A Tale of Two Cities (and Three Men): Armenians in Rome and Ancona, 1565-1590

In the last few decades, the history of Eastern Christians in the early modern age has become the object of renewed interest. Their ambiguous position between different worlds and cultures has made them excellent subjects for investigation by researchers interested in intercultural contact and exchange. The study of their presence and circulation in Western Europe has so far consisted mainly of two distinct approaches: one privileging the community dimension, and concentrating on the settlement of merchants and sailors of a given nation in a specific city; the other one focusing on the biographical paths of individuals best known for their ecclesiastical or cultural career, such as scholars in the service of Roman congregations or Italian princely courts. In both cases the focus has been on mobility driven either by economic or diplomatic reasons, and the actors were either merchants engaged in cross-cultural trade, or high-ranking individuals and men of culture who engaged directly with popes and sovereigns. In my paper, I will combine these two approaches together, by describing the modalities of settlement of the Armenians in two cities that reflect these two types of mobility, respectively Ancona and Rome. The commercial attractiveness of the former is well represented by the figure of the wealthy Armenian merchant Giorgio Morato, who wanted to manifest his Catholic faith and attachment to his origins by sponsoring a pictorial program in the churches of the city (1559-1570). The diplomatic and cultural centrality of Rome is instead embodied by the figure of Sultanšah T‘oxat‘ec‘i, better known as Marcantonio Abagaro, son of the ambassador of the head of the Armenian Church to the pope, who later also became interpreter, translator and printer on behalf of the Roman Curia (1564-1593). The two poles presented so far came into contact thanks to the representative of a third, main vector of circulation, involving primarily a religious dimension: Giulio Antonio Santoro, cardinal of Santa Severina, used in fact Morato’s money and Marcantonio Abagaro’s work to erect a church and hospice for the Armenians in Ancona (1580), on the model of the one established a few years before in Rome, which fell under his patronage, too. His motivation was certainly not to enrich the cities of the papal state with foreign capital, but rather to attract a conspicuous number of Eastern pilgrims and ecclesiastics, make them profess the Catholic faith, and then send them back home to bear witness to their new creed. By comparing the common features and different developments of the Armenian hospices in Rome and Ancona, this paper intends to sparkle a reflection on the peculiar features of early modern Catholic ‘confessional mobility’, and its relationship with the other channels of mobility in the early modern Mediterranean