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The Greek-Rite Minority in the Seventeenth-Century Kingdom of Naples: The Case of the Albanians of Barile

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2026

Francesca Vera Romano
Francesca Vera Romano*
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza , Italy
*
Email: francescavera.romano@uniroma1.it
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Abstract

This article examines how the Greek-rite Albanian community of Barile, in the seventeenth-century Kingdom of Naples, negotiated the pressures of post-Tridentine religious reform while preserving elements of its ritual and social identity. In the aftermath of the Council of Trent, ecclesiastical authorities – particularly bishops and inquisitors – sought to regulate devotional life by suppressing practices classified as “superstitious.” These policies were gradually extended to Eastern Christian communities, which had previously enjoyed a degree of liturgical autonomy within the Kingdom of Naples. Focusing on the confrontation between Bishop Deodato Scaglia and the Greek community of Barile, this article explores how local actors responded to increasing pressure to conform to the Latin rite. Drawing on episcopal reports, inquisitorial correspondence, synodal decrees, and documents from the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, the study identifies four recurring patterns of adaptation: control of sacred space, intermarriage, factional organization, and diplomatic negotiation. It argues that practices labeled “superstitions” functioned not only as objects of repression but also as mechanisms through which the community articulated collective identity and negotiated confessional boundaries, showing that post-Tridentine reform operated through continuous negotiation rather than unilateral imposition.

Keywords

Kingdom of NaplesGreek-rite minoritydevotional practicesepiscopal jurisdictiondiplomacycultural resilience

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Type
Research Article
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Church History , First View , pp. 1 - 19
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society of Church History

I. Introduction

Early modern Catholicism was not a uniform religious landscape. Even within territories formally subject to Rome, communities differed in language, liturgy, devotional customs, and jurisdictional traditions. The post-Tridentine Church sought to clarify doctrine and discipline, but the implementation of reform depended on local circumstances and on the institutions responsible for enforcing ecclesiastical norms.Footnote 1 This article examines one such case: the Greek-rite Albanian community of Barile, in the Diocese of Melfi, in the seventeenth-century Kingdom of Naples. By “Greek rite,” this article refers to Catholic communities that remained obedient to the Roman Church while preserving liturgical and sacramental traditions associated with the Byzantine tradition. In practical terms, this meant a liturgy celebrated in Greek rather than Latin, the use of leavened rather than unleavened bread in the Eucharist, the conferral of confirmation immediately after baptism by the parish priest rather than reserving it to the bishop, and a married secular clergy. These communities were therefore not Orthodox in a formal jurisdictional sense, but neither did they conform to the Latin rite that dominated most dioceses in southern Italy. Their position created a zone of ambiguity.

To Roman and episcopal authorities, the Greek rite could be tolerated as long as it remained doctrinally Catholic and institutionally obedient. Yet it could also become suspect when local customs, sacramental practices, or forms of popular devotion appeared to diverge from post-Tridentine expectations.Footnote 2 The institutional framework was equally complex. In early modern Rome, papal congregations were permanent or semi-permanent administrative bodies through which the papacy governed specific areas of doctrine, discipline, mission, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The Holy Office supervised matters of faith and heresy, while the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, founded in 1622, assumed increasing responsibility for missionary territories and for communities considered religiously marginal or in need of special oversight. In practice, their jurisdictions could overlap. The case of Barile shows how these institutions did not always operate according to a single logic: episcopal zeal, inquisitorial suspicion, and Roman pragmatism could coexist uneasily within the same controversy.Footnote 3

This article builds on scholarship that has reinterpreted Tridentine reform not as the imposition of uniformity but as a process of institutional consolidation and local implementation, particularly John W. O’Malley’s account of reform as clarification, governance, and pastoral discipline, and the work of Christopher F. Black and Aron-Beller on the relationship between the Roman Inquisition’s center and its peripheries. Carlo Ginzburg’s work on early modern popular belief offers a methodological warning central to this study: sources produced by inquisitors or bishops filter popular practice through ecclesiastical expectations rather than recording it transparently.Footnote 4 The article also draws on recent work on Roman congregations and the government of religious diversity, notably Pamela Long and Nelson Minnich on how Roman institutions translated local problems into administrative decisions, and Robert John Clines and Niccolò Fattori, whose work on the eastern Christian world situates Barile within a wider Mediterranean problem of Catholic diversity rather than as an isolated curiosity.Footnote 5

