The Angevin World, the Papacy and the East: 1250-1450

Other areas:
1. History of Mediterranean Sea
2. History of Asia
3. Romance Philology
4. History of Medieval Art

Abstract:
The Angevin-ruled territory, in close connection with the Papacy, represents a space of crucial importance of East-West diplomatic and cultural interactions in the 13th-15th century. The conquest of the Kingdom of Sicily by Charles of Anjou (1266) entailed deep political changes in the Mediterranean, redesigning power relations. While the Angevins became kings of Jerusalem in 1277, securing their influence on the Holy Land even after the fall of Acre, the Principality of Taranto ensured Angevin hegemony on the Balkans, indulging in the dream of ruling over Constantinople. In the same period, the Mongol expansion offered unprecedented opportunities for travel and cross-cultural exposure, nurturing projects of Christian-Mongol alliance. The project, which associates historians, philologists and art historians from the Universities of Naples L'Orientale, Bologna, Chieti and Rome Sapienza, aims to produce a new comprehensive map of the cultural contacts between the Angevin space, the papacy and the East in the late Middle Ages. By integrating a wide range of sources in Eastern and Western languages and by indexing them in an online database, the group will analyze the circulation of information and patterns of representation during a momentous phase of East-West relations. The Naples unit will provide a comprehensive analytical survey of the Persian, Arabic, and Georgian sources, focusing on historiographical representations of the West. The Bologna group will analyse cultural and diplomatic relations between the papacy, the Angevins and the East, concentrating on a selection of diplomatic, historical and military treatises circulating at the papal court. The unit in Chieti will study historical and artistic relations between Southern Italy, the Balkans, and the Holy Land, demonstrating how the circulation of artistic models contributed to characterize the Kingdom of Naples as a Mediterranean region. Finally, the Rome group will analyze illuminated manuscripts, cartographic evidence and geo-ethnographic reports from Central and Southern France, Southern Italy, and Catalonia. The research will thus produce a digital survey and in-depth analysis of Eastern and Western materials, connecting disciplines that normally work separately.

Duration of the project: 17/10/2023 – 17/10/2025

Co-Principal investigator: Irene Bueno

Principal investigator: Michele Bernardini (Università di Napoli “l’Orientale”)

Partnership: Università di Napoli “l’Orientale”, Università degli Studi di Chieti-Pescara, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”

Budget of the University of Bologna: 45.539 EUR

ERC sectors:
SH5_6 History of art and architecture, arts-based research
SH5_3 Philology; text and image studies
SH6_7 Medieval history