Project description
How Christian leaders adapted to a changing Islamic world
When the Islamic world took shape in the early Middle Ages, Christian communities faced profound change. Bishops were no longer backed by empire and had to navigate new political realities, shifting borders and evolving religious identities. In this context, the ERC-funded MASLAB project aims to examine how Christian leaders adapted. Drawing on sources in multiple languages, researchers are mapping the networks, decisions, and strategies bishops used to maintain authority and cohesion. Rather than viewing these communities as fixed minorities under Islamic rule, the project reveals a dynamic picture. It is one shaped by negotiation, local power and social ties. In doing so, MASLAB offers a fresh understanding of leadership and coexistence in the medieval world.
Objective
By overcoming entrenched disciplinary divides and proposing a theoretical reframing, MASLAB explores how the social, religious and political changes of the Islamic period (mid. 7th-10th c.) fashioned episcopal governance, networks and power in the Christian communities of the Near East. Relying, for the first time, on a multi-language and multi-genre corpus, MASLAB looks at the actions that bishops took and the relations and resources they mobilized in handling new socio-political and religious circumstances: the legal codification of non-Muslims’ social status; the downgrading of Christianity from imperially sponsored religion to political minority; the crystallization of intra-Christian confessional boundaries; the more fluid and federalized notion of power and territoriality.
This translates into three objectives: 1) Bringing together largely untapped material, and balancing qualitative and quantitative methods, it provides a prosopographic and topographic study of eastern Christian bishops and dioceses that has been lacking for decades. 2) It bridges disciplinary divides by executing unprecedented comparative studies on episcopal encounters with institutional power, interconfessional encounters and socio-spatial analysis of episcopal networks and governance, confronting four areas of specialism (Armenian, East Syrian, Syriac Orthodox, Coptic). 3) It articulates a novel account of episcopal leadership in the Islamic period, deconstructing the dominating communalist paradigm that sees non-Muslim groups as monolithic, state-recognized entities and reads episcopal relation with power only through the dyadic model ‘bishop-caliph’. Looking at the society in which bishops moved as a complex system of entangled elements, open to multiple internal and external impulses, MASLAB shifts emphasis from former binary paradigms to a multi-agent networks model and from a religious to a political interpretation that accounts for the socio-political variables of the Islamic rule.
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Keywords
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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00185 Roma
Italy
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