My central argument is that accusations of “superstition” against the Greek-rite Albanians of Barile were not merely generic criticisms of popular religion. Rather, they functioned as a disciplinary language through which ecclesiastical authorities sought to transform ritual difference into a problem of orthodoxy and jurisdiction. Practices associated with childbirth, marriage, divination, funerary rites, or sacred space became significant because they were interpreted as evidence that the Greek rite itself was unstable, corrupted, or insufficiently subject to Roman norms. At the same time, the Greek-Albanian community did not simply resist or submit. Its members responded through recurring behavioral patterns: negotiating control over sacred space, forming mixed marriages and kinship ties, mobilizing factional identities, and appealing to Roman institutions such as Propaganda Fide. These actions reveal a process of negotiated resilience, in which local actors sought to preserve elements of their ritual identity while remaining within the framework of Catholic obedience. This article proceeds as follows. It first reconstructs the historical and institutional context of Albanian migration and Tridentine reform in the Kingdom of Naples, then examines the category of superstition before turning to Bishop Scaglia’s reports of 1627 and 1634, the behavioral patterns through which Barile’s Greek community negotiated ecclesiastical pressure, and Scaglia’s synod of 1635.

II. The Historical Context

The Greek-rite Albanian communities of the Kingdom of Naples originated in the broader context of Ottoman expansion in the Balkans during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The Ottoman advance, especially after the death of George Castriota Skanderbeg, contributed to successive waves of migration from Albania and other Balkan territories toward southern Italy, coinciding with the demographic needs of the Kingdom of Naples, which was affected by depopulation and rural decline since the late Middle Ages.Footnote 6 Albanian refugees were therefore welcomed by both royal authorities and local feudal lords, who saw in their arrival an opportunity to repopulate abandoned or weakened settlements. This migration unfolded over several centuries and involved multiple waves: the first followed the fall of Scutari in 1479, a second the fall of Corone in 1532, and a third the occupation of Maina in the mid-seventeenth century. These movements contributed to the formation of Albanian settlements across southern Italy, including the area of Mount Vulture, within the Diocese of Melfi, where the Albanians became vassals of the Prince of Torella, Lord of Melfi and Barile, and founded or repopulated hamlets including Barile, Ginestra, and Arenigo. Along with their language and social customs, they preserved their religious traditions, especially the Catholic Greek rite, which distinguished them from the surrounding Latin population while still placing them formally within the jurisdiction of the Roman Church.

The coexistence of Greek-rite and Latin communities created a complex ecclesiastical situation. Local bishops were increasingly expected to implement the disciplinary and liturgical norms associated with post-Tridentine reform, yet Greek-rite communities possessed privileges and traditions that complicated straightforward Latinization. In the Diocese of Melfi, this tension was already visible in the late sixteenth century. The first significant episcopal testimony comes from Gaspare Cenci, bishop of Melfi from 1574 to 1590, whose Relationes ad limina of March 26, 1590, noted that the Albanians of Barile professed the Greek rite while also reporting that “the more serious superstitions have been abolished and completely abandoned.”Footnote 7 This statement both confirms the persistence of the Greek rite in Barile at the end of the sixteenth century and shows that episcopal authorities were already interpreting Greek-rite religious life through the category of superstition. The conflict intensified in the first half of the seventeenth century, when Bishop Deodato Scaglia attempted to bring the Greek-Albanian population of Barile more firmly under Latin ecclesiastical norms. The confrontation that followed involved not liturgy alone but questions of jurisdiction, sacramental practice, devotional custom, social identity, and the authority of Roman congregations: Barile thus became a local setting in which broader post-Tridentine tensions between discipline and religious diversity became visible.

III. The Council of Trent and the Greek-Rite Minorities in the Kingdom of Naples

The Council of Trent reshaped the ways in which ecclesiastical authorities sought to regulate local religious practice. Its decrees did not simply impose uniformity from above; rather, they strengthened the role of bishops as agents of pastoral reform, doctrinal supervision, and liturgical discipline, establishing new standards for the regulation of religious life at the diocesan level, especially in communities whose practices appeared irregular or insufficiently aligned with Roman norms.Footnote 8 This process had significant consequences for Greek-rite communities in southern Italy. Before the second half of the sixteenth century, these communities had enjoyed a degree of autonomy, supported by earlier papal privileges issued by Leo X in 1521 and Paul III in 1536, remaining within the obedience of the Roman Church while preserving liturgical and sacramental traditions associated with the Byzantine rite. After Trent, however, such autonomy became increasingly difficult to reconcile with the growing emphasis on episcopal oversight, sacramental discipline, and doctrinal conformity. A decisive turning point came with the bull issued by Pius IV in 1564, which authorized Latin ordinaries to intervene in the customs, rites, and liturgical practices of Greek communities. This did not immediately abolish the Greek rite, but gave bishops a stronger basis for correcting practices they considered abusive, irregular, or doctrinally dangerous: the Greek rite could continue to be tolerated, but only insofar as it remained compatible with Roman Catholic orthodoxy and subject to episcopal supervision.Footnote 9

