Between East and West: Eastern Christian mobility and the Roman hub (17th-18th century)

Santus, Cesare
(2018) International Conference “The Iberian World and the East: Go-betweens and Mediations, 16th-18th centuries” — Location: Maison française d’Oxford, Oxford (2.July.2018)

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  • Santus, CesareUCLouvain
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Abstract
The Eternal City was not only at the geographic crossroad between East and West, but hosted the Papal Curia, which could provide Eastern Christian visitors with canonical dispensations, letters of recommendation and certificates of Catholicity, needed to take advantage of the local employment and education opportunities. During their stay in Rome, the Eastern Christian visitors were hosted in the hospices annexed to their ‘national churches’, or they took shelter in the public hospitals and charitable institutions of the city. The growing concern toward the social and confessional control of foreigners led the Roman Inquisition to an effort of identification and regulation of immigrants, progressively achieved through the requirement of an explicit profession of Catholic faith. These professions 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 the city every year, the moments of greater affluence and the most represented communities, like Greeks and Armenians. In some cases, it is also possible to reconstruct their routes beyond Rome, heading toward Naples, Marseille or Sevilla. My paper will start by presenting the prosopographical database I am currently working on, then focusing particularly on those individuals who tried to reach the Spanish territories.
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  • École française de Rome

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Santus, C. (2018). Between East and West: Eastern Christian mobility and the Roman hub (17th-18th century). International Conference “The Iberian World and the East: Go-betweens and Mediations, 16th-18th centuries”, Maison française d’Oxford, Oxford. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/106775