You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled “A Silent Government: Mediterranean Conditions of Imperial and Ecclesiological Authority in the Sixteenth Century between Curial Rome, Ottoman Empire, and Spanish Monarchy” organized by the Department of History.
Date: 04 June 2024, Tuesday
Time: 16.30
Avenue: A-130 Seminar Room
Title: A Silent Government: Mediterranean Conditions of Imperial and Ecclesiological Authority in the Sixteenth Century between Curial Rome, Ottoman Empire, and Spanish Monarchy
Speaker: Dr. Filip Malesevic, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Abstract:
After the Dominican theologian and philosopher Tommaso Campanella, who had been denounced by the Roman Holy Office of the Inquisition for his heterodox theological thought and astrological speculations and had subsequently been arrested in Padua by Inquisitorial officials, was liberated from his confinement in a convent in 1597, he started drafting his Monarchia di Spagna (“Spanish Monarchy), displaying a particular enthusiasm for contemporary political developments as well as for the substantial growth of the literary raison d’état (“reason of state”) tradition. Similarly to Giovanni Botero’s political thought, Campanella presented in his discourse a defense of a political thought on the foundations of a doctrinal confutation of Macchiavellianism by advancing the cause of Christianity against the Ottoman Empire by recommending to the King of Spain, Philipp II, to imitate the Sultan in establishing seminaries for soldiers in his own territories, where the military arts as well as a proper religious education were to be taught. Campanella’s program of “making the world Spanish” (spagnolare il mondo), however, not only advanced a certain constitutional awareness for adopting political strategies that emerged with the Ottoman Empire, but also revitalized a program of theological thought that had been conditioned by the cognizance of the shifting geopolitical circumstances in the Mediterranean since the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Te following talk aims at presenting how the political thought of ecclesiastical government was generated from the collision of the distinct types for administering imperial and ecclesiastical authority in the Mediterranean of the sixteenth century. It proposes to consider a political thought that had started to considerably be developed by theological scholars since the early sixteenth century, sensible to the challenges of Spanish as well as Roman political supremacy in the Mediterranean with the advent of the Ottoman Empire, but which remained in the background of the major political incidents, silently readjusting the main constituents of political authority.
Bio:
Dr Filip Malesevic is currently Junior Research and Teaching Associate at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He received the “Habilitation” from the University of Fribourg this year, and holds his PhD from Fribourg and his MA in History from the University of Basel. He has previously taught at the Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Bern, Switzerland. His research interests focus on early modern ecclesiastical history, with special reference to the Papacy, and he has published a number of monographs (in both English and German) as well as numerous articles and book-chapters.