In the Kingdom of Naples, despite the presence of a nuncio and of ministers delegated from Rome, bishops retained significant authority in matters of religious discipline, conducting inquiries concerning faith within the framework of criminal and civil justice, with jurisdiction extending to cases involving heresy, superstition, and the abuse of the sacraments.Footnote 10 The Holy Office also played an important role in shaping Roman attitudes toward the Greek rite: for some Roman officials, including Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santoro, Greek liturgical difference could appear as a possible vehicle of doctrinal error, especially when associated with forms of popular devotion judged to be superstitious. The issue was therefore not simply whether Greek-rite communities were formally Catholic, but whether their rites, clergy, and sacramental practices could be reliably brought within the disciplinary structures of the post-Tridentine Church.Footnote 11

In 1573, the papacy created the Congregation for the Greeks, reflecting the need to address Greek-rite communities through specific institutional mechanisms. In 1595, Clement VIII issued the Per brevis instructio super aliquibus ritibus Graecorum ad RR. PP. DD. Episcopos Latinos, in quorum civitatibus vel dioecesibus Graeci vel Albanenses Graeco ritu viventes degunt, which allowed Greek-Albanian communities to maintain their rite, provided that they remained obedient to Rome and accepted Catholic doctrine. These measures reveal the ambivalence of Roman policy: Greek liturgical traditions were not rejected outright, but were increasingly subjected to correction, clarification, and control.Footnote 12 The foundation of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide in 1622 further altered the institutional landscape. Although created primarily to oversee missionary activity, it soon became involved in the supervision of religious minorities considered insufficiently integrated into Latin Catholic structures. Its approach was often more pragmatic than that of the Holy Office, since it had to balance doctrinal concerns with pastoral, diplomatic, and administrative considerations.Footnote 13

In practice, these overlapping jurisdictions produced a particularly complex situation. The Roman Inquisition did not exercise the same direct institutional presence in the Kingdom of Naples as it did in other Italian territories, and bishops played a central role in identifying and correcting religious deviance, acting not only as pastors but also as disciplinary authorities responsible for supervising sacramental practice, combating heresy, and regulating local devotional life – a role especially important in dioceses that contained Greek-rite minorities.Footnote 14 The case of Barile must be understood within this institutional framework. The conflict between Bishop Deodato Scaglia and the Greek-Albanian community reflected a broader post-Tridentine problem: how far could ritual diversity be tolerated within Catholic obedience, and when did such diversity become a sign of disorder, superstition, or doctrinal danger? This question forms the basis for the following section, which examines the category of superstition as a key instrument of ecclesiastical interpretation and control.

IV. The Problem of Superstition

The difficulty of defining “superstition” in early modern Europe has long been emphasized in the historiography. As Euan Cameron has shown, the term did not denote a fixed set of practices, but a flexible and polemical category used to classify beliefs and rituals perceived as deviant or improperly religious.Footnote 15 Carlo Ginzburg’s work on inquisitorial sources has similarly shown that categories such as magic and superstition were often shaped by judicial and ecclesiastical frameworks rather than reflecting coherent systems of popular belief.Footnote 16 Superstition thus functioned less as a stable concept than as a tool through which ecclesiastical authorities interpreted and regulated religious behavior. From a theological perspective, superstition was traditionally understood as a sin against religion, encompassing both illicit ritual practices and improper uses of legitimate ones. Yet, as David Gentilcore has demonstrated for southern Italy, the boundaries between orthodoxy and superstition were often blurred in everyday practice: healing rituals, protective charms, and popular devotion frequently operated within a shared symbolic universe in which the sacred and the practical coexisted.Footnote 17 This ambiguity made superstition a useful category for ecclesiastical intervention, allowing authorities to group a wide range of behaviors under a single framework of moral and doctrinal correction.

The roots of this category can be traced to late medieval and early sixteenth-century reform discourse. In the Libellus ad Leonem X, presented during the Fifth Lateran Council, superstition was identified, alongside ignorance, as one of the principal problems affecting Christian society. The document framed both as the idolatrous practices attributed to non-European populations and as the persistence of improper rituals within Christendom itself – a parallel between external and internal forms of religious deviance that remained important in early modern Catholic thought, linking missionary activity abroad with confessional discipline within Europe.Footnote 18 Within the post-Tridentine Church, superstition acquired an increasingly juridical dimension. As Christopher Black has argued, inquisitorial practice did not treat superstition as a clearly defined crime, but as a fluid area of suspicion overlapping with heresy, sacramental abuse, and magical activity.Footnote 19 In many tribunals, particularly those of the Roman Inquisition, superstition rarely appeared as an autonomous offense, but as a point of convergence for a range of illicit practices; the bull Coeli et terrae creator, issued by Sixtus V in 1586, reinforced this tendency by explicitly associating magical and divinatory practices with heresy.Footnote 20

In the Kingdom of Naples, this conceptual fluidity was especially visible. As judicial and pastoral authorities sought to impose Tridentine norms, superstition became a key category through which local religious practices were evaluated and, when necessary, condemned. Yet such practices were deeply embedded in the social and cultural life of rural communities, where they fulfilled functions related to health, protection, fertility, and the management of uncertainty, and were often intertwined with Catholic devotional life rather than opposed to it, drawing on sacramental objects, prayers, images, and clerical authority.Footnote 21 This ambiguity is particularly important in the case of the Greek-rite Albanians, where accusations of superstition were tied to the perceived alterity of the rite itself. The coexistence of Byzantine liturgical elements with local customs made the Greek rite difficult to classify within post-Tridentine categories of orthodoxy. Consequently, the charge of superstition functioned not merely as a critique of popular religion, but as a means of delegitimizing a confessional identity situated at the margins of Latin Catholicism.

