Latin Christendom Research Articles

A Local Translation in a Global World: Odoric of Pordenone, William of Solagna, and a Giant Tortoise in Fourteenth-Century Padua

ABSTRACT This article revisits one of the texts associated with the fourteenth-century spread of Franciscan mission across Eurasia, the account of the travels of Odoric of Pordenone (d.1331). Odoric's text is often mined for what it might reveal about Latin Christian perceptions of East Asia. This article argues that the local rather than the global aspects of the text should be given prominence in our assessment of his work, and greater attention paid to the process of composition and likely audience. Odoric worked with a co-author and addressed a specifically Franciscan audience in the early fourteenth-century Veneto. The central priority of the text was to convey the ‘reality’ of a distant martyrdom, in Tana, India, in the absence of tangible relics to demonstrate the truth of that martyrdom. The account highlights some of the intellectual tensions produced as a narrative of universal mission – and martyrdom – became increasingly central to Franciscan identity.

Canon Lists of Church Fathers in Early Christianity

Abstract This article examines how the names of “church fathers” were compiled into lists from the end of the fourth century to the middle of the sixth century. Although not as common as biblical canon lists, these lists of church fathers attempt to vest ecclesiastical authority in the figures listed. Surveying Greek and Latin Christian literature, it finds that there are two overarching strategies for listing church fathers: (1) linking individual fathers’ authority to their involvement in authoritative church councils; (2) compiling lists of names that are meant to be representative of the church’s antiquity and catholicity.

Multi-proxy bioarchaeological analysis ofskeletal remains shows genetic discontinuity in a Medieval Sicilian community.

The medieval period in Sicily was turbulent, involving successiveregime changes, from Byzantine (Greek Christian), Aghlabid (Sunni Muslim), Fatimid (Shī'a Muslim), to Normans and Swabians (Latin Christian). To shed new light on the localimplications of regime changes, we conducted amultidisciplinary analysis of 27 individuals buried in adjacentMuslim and Christian cemeteries at the site of Segesta,western Sicily. By combining radiocarbon dating, genome-wide sequencing, stable and radiogenic isotopic data, and archaeological records, we uncover genetic differences between the two communities but find evidence of continuity in other aspects of life. Historical and archaeological evidence shows a Muslim community was present by the 12th century during Norman governance, with the Christian settlement appearing in the 13th century under Swabian governance. ABayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates from the burials finds the abandonment of the Muslim cemetery likely occurred after the establishment of the Christian cemetery, indicating that individuals of both faiths were present in the area in the first half of the 13th century. The biomolecular results suggest the Christians remained genetically distinct from the Muslim community at Segesta while following a substantially similar diet. This study demonstrates that medieval regime changes had major impacts beyond the political core, leading to demographic changes while economic systems persisted and new social relationships emerged.

The Letters of the Ethiopian Ambassador Mateus and his Embassy to Lisbon: When Prester John Actually Ruled Ethiopia, 1509–1520

The relationship between Ethiopia and Prester John, the mythical ruler from the East searched for by the Latin Christians of Europe since the twelfth century, is long established in scholarship for the period between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. This relationship, however, appears one sided in the surviving source corpus with no reference to Prester John found in any Gǝʿǝz texts. Indeed, the Ethiopian monks at the Council of Florence in 1441 were recorded as actively rejecting such an association between this Prester John and their ruler to the Latin Christians. The absence of Gǝʿǝz sources aside, this article presents an edition and translation of four letters written in Arabic by the Ethiopian ambassador to Lisbon between 1509 and 1520, Mateus, to Dom Manuel, King of Portugal, which present him as the anbašadūr Brist Ǧuwān and pose further questions for this discussion. The letters provide examples of a counter narrative to the outright dismissal of the myth by the monks at Florence. With only one known clear proponent of each stance, and in different centuries, the discussion concerning Ethiopia's rejection of the Prester John myth may require more nuance.

