removal or appropriation elsewhere in Ottoman Greece, his intervention reinscribed the grotto within a symbolic geography of sovereign display and performance. However, the foreignness of this gesture was never complete because it relied on the presence, labor, and recognition of local actors, thus complicating the distinction between outside imposition and Indigenous participation.

The Antiparos episode exposed the porousness of distinctions often overdrawn in historiography between Latin and Orthodox, East and West, local and foreign. The multivalent affiliations that characterized relationships in the Cyclades undermined such binaries and rendered sovereignty performative and unsettled. Attending to these layered histories reveals how sacred landscapes in the eastern Mediterranean were never fixed or passive but shaped both by those who moved through them and by those who sought to define their meaning from afar.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.