Il Papato e (l'altro) Impero: trattare la particolarità ispanica (secoli XI- XIII)

GIOVANNI COLLAMATI

On Friday 1 December, the third appointment of the permanent seminar on the History of the Papacy will be held. Giovanni Collamati, from the Universidad CEU San Pablo in Madrid, will present a talk entitled The Papacy and (the other) Empire: dealing with the Hispanic peculiarity (12th-13th centuries). The scholar will illustrate the ways in which the Papacy related to the imperio astur-leones or imperio hispanico, whose sovereigns used to bear an imperial title between the 11th and 12th centuries, precisely in the years of fiercest conflict with the Holy Roman Empire. To this end, the paper will focus on the analysis of papal documents addressed to the two Spanish re-emperors, Alfonso VI and Alfonso VII; special attention will be given to the intitulationes employed by the papal chancery to describe the authority of the monarchs and how the Hispanics themselves left a record of these relations in their chronicles. The study will then consider the 13th century, when the Leonese chancellery abandoned the use of the imperial title, but one sovereign in particular, Alfonso X of Castile and León, decided to compete for the imperial crown (this time that of the Caesars). Again, the role played by the papacy would be crucial in marking the failure of the Alphonsine project.