On the heels of European businessmen came missionaries, teachers, travellers and explorers. The door was thus opened to modern influences, one of the most pregnant facts in the history of Ottoman Syria. The missionaries were Jesuits, Capuchins, Lazarites and members of other Catholic orders. Their activity was centred in the native Christian com- munities and resulted in the founding of the Uniat churches — Syrian and Greek — in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Syria was, however, much less exposed to West- ern influences than was Lebanon, and less affected by them throughout the Ottoman period.
Intellectually the period was one of sterility. Oppressive rule, high taxation, economic and social decline are not conducive to creative or original work in art, science or literature. The era of compilation, annotation, abridgment and imitation which had its beginnings centuries before con- tinued with fewer and poorer productions. Throughout the Ottoman age no Syrian poet, philosopher, artist, scientist or essayist of the first order made his appearance. Illiteracy was widespread, almost universal. Judges were appointed whose mastery over the written word was deficient. The few intellectuals who developed tended to be attracted to Constantinople, there to become fully Ottomanized. Damas- cus was the centre of some mediocre intellectual activity until about 1700. It was there that al-Maqqari of Tlemcen compiled between 1628 and 1630, from material brought with him from Morocco, the voluminous work considered the chief source of information for the literary history of Moslem Spain.
The first press with Arabic characters in the East made its appearance in 1702 at Aleppo through the initiative of a patriarch, Athanasius, who wavered between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The Gospels (1708) were among the first books printed in this press, which may have come from Wallachia, and which followed by 188 years the Arabic press at Fano (Italy), the first of its kind in the world,