At the same time, the persistence of such practices cannot be understood simply as resistance. Following Ginzburg’s methodological caution, episcopal and inquisitorial sources must be read as mediated records: they preserve traces of local practices, but also reshape those practices through the interpretive categories of ecclesiastical authority.Footnote 22 In rural contexts, moreover, the Church itself had long accommodated certain local customs by incorporating them into Christian ritual frameworks rather than attempting their complete eradication.Footnote 23 In this perspective, superstition emerges as a relational category, produced through the interaction between ecclesiastical norms and local practices. Its meaning was not fixed, but shifted according to context, institutional priorities, and the actors involved. This also means that the practices cataloged in Scaglia’s reports cannot be taken at face value as accurate ethnographic descriptions: some may reflect genuine customs, others distortions or projections shaped by the bishop’s expectations. The historian’s task is therefore not to recover a pristine popular culture behind the sources, but to read them as evidence of a contested encounter, in which the practices of the community and the interpretive framework of the bishop both left their traces. In the case of Barile, as the following sections will demonstrate, the label of superstition became a crucial instrument in the confrontation between episcopal authority and the Greek-rite community.

V. Bishop Scaglia’s Reports on the Greek Minority of Barile (1627–1634)

In 1627, Bishop Deodato Scaglia sent a letter to the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office – where his uncle, Cardinal Desiderio Scaglia, held a prominent position – in which he denounced the Greek minority of Barile for professing what he described as a completely fabricated rite, filled with superstitions that, in his view, risked spreading heresy among the Latin population.Footnote 24 According to the bishop, the principal cause of this deviation was the ignorance of both the Greek clergy and their congregations. In contrast, the Greek archpriest of Barile, Don Dimitro Aranitis, who had been educated at the Greek College in Rome, was determined to lead his parishioners toward the Latin rite. Consequently, Bishop Scaglia relied on him as an intermediary, commissioning him to document in detail all the errors, abuses, and superstitions practiced by his community. Based on Aranitis’s reports, Scaglia compiled a memorandum annexed to his letter to the Holy Office.

The note began with observations about baptism, describing several customs surrounding childbirth and baptism among the Greeks. When a son was born, for instance, the mother’s relatives would take the newborn outside the house and walk around it three times to ward off evil influences. Before baptism, the baby was taken to a crossroads, where the first passerby would be asked to serve as godfather, and it was believed that if someone requested fire from the household after a birth, it should not be granted, as doing so might bring misfortune. Further rituals included the blessing of the mother, thought to be most effective on Wednesdays; women present at childbirth were forbidden to enter the church until a priest had blessed them at home. After baptism, the godfather would cut four strands of the baby’s hair, placing them beneath an image of St. John the Baptist as a token of the baptism, and it was customary to change the baby’s name in the hope of prolonging its life.

The memorandum proceeded with an examination of the administration of the Eucharist and the institution of marriage within the Greek community of Barile. According to Scaglia’s account, Greek priests conferred the Sacrament of the Eucharist upon infants before they had reached the age of reason, and it was widely believed that the efficacy of the sacrament could be compromised if the communicant approached the altar wearing an unclean garment. The bishop also reported several matrimonial customs that he regarded as deviations from Catholic orthodoxy. Prior to the formal conclusion of a marriage agreement, it was customary for the groom to present a fragment of his sock to a woman reputed for her ritual skills, who performed ceremonies intended to secure prosperity and fertility for the union, for which she was remunerated. During the wedding procession, the couple would throw pomegranates with the left hand as an auspicious gesture for male progeny, and after receiving Communion the groom would step upon the bride’s left foot – an act believed to avert the superstition that the wife would predecease her husband. Once at their home, the bride was required to pass three times beneath her husband’s knees as a sign of submission, and it was also considered inauspicious to contract marriage during the month of May.Footnote 25 For Scaglia, these practices constituted a serious “abuse of the sacraments,” among the gravest forms of superstition according to both Thomas Aquinas and Cardinal Gaetano (Tommaso de Vio), who, in his 1518 commentary on the Summa Theologiae, addressed the theological and juridical dimensions of superstition within Christian doctrine.Footnote 26