Концепция души христианских учителей Ранней Церкви

The article is devoted to the teachings about the soul, which were developed in the early Christian tradition before the 4th century. There is no shortage of research on this topic, how-ever, in this article, firstly, no attempt is made to develop a uni-versal patristic teaching, but, on the contrary, an overview of the entire variety of ideas that were formed in the Early Church is give; secondly, the observation is made that the opinion ac-cepted among scientists about the unconditional adherence of Christian authors to one or the other philosophical schools are not supported by the sources. Christian writers argue with their contemporary philosophy, and at the same time rely more on the authority of St. Scriptures and the church tradition, creative-ly reworking the philosophical heritage. Christians use only the general idea of the soul, which was developed by the Greek philosophical schools. Idealistic teaching was spread among the Hellenized Jews of the Diaspora. Christian church teachers used both the «Platonic» immaterial concept of the soul, as well as the «Aristotelian» materialistic one. The author of the article concludes that the choice in favor of one or another model de-pended more on regional specifics. In those provinces of the West and East where the degree of Hellenization was higher, there is a greater attraction to Platonic idealism. On the contra-ry, in Roman North Africa, where Hellenistic culture did not spread, and as the local population as a whole tended to reli-gious literalism and materialism, typical for Punic culture, the materialistic doctrine of the soul also spread. Since it is in Ro-man Africa that Latin Christianity was born, it is in it that Christian materialism would develop. It is precisely caused by cultural specifics of the Mediterranean regions, and not by the difference in Greek and Latin languages, that is usually esti-mated as a core factor of the split between teachings of the soul in the Eastern and Western Christian thought.

S. Stefano al Monte Celio, Donnchad mac Briain and papal legates in Ireland, 1064–1203

AbstractIn 1064, Donnchad mac Briain, son of Brian Bóroma and deposed claimant to the kingship of Ireland, went on pilgrimage to Rome, where he was buried in the important basilica and martyr shrine of S. Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian Hill. More than a century later, in the transformative period 1176–1203 which followed the English conquest of Ireland, the papal legati a latere sent with full legatine authority and jurisdiction in Ireland appear to have been drawn exclusively from the church of S. Stefano. This article first considers the circumstances and symbolism of Donnchad's pilgrimage and burial, alongside its long-term impact on Hiberno-Papal relations and on the papacy's conceptions of Irish sovereignty in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It also explores the careers and missions of the cardinal priests and papal legates of S. Stefano to the peripheries of Latin Christendom in the long twelfth century, including at least one legate in Ireland, Gerard, who has hitherto awaited formal identification. Based on the legatine evidence, it suggests that in the decades of the English invasion, the papacy began using the burial site of the heir to arguably the last effective king of Ireland as part of a conscious and consistent rhetorical strategy, allowing it to dispose matters of sovereignty in Ireland.

Morisco Catechisms: Religious Incorporation and Differentiation in Early Modern Spain

In the debate over the theory and practice of the Spanish empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century, political, religious, and legal discourses differentiated conquered peoples and recent converts to Christianity from so-called “old Christians”, thereby creating distinct categories of Spanish subjects. In Spain itself, cultural markers like language, dress, and diet became the foundations of fiscal and legal differences, while normative codes were promulgated and negotiated across a range of documents, e.g., legal instruments, civic and ecclesiastical records, university debates, and juridical theory. Concomitant with this process, a set of Christian catechisms was produced in Spain, both before and after the promulgation of Tridentine reforms, that were directed especially at the converted morisco populations in Granada and Valencia. These catechisms were produced in Iberian Arabic and Romance languages and included instructions about how new converts from Islam should behave, as well as what they should believe in order to participate in liturgical activities and to be recognized as full members of the Christian community. This article examines the morisco catechisms produced in Spain between 1496 and 1566, as these documents are representative of a unique period in both the history of Latin Christianity and the burgeoning Spanish empire. Through the emergence of this corpus and against the backdrop of targeted legislation and new policies aimed at Arabic-speaking moriscos, first in Granada and later in Valencia, the ideological foundations constraining the morisco experience were forged.

