Ortodossi nel Mediterraneo cattolico: comunità di rito greco nell'Italia del Settecento

Ortodossi nel Mediterraneo cattolico: comunità di rito greco nell'Italia del Settecento

Angela Falcetta

2014-01-26

Thesis

Ph.D. thesis

Angela Falcetta

Thesis

Italy was in the eighteenth century a region of contact between Orthodoxy and Roman Christianity. Three main factors contributed to make this region a place of particular importance for the interaction between these two cultures: the settlement of a number of old and new Greek-rite communities, the rising presence and influence of Orthodox Russia across all the Mediterranean and the extensive power of the Catholic Church exerted above all through the Congregation of Propaganda Fide and its network of missionaries. This 'Catholic Mediterranean' constitutes the terrain of investigation for my thesis.
In the first part I reconstitute the formation process of a 'western Orthodoxy' along the boundary between the Respublica christiana and the «Orthodox Commonwealth». I draw attention, in particular, to the different legal statuses of the Greek-rite Christians with respect to the ecclesiastical and civil institutions. The Orthodox migrants/settlers organized themselves in multiple institutional forms of community: in brotherhoods, in merchant 'nations' protected by a consul or in relatively autonomous administrative units. Likewise, their political statuses were various: they could be subjects of the Catholic sovereign or foreigners from Venetian or Ottoman domains. For the civil authority being a Venetian or an Ottoman subject could be more important than belonging to a confessional minority. In general, all these legal factors, as well as the interstate relationships and the complex interaction between the ecclesiastical and civil spheres, influenced the confessional status of migrants/settlers. On the informal plan, the confessional and community borders were continuously crossed and contested, so that the official taxonomies, both political and religious, failed to give order to an extremely fluid reality.
In the second part, the 'western space' of Orthodoxy is reconstituted through the analysis of the individual trajectories and the inter-community ties. The lives of the orthodox migrants/settlers appear liminal, continuously shifting between different cultures, confessions and roles. The composite and fragmented reality, in which they moved, was internally connected by a network of manifold relationships (not only commercial) and by an intense mobility. The Kingdom of Naples is the main area of observation: it was, in fact, at the centre (although not the economic centre) of the Mediterranean and the orthodox migrant and social networks as well. It was a place of landing or a crossing point not only for hundreds of Orthodox merchants, soldiers and clergymen, but also for a variety of other subjects from Republics of Ragusa, Genoa and Venice, Dalmatia and Ionian islands, Habsburg lands and Ottoman empire. So, despite strong ties among the members of 'nation' existed, they intersected a more various reality. The study of Greek merchants resident in the coastal and inland towns of the Adriatic province of the Kingdom, Terra di Bari, brings out the partiality of the model addressed by the scholars of the 'Greek commercial diaspora'. Here the Greek merchant was not only nor mainly, like this model presumes, an intermediary between the eastern Mediterranean markets and the West, embedded in a Greek 'diasporic' space. In Terra di Bari the merchants of the «Greek nation» were also involved in the local economic circuits, especially in the rural economy and in the transport and trade of grain. The merchant trust was not founded solely on the ethno-confessional bonds; the cross-cultural and inter-confessional relationships, moreover, extended beyond the sphere of trade. Above all the church, which was for a long time denied by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, was not the centre of community ties.
In the third and final part, the analysis focuses on the community’s praxis. I explore under different respects the way in which community ties were created or challenged and the forms and meanings of belonging. Comparing western and eastern Mediterranean contexts, I investigate the connection among legal forms (the church, the brotherhood, the normative statutes, etc.), the informal practices (customs, temporary associations, etc.) and the ideological representations of community by the élite. The community as a coherent and 'perennial' unit does not exist in reality, but only like an image, shaped by its leaders in order to preserve the collective rights and the legal existence of the community. In reality, instead, the community is not an insular and compact entity, but is affected by environmental, economic and social factors. Exploring the factors determining the belonging, I find that the differences – political, religious and linguistic – are not in practice expression of distinct and separate identities. In some circumstances, nevertheless, they can assume an identitarian value at the ideological and discursive levels. So, in general, I note that the 'identities' exist only as processes, mostly transient and instrumental.
In conclusion, with this work I attempted to give a more nuanced and unitary picture of the so-called Greek diaspora and the Orthodoxy in the West. The continuous crossing of borders shows the historicity of civilizations (Catholic and Orthodox) and their inner and confused movement, especially at the boundary

2016-07-06 12:42:23

2014-01-26

Padova

Ortodossi nel Mediterraneo cattolico

Ph.D. thesis

Ortodossi nel Mediterraneo cattolico: comunità di rito greco nell'Italia del Settecento

http://paduaresearch.cab.unipd.it/6385/

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