According to Don Dimitro Aranitis’s report, the administration of baptism, the Eucharist, and marriage among the Greek minority of Barile was permeated with superstition. Aranitis also addressed the practice of dream interpretation (divinatio), which, as he noted, was widely employed by the Greeks of Barile. This practice had been explicitly condemned by Pope Sixtus V in his bull Coeli et terrae creator (1586), which classified superstition, magic, astrology, and divination as forms of heresy. Dream interpretation occupied a prominent place in the community’s religious life and was regularly used to predict the fate of absent relatives: losing a tooth or an eye in a dream, for example, was read as a premonition of a relative’s death, and women performed rituals intended to induce prophetic dreams about matters that concerned them. Other divinatory practices relied on everyday objects and actions. Walking around the house with covered ears was believed to draw favorable or unfavorable omens from chance encounters with passersby. Leaving a mixture of yeast and flour overnight, and reading its rise or stagnation as a sign of a distant relative’s health or death, served a similar purpose, as did consulting women known for skill in divination, who were paid for reading omens in broad beans and who occupied an ambiguous but respected position in the community.Footnote 27

Rather than treating these customs as isolated phenomena, Scaglia’s report reveals a coherent system of meaning in which sacramental life, domestic ritual, and divinatory practices were closely connected. In this respect, the practices he denounced as “superstitions” can be read, following Carlo Ginzburg’s work on popular culture, as part of a wider system of belief combining elements of learned religion, local tradition, and empirical knowledge.Footnote 28 Paradoxically, the bishop’s own thoroughness in cataloging these gestures preserves evidence of that underlying logic, which can be reconstructed from details he intended only as proof of deviation.Footnote 29 This apparent coherence made such practices suspect to ecclesiastical authorities, who interpreted them not as isolated customs but as signs of a broader religious disorder.

As Christopher Black has shown, early modern inquisitorial culture tended to conflate heterodoxy, popular religion, and superstition within a single interpretative framework, thereby extending its jurisdiction beyond formal heresy into the regulation of everyday belief and practice.Footnote 30 In this sense, the Barile memorandum exemplifies the transformation of pastoral observation into judicial evidence: a process through which local ritual practices were redefined as doctrinal deviations, and the category of superstition thus functioned not only as a descriptive label but as a disciplinary instrument, enabling the bishop to translate cultural difference into theological error. One year later, in 1628, Bishop Deodato Scaglia, in his Relationes ad limina to the cardinals of the Sacred Congregation of the Council, asserted that the population of Barile had already embraced the Latin rite.Footnote 31 In reality, as the documents examined below demonstrate, this claim was far from accurate.

Since 1622, the supervision of Catholic Greek communities had been entrusted to the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide, whose approach was generally more flexible than that of the Holy Office. In 1627, Bishop Deodato Scaglia had already appealed to the Holy Office – and particularly to his influential uncle, Cardinal Desiderio Scaglia – seeking guidance on how to address what he perceived as abuses within the Greek rite. Despite this earlier attempt, and unable to eradicate what he regarded as a flawed rite, in 1634 he composed a report entitled Relatione degli errori, et abusi dei Greci nel Regno di Napoli, e particolarmente nel Casale di Barile (“Report on the Errors and Abuses of the Greeks in the Kingdom of Naples and Particularly in the Hamlet of Barile”).Footnote 32 Addressed to the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide and to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the document sought to obtain a definitive resolution to the conflict. To justify his determination to convert the Greeks to the Latin rite, Scaglia drew upon a precedent established by Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino’s response to the bishop of Venosa, Andrea Perbenedetti, who in 1615 had appealed to the Holy Office over a similar issue among the Albanian population of Maschito, describing them as practicing “superstitions and diabolical experiments.”Footnote 33 Bellarmino’s decision was written on the verso of the document, following common Holy Office practice.Footnote 34 It instructed that the Latin rite be introduced wherever the Greek rite prevailed in the Kingdom of Naples, reflecting the Office’s determination to standardize liturgical practice throughout the realm.Footnote 35

Deodato Scaglia’s interpretation of episcopal authority, informed by this precedent, led him to regard the persistence of the Greek rite not simply as a pastoral problem but as evidence of doctrinal disorder requiring direct intervention. His report meticulously cataloged practices interpreted as superstitious, framing them not as isolated customs but as evidence of a potentially heterodox ritual system, and thereby transforming local practices into explicit signs of doctrinal danger. As Carlo Ginzburg has observed regarding inquisitorial documentation, such descriptions should not be read as transparent representations of popular culture, but as mediated reconstructions shaped by ecclesiastical concerns and categories.Footnote 36

