Associated investigator Research unit Sapienza Università di Roma - Prin 2023 The Angevin World, the Papacy, and the East: 1250-1450 (Prot. 202223C3X9)

The Angevin-ruled territory (central and southern France, southern Italy, Hungary, Balkans, Morea), 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. The Angevins became kings of Jerusalem in 1277, securing their influence on the Holy Land even after the fall of Acre. Moreover, the Principality of Taranto ensured Angevin hegemony on the Balkans, indulging in the dream of ruling over Constantinople. In addition, the Mongol expansion offered unprecedented opportunities for travel and cross-cultural exposure, nurturing projects of Christian-Mongol alliance. The project, which associates art 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 visual and textual sources in Eastern and Western languages and by indexing them in an online database addressed to scholars and to the general public, the group seeks to analyze the processes of transmission, borrowing, and cross-dissemination which characterized 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, Turkish, Georgian and Armenian 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 the geo-ethnographic and historical information available in Avignon. 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 travelers’ reports from Central and Southern France, Southern Italy, and Catalonia and will shed light together with the Bologna unit on the significant role of the of the Avignon court’s eastern connections from the points of view of history, romance philology and history of illumination. With an original focus on the Angevin world, the research will thus produce a new digital survey and in-depth analysis of Eastern and Western materials, connecting disciplines that normally work separately: Islamic and Caucasian studies, medieval history, art history, romance philology, manuscript studies and history of cartography. The results will be of interest to a broad scholarly audience and will be shared with the general public via targeted events.