Descrizione del progetto
Uno sguardo più attento al Caucaso meridionale, all’Anatolia orientale e alla Mesopotamia settentrionale tra il IX e il XIV secolo
La storia dell’Eurasia medievale è stata in qualche modo trascurata dagli storici che studiano il Medioevo a livello mondiale. Tuttavia, il Caucaso meridionale, l’Anatolia orientale e la Mesopotamia settentrionale (una regione chiamata con l’acronimo «CAM») hanno avuto un ruolo importante tra il IX e il XIV secolo, nonostante siano stati rimossi dai principali centri di potere. Il progetto ArmEn, finanziato dall’UE, farà luce su come la regione del CAM si trovasse al centro dell’espansione degli imperi eurasiatici e dei movimenti della popolazione. Passerà in rassegna un ampio corpus di fonti armene, oltre a quelle in arabo, georgiano, greco, persiano, siriano e turco. Esplorerà i luoghi e i protagonisti degli intrecci tracciando le caratteristiche condivise nella produzione testuale e artistica multilingue del CAM e correlandole alla circolazione di idee e concetti.
Obiettivo
ArmEn seeks to establish a new framework for studying the southern Caucasus, eastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia (CAM) as a space of cultural entanglements between the 9th to 14th centuries. It argues that this region is key to understanding the history of medieval Eurasia but has so far been completely neglected by the burgeoning field of Global Middle Ages. The CAM was on the crossroads of expanding Eurasian empires and population movements, but was removed from major hubs of power. Poly-centrism; political, ethno-linguistic, and religious heterogeneity; frequently shifting hegemonic hierarchies were key aspects of its, nevertheless, inter-connected landscape. This fluidity and complexity left its mark on the cultural products – textual and material – created in the CAM. ArmEn aims to trace shared features in the multi-lingual textual and artistic production of CAM and correlate them to the circulation of ideas and concepts, as well as to real-life interactions, between multiple groups, identifying the locations and agents of entanglements. The large but under-utilised body of Armenian sources to be explored together with those in Arabic, Georgian, Greek, Persian, Syriac, and Turkish, will illuminate cultural entanglements between Muslim and Christian Arabs, Byzantines, Syriac Christians, Georgians, Caucasian Albanians, Turko-Muslim dynasties, Kurds, Iranians, Western Europeans, and Mongols, that inhabited, conquered, or passed through and produced cultural goods in CAM. Evidence from manuscript illuminations and numismatics will provide a material cultural dimension to the analysis. ArmEn will create a trans-cultural vision of the CAM, bridging area studies into a unifying framework, bringing together various disciplinary approaches (philology, literary criticism, religious studies, art history, numismatics, etc.), to build a narrative synthesis in which the dynamics of cross-cultural entanglements in the CAM emerge in their spatial and temporal dimensions.
Campo scientifico
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantIstituzione ospitante
50121 Florence
Italia