Particular scrutiny was devoted to omens associated with lunar phases: widespread beliefs included avoiding important tasks on moonless nights and, conversely, celebrating the new moon through a lullaby dedicated to the “Holy Virgin of the Moon,” while counting money during the crescent moon was thought to ensure its multiplication. Childbirth rituals showed a similar interweaving of custom and devotion: on the third evening after delivery, families prepared a bread-like dish believed to appease the fairies responsible for the newborn’s fate, and newborns were taken to a crossroads so that the first passerby might serve as godfather and guarantee the child’s longevity.Footnote 37 These practices, together with the limited availability of clergy adequately trained in the Greek rite, contributed – in Scaglia’s view – to a condition of religious ambiguity that blurred the boundaries between ritual custom, popular devotion, and doctrinal orthodoxy. The bishop interpreted this situation as evidence of insufficient religious instruction and as a source of potential disorder within the community.Footnote 38

Furthermore, many inhabitants of Barile appear to have regarded the Greek rite primarily as a customary practice associated with local belonging rather than as an exclusive marker of confessional identity. A significant number of the Greeks of Barile served in the Royal Army as cavalrymen, collectively known as the “Albanian Cavalry,” with duties including guard service along the Kingdom’s coastline and campaigns in Lombardy, Flanders, and Germany. This military mobility, often requiring extended residence in predominantly Latin quarters, exposed them to Latin-rite observance, to which many returning soldiers had grown accustomed before resuming Greek-rite practice back in Barile. These shifts in ritual adherence were shaped by practical necessity, factional loyalties, and interpersonal conflicts: individuals who ordinarily followed the Greek rite sometimes adopted the Latin rite temporarily as part of factional rivalries or personal disputes, before returning to their previous observance. The choice of rite, therefore, could function not only as a matter of confessional affiliation but also as a marker of social and political alignment. From the bishop’s perspective, this fluidity posed an additional problem, since adherence to the Greek rite could also serve practical and economic purposes: by maintaining nominal allegiance to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, some members of the community could avoid the payment of certain ecclesiastical tithes to the local Latin hierarchy.Footnote 39

Between April and August 1634, representatives of the Greek community appealed directly to Propaganda Fide through their intermediary at the College of the Greeks in Naples, the priest Andrea Paleologo. A series of letters sent to the Congregation, now preserved in the Historical Archive of Propaganda Fide, articulated their grievances in detail. In his correspondence with Francesco Ingoli, secretary of the Congregation, Paleologo claimed that the Greeks were suffering persecution at the hands of Bishop Scaglia. Rather than celebrating Mass and conducting their devotions in the main parish church – sharing revenues with the Latin archpriest, as the bishop required – they requested permission to worship in a separate church. They also sought the appointment of a Greek priest directly dependent upon the archbishop of Matera, thereby freeing themselves from the authority of the bishop of Melfi.

A note written on the reverse of one of the letters reveals, however, that officials within Propaganda Fide regarded this request with suspicion, interpreting it as an attempt to resist the suppression of the Greek rite. The petitioners further urged Monsignor Ingoli not to transfer the case to the Holy Office, expressing concern that the matter might fall under the influence of Cardinal Desiderio Scaglia, uncle of the bishop and perceived by the petitioners as aligned with his position.Footnote 40 In September 1634, Cardinal Francesco Barberini delegated the resolution of the matter to Desiderio Scaglia through an explicit decree.Footnote 41 The decision established that the Latin community would retain the principal church of Santa Maria della Grazia, while the Greeks would receive the church of San Nicola. The Latin parishioners were also instructed to contribute to the restoration expenses of the Greek church, and the Greek priest was to receive a portion of ecclesiastical revenues sufficient for his maintenance.Footnote 42 The outcome suggests that the Greeks of Barile succeeded in avoiding conversion to the Latin rite through forms of negotiated resilience that emerged through devotional practice, kinship networks, and institutional negotiation. In the following sections, I examine four principal patterns of religious resilience through which the community responded to pressures toward Latinization: the control of sacred space, intermarriage and kinship alliances, factional identities, and diplomatic negotiation.

VI. Behavioral Patterns of Resilience

The Greek-rite community of Barile responded to the pressures of Tridentine reform not through open resistance but through a set of recurring behavioral patterns embedded in everyday social life. Four such patterns can be identified in the sources examined here. The first concerns the control of sacred space: the shared parish church became a site of continuous rivalry over ceremonial precedence, liturgical arrangement, and communal visibility. The second involves intermarriage between Greek-rite and Latin individuals, which blurred confessional boundaries across households and generations while allowing ritual practices to circulate and persist. The third concerns the role of kinship groups and factional identities, through which religious affiliation intersected with networks of household allegiance, status, and local power. The fourth, finally, is diplomatic negotiation: the community’s strategic appeal to the Congregation of Propaganda Fide in order to limit episcopal pressure and preserve its rite within a framework of Catholic obedience. Together, these patterns reveal a process of negotiated resilience rather than either passive conformity or organized defiance.

