2 - The Wasted Career of an Eastern Clergyman in Italy: Timothy Karnuk (Timoteo Agnellini), Syriac Catholic Archbishop of Mardin

Summary

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, visitors to Italy and Rome who belonged to the different Christian confessions from the Arab Middle East represented only a small proportion in relation to travellers from the states of Christian Europe. They formed none the less a significant group by virtue of their social status and their number, compared to the size of their original community.

Only a few of this already small number left a written testimony of their stay. The travelogue genre, which was very popular in early modern Europe and still alive in the Muslim written tradition, only made a timid appearance in Arab Christian literature of this period, whereas the stereotyped formula of the ‘pilgrim's guide’, in which Rome occupied a secondary place behind Jerusalem and the Sinai, survived. However, the Roman archives, and in particular the correspondence preserved at the Congregation de Propaganda Fide, partially compensate for this absence and make it possible to retrace some episodes of the lives of those who settled for a while in the capital of Catholicism, or elsewhere in Italy.

I have already mentioned those lay people, usually devoted to trade, who occasionally came to seek the protection of the Roman Church. The clergy who came to Christian Europe were far more numerous. A certain number of them looked to establish themselves permanently in Europe, and the most famous succeeded in finding a biographer. Some had successful careers in teaching and translating Eastern languages; others obtained an ecclesiastical living or casual income in exchange for offering pastoral care to Levantines in Malta, Livorno, or other Italian towns. However, an ecclesiastical prebend was nearly always inaccessible to them, while the position of Orientalist scholar remained uncertain, dependent on a patron. Therefore, the recommendation of the cardinals of the Propaganda was often necessary to obtain or keep a stable job.

The most colourful character whose existence I was able to follow through the Congregation's records is also an exemplary case, in so far as, over the course of his long life, he explored all of the options available to an Eastern ecclesiastic in Europe: he tried to make a living using his regional and linguistic skills; he engaged in trade with his compatriots; and he sought the patronage of, or a pension from, the cardinals of the Propaganda.