The expansion of the faith: crusading on the frontiers of Latin Christendom in the High Middle Ages

The expansion of the faith: crusading on the frontiers of Latin Christendom in the High Middle Ages

The Fall of Constantinople: A Critical Analysis of Its Bearing on Islamophobia Discourse

This essay examines the fall of Constantinople in 1453 as a critical juncture for the playing out of Chrisitan-Muslim relations. Particularly, this historical moment demonstrates the significant theological schism between Orthodox and Latin Christianity that overshadowed the external threat posed by the Ottomans. The fall marked the end of the Eastern Roman Empire and highlighted the deep-rooted theological tensions within Christianity, tensions that were so profound that many Orthodox Christians preferred Ottoman rule over submission to the Latin Church. This preference stemmed from a desire to maintain theological autonomy and avoid the doctrinal compromises required by the Latin Church. The essay critically assesses the contemporary scholarship on Christian Islamophobia, arguing that it often overlooks the internal Christian divisions and portrays Christianity as a monolithic entity united against Islam. By focusing on the diverse Christian attitudes towards the Ottomans, particularly the Orthodox perspective, the essay demonstrates that the fear of theological compromise with the Latins was considered a worse fate than Muslim conquest. This analysis challenges the prevailing narratives in Islamophobia literature by highlighting the necessity of acknowledging intra-Christian tensions to fully understand the historical dynamics of Christianity and Islamophobia. Through an exploration of various Christian responses to the Ottoman threat and the subsequent establishment of the millet system, the essay advocates for a more nuanced portrayal of Christianity’s internal divisions and their impact on the construction of Christian identity and attitudes towards Islam.

Liturgical Animals in a Secular Age: On Charles Taylor and James K. A. Smith

Charles Taylor and James K. A. Smith occupy unique terrain among the many genealogists, cartographers, and mission-oriented Christian interpreters of secular modernity. By putting a methodological premium on philosophical(-theological) anthropology and on articulating the conditions—rather than simply the content—of belief in the West today, they approach and elucidate a well-trodden scholarly landscape in new ways. Taylor’s A Secular Age is a monumental, sui generis existential and phenomenological history of the West’s ever-evolving social imaginary, a history whose methodology and anthropological presuppositions merit extensive analysis (undertaken in part 1). In his Cultural Liturgies trilogy, James Smith takes queues from Taylor’s approach and proposes a highly congruous and complementary anthropology to which “liturgy” is the key. His work offers a lexical and hermeneutical toolkit for filling in explanatory gaps in Taylor’s narrative of Latin Christendom’s “secularization”; for further investigation into any particular feature, idea, or practice in said narrative; and for exegeting the numerous ritual and liturgical practices constitutive of every human life, including one’s own (part 2). Despite similar “diagnoses” of secular modernity’s malaise, the two thinkers offer meaningfully disparate remedial “prescriptions.” Part 3 articulates these differences, as they are important for theologians who are discerning the form Christian mission might take in secular modernity. Part 4 considers an apparent asymmetry between Smith’s diagnosis of contemporary Western Christianity’s ills and the correlate prescriptions he suggests the church adopt, as well as issues endemic to Taylor and Smith’s aims to reincarnate the modern, excarnated self. Taylor articulates the otherwise inarticulate and Smith unveils the pedagogical potency of the otherwise ordinary; when read together—especially with Smith as a constructively critical supplement to Taylor—their categories and analyses capacitate a more holistic understanding of what exactly it means to be—and to be the church—in a secular age.

Asking for forgiveness as an aspect of crusade

Analyses of medieval crusade have highlighted the ways in which participants expressed multifaceted martial, ecclesiastical, regional and gendered expressions of identity. Much of contemporaries’ consideration and display of ‘crusading identity’ took place far away from the battlefield. This paper examines an element of crusading identity manifest in the Kingdom of Scotland – a region that produced numerous crusaders and benefactors of the Military Orders, and yet has seldom featured as a centre-point for crusade studies. This article focuses on crusaders’ practice of settling disputes and displaying their magnanimity within their community, ahead of their departure. Using Earl Patrick II of Dunbar (d 1248) and Robert de Brus (d 1295) as case studies, the article argues that their preparations for holy war are indicative of a strong awareness of the subtleties of wider Latin Christian crusading culture among Scotland’s nobility.

