Religious Mobility and Confessional Control: Eastern Christian Immigrants and ‘Refugees’ in Early Modern Rome

Santus, Cesare
(2019) Faire diaspora en Ville: mémoires, représentations, institutions Europe méditerranéenne, XIVe–XVIIIe siècle — Location: École française de Rome (26.September.2019)

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  • Santus, CesareUCLouvain
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Abstract
During the 17th and 18th century, Rome became the destination of a great number of pilgrims and temporary immigrants, who resorted to the Holy See in order to obtain education, canonical dispensations, resolution of cases of conscience, but also alms and material aid. Eastern Christians composed a consistent but hitherto neglected segment of these travelers, coming from the European and Asiatic territories of the Ottoman Empire, or even beyond. During their stay in the city, they were hosted in the hospices annexed to their ‘national churches’, or they took shelter in the public hospitals and charitable institutions of Rome, along with other poor people and vagrants. In order to be welcomed and see their demands met, an increasing number of Eastern Christians confessed the Catholic faith before the Roman Inquisition. These professions of faith were then recorded in special registers, kept in the archives of the Inquisition, which represent a mine of information for the historian, since they include name, patronymic, age, place of origin and personal signature of nearly 3000 individuals. This allows us to obtain a large set of data about the number of Eastern Catholics who reached Rome every year, the moments of greater affluence (which did not necessarily coincide with the jubilees) and the most represented communities – for example, the Armenians were significantly more numerous than any other Eastern Christian group. Thanks to the prosopographical database I am currently working on, and by cross-checking its data with other Roman archives and collections, in my paper I will address three key issues: what were the main roads that brought Eastern Christians to Rome, in a metaphorical and concrete sense? What were the strategies put in place by them in order to ease their reception and possibly transform their temporary stay into a permanent one? How did the Catholic authorities manage to monitor these individuals, characterized by an ambiguous confessional identity and whose conversion was always viewed with suspicion? In trying to answer these questions, the focus will be particularly on the Greek and Armenian case.
Affiliations
  • Villa I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance StudiesFrancesco De Dombrowski Post-doctoral Fellowship

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Santus, C. (2019). Religious Mobility and Confessional Control: Eastern Christian Immigrants and ‘Refugees’ in Early Modern Rome. Faire diaspora en Ville: mémoires, représentations, institutions Europe méditerranéenne, XIVe–XVIIIe siècle, École française de Rome. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/120833