A central issue in Scaglia’s report concerns the contested use of sacred space. The bishop described recurrent conflicts, mockery, sacramental theft, and acts of vandalism within the single church in which both the Latin and Greek communities celebrated their liturgies. Although Scaglia attributed these disturbances chiefly to the Greeks, his account reveals a broader struggle over ceremonial precedence and institutional authority, in which devotional practice became a means through which both groups asserted their place within the shared church. As Angelo Torre has argued, sacred places in early modern communities were shaped by social practices and claims of belonging rather than by ecclesiastical designation alone.Footnote 43 In Barile, the church was the space through which the two communities negotiated visibility, hierarchy, and legitimacy.

Scaglia’s account offers a detailed description of these disturbances. During the weeks when both Latin and Greek services were celebrated, tensions frequently arose, especially on major feast days: the Latins decorated the altar and presbytery according to their own norms, and when the Greeks took their turn, they dismantled these decorations during the first Vespers, claiming they needed to prepare the space for their own ceremonies.

To Scaglia, this appeared as resentment and retaliation, yet the Latin clergy also disrupted Greek observances, suggesting that conflict over sacred space was reciprocal rather than one-sided. The Greeks, accustomed to a ceremonial order that included a large and a small altar, ritual canopies, and distinct entrances for clergy, rearranged the church interior to affirm their own ritual precedence, producing repeated disorder especially during joint ceremonies such as funerals and baptisms. According to Scaglia, these scenes of confusion “exceeded even the tumult found in Jewish synagogues” – polemical phrasing that nonetheless shows how strongly he associated ritual conflict with disorder and failed discipline.Footnote 44

Disputes extended beyond decoration and ceremony. While the Latin parish priest celebrated Mass with his clerics, the Greek priest sometimes entered the sanctuary, claiming an urgent need to retrieve the Eucharist for a parishioner in danger of death, forcing the Latin celebrant to abandon the altar.Footnote 45 Processions of the saints also became occasions for rivalry, and during Holy Week these tensions sometimes escalated into physical confrontations involving both clergy and laity.Footnote 46 Behind these disputes lay a broader struggle over communal identity and institutional control. Ceremonial precedence allowed the Greek-rite minority to maintain visibility within a shared ecclesiastical space otherwise increasingly shaped by Latin norms: the issue was not only liturgical, but concerned who had the right to occupy, arrange, and define sacred space, making the church a crucial arena in which the Greek community asserted its continued presence within Barile. This dimension becomes clearer in relation to patronage and access to ecclesiastical property: wealthier families gradually conformed to the Latin rite in pursuit of economic and territorial advantages, particularly through the acquisition of churches under the right of juspatronatus. Footnote 47 Such conformity could therefore be perceived by the remaining Greek-rite community as weakening communal cohesion, so that the conflict over sacred space was also a conflict over resources, status, and the institutional future of the Greek community.

A second recurring pattern involved intermarriage. In his report, Scaglia noted that many of the disorders affecting Barile appeared within mixed households, where religious customs were exchanged, adapted, or inconsistently observed. When a Greek-rite individual married a Latin spouse, the Greek spouse might adopt Latin practices, and conversely, a Latin spouse entering a Greek household might conform to the Greek rite, so that within families marked by such mixed affiliations the boundaries between the two rites became difficult to regulate. For Scaglia, this fluidity produced religious confusion. Individuals could alternate between rites according to domestic circumstances, personal preference, or family ties, creating inconsistencies among siblings and across generations. Even communal meals became occasions in which practices associated with distinct ritual traditions lost clear boundaries. Religious observance therefore appeared, from the bishop’s perspective, less as a stable marker of confessional discipline than as a matter shaped by cohabitation and kinship.

Intermarriage should not, however, be read as a deliberate strategy of resistance, but rather as a social condition through which ritual practices could circulate, persist, and be transmitted across generations. As Osvaldo Raggio has shown, kinship networks and factional alignments could organize access to resources, shape conflict, and structure political action within local communities.Footnote 48 In Barile, mixed marriages did not simply unite individuals but connected households, redistributed obligations, and created relationships that crossed the Greek-Latin divide. Extended Albanian families, living in close proximity and forming dense kinship networks, used lineage and household affiliation as languages of belonging that helped organize alliances and transmit forms of identity that were not exclusively theological but also social, economic, and territorial.Footnote 49 Intermarriage thus helps clarify one of the central points of this article: the Greek-rite Albanians did not respond to Latinization through a single, coherent strategy, but through ordinary social relations – marriage, co-residence, inheritance, kinship, and factional alignment – that enabled forms of adaptation preserving ritual identity while also producing the very ambiguity that Scaglia sought to discipline.

