ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores the presence of eastern Christians in Rome during the cardinalate of Marcello Cervini (1539–1555). This period merits particular attention, for it was during Cervini’s cardinalate that scholars and prelates in Rome were exposed to eastern Christianity in a way unprecedented in recent history. In this period Catholics in Rome received embassies from the Armenian, Jacobite and ‘Nestorian’ Churches, and developed closer contact with the community of Ethiopians settled just behind the Vatican at Santo Stefano dei Mori. Drawing on Cervini’s correspondence, this chapter shows how he created a network of Catholic Orientalists and eastern Christians in order to investigate the history and literature of the Armenian, Ethiopian, and Syrian Churches for new material in the fight against Protestantism. While some of these collaborations produced the results that Cervini had hoped for, they nonetheless had an unexpected consequence. The realisation that the eastern Churches were not as close to Rome as had been anticipated proved to be profoundly alienating for some of Cervini’s Catholic collaborators, damaging the goodwill that had guided Catholic policy towards the eastern Churches since the Council of Ferrara-Florence.
