Religious Conflict and Mobility between Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Byzantium and the Greater Mediterranean, 700-900

• Applicant: Dr. Federico Montinaro
• Subject Area: Ancient History ; Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies ; Roman Catholic Theology ; Medieval History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 432206574

The research group intends to investigate for the first time comprehensively the link between religious conflict and the movement of people and ideas at the end of Christian antiquity in the greater Mediterranean region, including the Near East and Eastern Europe. Religious conflict is here understood as a pervasive and diverse phenomenon at different and intertwined levels which move from the center of the investigation, “orthodox” Christianity under the Patriarchate of Constantinople: inter- and intraconfessional controversy with the other patriarchates, particularly Rome and the "Melkites"; Mission; interreligious conflict between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.Religious conflict regularly triggered or accelerated in this period a series of "mobility Events": political and ecclesiastical embassies within and outside "orthodox" Christianity; the production, copy, translation and circulation of texts; forced or voluntary migration of individuals and groups; the intensification of missionary activity and the exclusion of heterodox and Jews; internal Christian reflection and exchange with the Caliphate. All these "mobility Events" were to have surprisingly positive and global cultural historical consequences for the cohesion of Mediterranean societies at the end of Antiquity.In concrete terms the research group will bring out, beside an all-embracing Synthesis (group leader), one habilitation and two doctoral theses on understudied aspects of the connection between religious conflict and mobility in the period under scrutiny as well as the first critical edition and translation of the acts of the last disputed "ecumenical" council of ancient Christianity (879-80). The synthesis will, among other things, bring together the results of the other sub-projects and produce a new cultural history of the crucial transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in the Mediterranean, with Byzantium as the main focus. Cultural and church historical phenomena such as Iconoclasm, the "first Byzantine Humanism", and the so-called "Photian Schism" are now interpreted no more as the beginning of new Medieval conditions but as the positive conclusion of wider Late Antique religious conflicts. From this perspective the relevance of the very historiographical division between Antiquity and the Middles Ages and of the notion of "Dark centuries" are questioned on a new basis.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups