RICERCA ITALIANA     

LANGUAGE, RITUALS AND SYMBOLICS OF SOVEREIGNTY FROM ARMENIA TO THE MEDITERRANEAN COASTS. CONTINUITY AND DISCONTINUITY

Università degli Studi di Bologna

Abstract

Political thought, or rather political theology, as seen from Byzantium, shows the importance which this field of research represents in our culture. As a theocratic autocracy, the Byzantine empire provided European culture with a complete model of absolute power, that is the political form against which western European culture reacted from XVIII c. up to our days, not without some nostalgia and some exotic whims, suggested by the gorgeous court ritual which surrounded the earthly life of the man appointed by God to the salvation of the world, the "theosteptos" crowned by God, not a god himself but a saint emperor who, with the words of VI c. deacon Agapetus - who Sevchenko, Cavarra and Riedinger have proposed to our reflection in the last thirty years - "in the reality of his body is like every man but as for the dignity he is a similitude of God above all ("Expositio capitum pareneticorum", 21). The "imitation of God", according to the text of the Saint Sophia deacon about 527 (chap. 1), from XV c. on will be evocated in the ottoman title of the sultan "shade of God on the earth" in the rhetorical and ideological continuity of divine majesty which for the first time in the roman world was adopted by stoicism and quoted by Seneca in his "De clementia". Transmitted by Hellenistic culture to late roman world, in the theories of Gregory of Nazianzos and of Basil of Caesarea, quoted word by word by Agapetus, this theory projected the imperial dignity into a sacral sphere of >>>

Principal Investigator

Antonio CARILE Università degli Studi di BOLOGNA

Research Objectives

The definition of the central power and of the idea of the ruler in the Mediterranean world is at the foundation of the concept of state and of the public function of rule in Europe and generally speaking in the western world.
The research about the historical premises of this idea shall be useful in order to understand the differences among these functions in the western world and in order to single out the historical peculiarity of this political form in front of other cultural traditions. The Byzantine sovereignty can supply the starting point of this historical analysis so that this form of kingship deserves to be put into perspective as for its sources, thanks to critical editions too, in its historical premises and in its post-byzantine continuity, of which the norman suevian kingdom of Sicily, by the way the first form of a centralized state in the western world, and the duchy of Venice, archetype of every oligarchical system in Europe, represent two most important paths of diffusion in Europe of the idea and of the praxis of the Byzantine monarchy. The rapport of the Byzantine kingship with the Hebrew and near east kingship is substantial in order to understand the historical and political relations with Islam.
The aim of the project is to find and to put at disposal of scholars a basic repertory which can afford terms and themes about the forms of the mediterranean kingship, in order >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

From the perspective of the a) Processes of shaping of the sacred kingship in the Mediterranean World (Carile); springs the assembling of different elements: b) The symbolism of the royalty in the Byzantine historical and literary sources in the VII-XII centuries (Spadaro); c) The Armenian kingship from Antiquity to Middle Ages: ideology and territorial spaces (Traina); d) Royalty of Byzantine tradition in the Norman Suevian Southern Italy (Burgarella). The diversity of the themes is in its reality the sum of the historical and territorial spheres in which takes shape the general theme of the research: Language, Rituals and Symbolics of Sovereignty from Armenia to the Mediterranean Coasts. Continuity and Discontinuity. The kingship in the Mediterranean world is shaped in a mosaic of elements interconnected among themselves in time and space; these elements are the components of the mental structure of the absolute power of transcendent origin which aims to improve the condition of human beings. The analysis of this structure clarifies the historical foundations of the European mentality about centralized power and about its tasks of improving if not saving the human beings.
Such aspects are largely present in the Byzantine civilization that supplied to European culture the model of the absolute power of the sovereign, who played the role of mesites intermediary between God and the people, not God himself but representative of God on earth. The >>>