When the Papal Legate Is Not Well Received

The Papacy became the supreme authority of the Latin Christianity at least at the turn of the twelfth–thirteenth centuries. Papal delegates, especially legati a latere were the “long arm” of the popes to settle and negotiate both ecclesiastical and political issues. In theory, papal representatives should have been given a warm welcome in the places where they were sent, however, as the examples in the paper show, this was by no means always the case. The paper aims to discuss this process by analysing the activities of the papal legates in the Kingdom if Hungary, the form of representation and the procedures of the negotiation (cooperation, contestation, refusal) of this authority in the context of the Hungarian Kingdom in thirteenth-fourteenth centuries.

The pope, a knight and a bishop on the edge of Christendom: the politics of exclusion in thirteenth-century Ireland

AbstractThis article provides a re-appraisal of the land dispute between the lord of Leinster, William Marshal, and the bishop of Ferns, Ailbe Ó Máelmuaid, in the 1210s. In 1215, Ailbe petitioned the pope to solve the dispute, leading to the pronouncement of an interdict and excommunication against the Marshal. It is argued that after King John of England died and the Marshal became regent of England in 1216, the papal stance towards the land dispute changed and the Marshal enjoyed favour in Rome, thus shutting the roads to redress for the bishop of Ferns. Now the most powerful man in the Plantagenet dominions, William Marshal used his position as regent to begin the policy of English discrimination against Gaelic-born bishops for episcopal sees in Ireland. This article uses this dispute as a means of exploring Ireland's position within wider Latin Christendom against the background of the papacy's crusading agenda.

:The Chronicle of an Anonymous Roman: Rome, Italy, and Latin Christendom, c. 1325–1360

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From Canonry to Monastery: Changing Observances and the Agency of the Foundation’s Community at Eleventh-Century Hasungen

Abstract Interreligious endowments in the strict sense were beyond the imagination of medieval founders and churchmen alike. Among similar phenomena, however, Latin Christendom did experience changes of monastic observances, which were often shaped as refoundations. In the late eleventh century, when monastic reform movements became increasingly important, a number of canonries (communities of secular clerics) were reorganized as monasteries. Hasungen in Hesse is an interesting case, founded and refounded by the same bishop for spiritual, political and personal reasons. This paper looks at the reaction of the former canons. By analysing charters and narrative evidence, it asks about their agency in adapting to the change of observance. Although monastic “reform” had the potential to marginalize the former canons, they not only accepted the refoundation: during the eventful first decades of the new monastery, they managed to keep alive the memory of, and connections to, the social environment which their pre-monastic community had been rooted in.

Elective Affinities: Papal and Regal Privileges for Mount Athos and the Holy Mountain’s Relationship with the Medieval West

Abstract Though the self-presentation of the Holy Mountain as a bastion of Orthodoxy and implacable foe of church union is in some respects justified, popes and western rulers in fact played an important, and not always a hostile, role in the history of Mount Athos. Some of the founding figures of Athonite monasticism had Roman connections, and there were even periods in which the monasteries of Mount Athos sought the protection of popes and potentates from the West. While Athonite archives contain numerous charters stemming from Byzantine and other Orthodox rulers, and the monasteries’ vast Ottoman holdings have received increasing attention in recent years, charters issued by Latin Christian potentates and prelates have largely been overlooked. This contribution adds new information to previous studies of the relationship of Mount Athos with the Medieval West and applies the notion of interreligious founding to the Athonite context, attempting thereby to nuance the notion that Byzantine and Latin religious patronage operated in mutually exclusive spheres, even after the so-called “Great Schism” of 1054.

