Papacy, Religious Orders, and International Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Autori Vari, Massimo Carlo Giannini

• Publisher: Viella Libreria Editrice
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9788867282463
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

During the early modern age religious orders had to interpret papal strategies and directives in international politics in the light of a substantial ambiguity. They were loyal subjects of the pope, but also trusted agents and advisers of princes. They were operatives of the Holy See and, at the same time, of strategies not necessarily in line with Roman guidelines. This ambiguity resulted in conflicts, both overt and latent, between obedience to the pope and obedience to the sovereign, between membership in a universal religious order and individual «national» origins and personal ties, between observance of Roman directives and the need to maintain good relations with the authorities of the territory in which the religious orders lived and worked.This book aims to examine, through a series of case studies not only in Europe but also America and the Middle East, the roles played by religious orders in the international politics of the Holy See. It seeks to determine the extent to which the orders were mere objects or instruments; whether they were able to give life, more or less openly, to autonomous strategies, and for what reasons; and what awareness of their own identity groups or individuals developed in relation to the influences of international politics in an age of conflict.

Antal Molnár

Bosnian Franciscans between Roman Centralisation
and Balkan Confessionalisation

It may not be an exaggeration to state that Bosnia is one of the greatest and most tragic mysteries of European history. It is a puzzle politicians have not yet been able to solve and a problem that still poses challenges to historians. Essential regularities of European development cannot be applied to that historical region, or at least not without serious restrictions.

In the twelfth century Bosnia emerged as an autonomous state between East and West without having been conquered by either culture. Every impact from both regions was transformed and combined by Bosnia with an unpredictable logic of its own, often resulting in a distorted end product. Under the Ottoman Empire three ethno-cultural entities separated by religion appeared in Bosnia: Catholics, with their roots in the Middle Ages, the Orthodox, settling after the Ottoman invasion, and the Muslims, emerging with Islamisation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These religious groups stood out in sharp contrast to each other on the level of elite culture but were intertwined in popular culture. They developed into autonomous nations in the nineteenth century. While Catholics joined the Croatian national revival, the Orthodox chose the Serbian rebirth, thus creating the Bosnian Croatian and Serbian ethnic groups. The Muslims connected their ethnogenesis to the Islamisation of Bosnian heretics and formed their own Bosnian identity. Consequently, tendencies for both separatism and cohesion were witnessed at the same time in the territory of Bosnia, which rendered impossible the application of the logic of European nation states to this country.641

The aim of the present study is to examine one component of this difficult and puzzling process: the presence of the Franciscans in Bosnia. The Franciscan Order, the only institution in Bosnia existing continuously since the end of the thirteenth century, is a bridge connecting the Middle Ages and the Ottoman era to our times, a bridge between Bosnia and western culture. During its 700-year existence even the Franciscan Order could not shake off the impact of the Bosnian land that transformed everything according to its own laws. It took major compromises and a long process of accommodation for the Franciscan mission to gather enough strength to gain all the ecclesiastical functions of the medieval Bosnian state, to survive the Ottoman invasion, and to become the strongest Catholic institution of the Balkan peninsula.642 Thus, the history of the Franciscans in Bosnia has an importance beyond itself: apart from what it teaches us about Church and cultural history, it helps illuminate the development of the entity of Bosnia itself.

To reveal the specific features of Catholic/Franciscan confessionalisation in Bosnia it is not enough to examine its development only in the early modern period; by the sixteenth century the Franciscan province in Bosnia had suffered severe distortions as to the ideals of Rome, which determined the tendencies of its later development. To demonstrate this, I will present an outline of the major characteristics of the development of the me...

Table of contents

• Copertina
• Occhiello
• Frontespizio
• Colophon
• Massimo Carlo Giannini, Introduction
• Boris Jeanne, The Franciscans of Mexico.Tracing Tensions between Rome and Madridin the provincia del Santo Evangelio (1454-1622)
• Benoist Pierre, Religious, the Pope, and the Kings of Franceduring the Wars of Religion
• Esther Jiménez Pablo, The Evolution of the Society of Jesusduring the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries:an Order that Favoured the Papacy or the Hispanic Monarchy?
• Aurélien Girard, Impossible Independence or Necessary Dependency?Missionaries in the Near East, the “Protection”of the Catholic States, and the Roman Arbitrator*
• Massimo Carlo Giannini, Three General Masters for the Dominican Order:The Ridolfi Affaire between International Politicsand Faction Struggle at the Papal Court (1642-1644)*
• Ignasi Fernandez Terricabras, Surviving between Spain and France:Religious Orders and the Papacy in Catalonia (1640-1659)*
• Tomas Parma, “Bishops Are not Necessary for Reform.”Religious Orders in the Catholic Reconquistaof Bohemia and Moravia: Two Case Studies*
• Gaetano Platania, Two Religious Orders in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Poland: The Jesuits and the Arrival of the Capuchin Friars
• Antal Molnar, Bosnian Franciscans between Roman Centralisationand Balkan Confessionalisation