Project description
Mount Athos connections in the Middle Ages
A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mount Athos has been inhabited for over 1 000 years only by monks (women and female animals are forbidden from entering). For the first time, researchers will analyse the role the monastic communities on Mount Athos played in the medieval society of the Eastern Mediterranean. The EU-funded MAMEMS project will study how this monastic republic was intimately connected with the Byzantine Empire, the Orthodox principalities of the Balkans and Caucasus, South Italy, as well as the Ottoman Empire. The project will draw on a database containing information about every monk to have ever resided on the Holy Mountain, as well as every Athonite benefactor and each visitor between 850 and 1550.
Objective
MAMEMS will constitute the first comprehensive examination of the monastic communities of Mount Athos as independent actors in medieval Eastern Mediterranean Society. This “monastic republic” was intimately connected with the Byzantine Empire, the various Orthodox principalities of the Balkans and Caucasus, South Italy, as well with the Ottoman Empire. By taking advantage of considerable advances in subfields like prosopography, analyzing and making available a set of sources (lists of commemoration) that are either poorly studied or unedited, and by bringing together an interdisciplinary team (a Byzantinist, Slavicist annd Kartvelologist) under the direction of the PI, MAMEMS will transform the way the Holy Mountain is viewed within scholarship and the general public via a triad of leitmotifs: wealth, ethnicity and gender (WEG). The exploration of these topics will be undergirded by the creation of a prosopographical database, Prosopographika Athonika, containing entries for every monk to have resided on the Holy Mountain, every Athonite benefactor and every person to have visited there from ca. 850 to 1550, that is from the time of the first surviving documents in the Athonite archives until the founding of the last of the major Athonite houses, Stavronikita. This database will finally allow a concrete analysis of how medieval Mount Athos was embedded within wider networks of economic interests, church leadership, intellectual exchange and patronage.
Fields of science
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
55122 Mainz
Germany