What Is Christendom to Us? Making Better Sense of Christianity in Global Politics

Abstract What is Christendom in international relations? We argue that Christendom does not equate to a long-lost historical empire but an enduring imaginary of a political order where government secures the church and the church ministers to government. Such imaginaries have taken a diverse range of historical and geographical forms, which have barely been explored in International Relations (IR). They may be state-centric or decentered. As intellectual historians of the discipline have demonstrated, international relations was founded on a Christendom ontology and theology, and then rapidly forgot that fact. One major feature of this forgetting is a narrow historical conception of Christendom—its equation with Latin Christendom—in contrast with the wealth of scholarship in the humanities, which has revealed various conceptual forms and discursive practices of Christendom from at least the fourth century CE to the present. The effect of this narrowness has been to confirm IR’s historical Eurocentrism and prevent it from exploring the international politics of Eurasian, Eastern Orthodox forms of Christendom, and signs of new imaginaries of Christendom emerging in the Global South. But such neo-Christendoms—which imagine government as re-centered on the church—raise the possibility of the emergence of modern variations of the legitimized violence associated with Latin Christendom. Alternative theologies of post-Christendom—imagining the church as politically active but decentered from government—indicate that such an imaginary is contested not just beyond but within Christian theology. The paper provides a new definition of Christendom and re-evaluation of its afterlives for the study of religion and theology in international relations.

Contacts between the Cistercian Monks and the Christians of the Eastern Rite between the 12th and 13th Centuries*

Abstract The Order of Cistercians was one of the most powerful tools employed by the Apostolic See in order to impose its hierocratic vision as well as its disciplinary regime and to forge the institutional, religious coherence of Christianitas during the 12th and 13th centuries. The main objective of this paper is to bring forward a problematization concerning the Cistercians acting as a means of evangelization in the service of Ecclesia Romana in relation to Christians of the Eastern rite. In order to evaluate this hypothesis, the present article emphasises the perception of the Holy See in regard to the elements external to Latin Christianity, the nature of Cistercian obedience to the Bishop of Rome, and discusses the presence of the White Monks in mediaeval Poland, Banat and Transylvania – border regions of Christianitas where the resurgence of previous beliefs or contacts with the population of the Eastern Christianity matrix were frequent.

Matteo Ricci as an Islamicate informant. Two moments of connection in the Persian afterlives of a Latin account of China

AbstractThree centuries after the Mongol-era historian Rashid al-Din (1247–1318) wrote his influential account of China, an émigré Christian convert from Islam translated Matteo Ricci's book on China into Persian in Mughal Delhi. In doing so, he provided a remarkably detailed depiction of the rulers, religions, and regulations of the Ming empire that greatly updated, and superseded, Rashid al-Din's celebrated account. Nonetheless, by the very virtue of its triangulated origins—between China, Europe, and India; between Chinese, Latin, and Persian—this was a fraught endeavour. For Chinese cultural traditions had to be rendered into Islamicate Persian terms that were approximate equivalents for Latin Christian terms which themselves inevitably misrepresented Confucian terms that in turn provided biased depictions of Buddhist and Daoist beliefs. By looking at two moments of the transmission of Ricci into Persian—in the early modern era of manuscripts and amid the colonial ascent of Indian print—this article uses translation as a lens through which to observe both the reach and limits of the cross-cultural connections that have captivated global historians in recent decades.

Sacrifice and the limits of sovereignty 1589–1613

ABSTRACT Although sovereign power is often defined as transcending legal and religious norms, the work of historians like Prodi and Agamben has drawn our attention to the ways in which modern accounts of sovereignty depend fundamentally upon the fusion and transformation of these norms. In Latin Christendom, this process was enabled by the juridical quality of ecclesiastical authority, its expression through laws similar in form and structure to those of civil power. There was, however, an important strand of Catholic thinking from the late-sixteenth century which emphasised the centrality of sacrifice, rather than law or jurisdiction, in creating communities. For Catholic polemicists like Rossaeus (William Reynolds) sacrifice came before law and the juridical organisation of human society was secondary to the ritual and ceremonial. This article will examine the roots of this claim in post-Tridentine discussions of the Mass as a sacrifice and will go on to show how it was used to defend the primacy of the Catholic Church, particularly in 1590s France. It will consider the impact of this argument and suggest its importance in provoking new and more powerful articulations of both royal sovereignty and papal power.