In Barile, the parish church was not merely a liturgical space but also a public arena in which kinship groups displayed status, negotiated precedence, and articulated factional alliances; the conflicts described by Scaglia should therefore be read within the broader social organization of the community, where religious affiliation, household ties, and local power were closely connected. This interpretation is consistent with the historiography on local societies in early modern Italy, which has emphasized the role of kinship networks and factional alignments in shaping political and religious action. As Osvaldo Raggio has shown, conflicts within local communities were often structured through family groups and systems of alliance rather than through formal institutions alone.Footnote 50 The parish did not simply reflect ecclesiastical hierarchy; it also made visible the social divisions of the town, as extended kinship groups used religious space to assert their presence, negotiate status, and manage relations with rival households.

Marriage alliances were especially important in this process. They could not only mitigate tensions between opposing groups but could also complicate episcopal attempts to impose clear boundaries between Greek and Latin observance, since ritual affiliation could follow household ties, factional loyalties, or practical circumstances rather than stable confessional categories. Scaglia complained that the persistence of the Greek rite often served as a pretext for the management of factional disputes.Footnote 51 This observation should be read critically. It does not mean the Greek rite merely concealed social conflict, but suggests that ritual affiliation could become a language through which local tensions were expressed, operating as a marker of household allegiance, social position, and communal belonging as much as of theological difference. These patterns should not be understood as a calculated strategy of resistance, but as recurring forms of action through which local actors negotiated the constraints imposed by episcopal authority. Kinship, marriage, and control over sacred space allowed the Greek-rite community to preserve elements of its identity while remaining within a shared, though unequal, Catholic framework: post-Tridentine discipline was not simply imposed from above, but was continually reshaped through local social relations.

The final pattern concerns the community’s appeal to Roman institutions. In his 1634 report, Bishop Scaglia sought authorization from the Congregation of Propaganda Fide to bring the Greek minority of Barile into closer conformity with the Latin rite. His request rested on the claim that confusion in the administration of the sacraments and devotional practices made the shared use of the parish church untenable. Faced with the possibility of direct episcopal intervention, the Greek community did not respond through open defiance. Instead, acting through its representative in Naples, the priest Andrea Paleologo, it pursued a negotiated response. Between April and August 1634, Paleologo sent a series of letters to Francesco Ingoli, secretary of Propaganda Fide, describing the Greeks of Barile as victims of episcopal persecution and requesting permission for them to worship in a separate church.Footnote 52 The Greeks accepted relocation to a separate church while continuing to profess their own rite. This compromise allowed them to remain formally obedient to ecclesiastical authority while preserving the ritual framework through which their communal identity was expressed.

This appeal to Propaganda Fide was not accidental. Rather than confronting episcopal authority directly – a difficult course, given Scaglia’s family connection to Cardinal Desiderio Scaglia within the Holy Office – the community sought to keep the case within a Roman institution more likely to frame the matter in pastoral and administrative terms. As Giovanni Pizzorusso has shown, Propaganda Fide functioned not only as a missionary congregation but also as a center for collecting information, mediating local conflicts, and producing administrative solutions for communities at the margins of Latin Catholic structures.Footnote 53 In his correspondence, Paleologo petitioned the Congregation to send learned and properly trained priests to guide the Greek community – framing the conflict as a problem of pastoral instruction rather than heresy – and urged Ingoli not to transfer the case to the Holy Office, fearing it might fall under the influence of Cardinal Desiderio Scaglia, whom the petitioners perceived as aligned with his nephew’s position.Footnote 54

The resolution of the dispute confirmed the effectiveness of this institutional appeal. In September 1634, Cardinal Francesco Barberini delegated the matter to Desiderio Scaglia through an explicit decree, establishing that the Latin community would retain the principal church of Santa Maria della Grazia while the Greeks would receive the church of San Nicola, with the Latin parishioners contributing to the restoration of the Greek church and the Greek priest receiving sufficient ecclesiastical revenues for his maintenance.Footnote 55 Diplomacy, in this case, should therefore be understood as a form of negotiated adaptation rather than as a coherent strategy of resistance. The Greeks of Barile did not reject Roman authority. Rather, they used one Roman institution against another, appealing to Propaganda Fide to limit episcopal pressure and preserve their rite within a framework of Catholic obedience – confirming that post-Tridentine discipline was shaped not only by episcopal initiative but also by local actors capable of navigating the institutional complexity of Roman Catholic governance.

VII. The Synod of 1635 and the Codification of Episcopal Discipline

The synod of 1635 shows that the compromise reached in 1634 did not put an end to Scaglia’s efforts to regulate the Greek rite. Rather, the bishop translated the accusations developed in his reports into diocesan legislation, functioning as a normative instrument through which he sought to define the boundary between tolerated ritual diversity and condemned superstition. Convened in 1635 and later promulgated in 1638, the synod devoted a substantial section to the so-called superstitiones Graecorum, confirming that the issue remained central to his episcopal program.Footnote 56 Scaglia’s concern was not limited to the formal administration of the sacraments or to whether Greek priests recognized Roman authority rather than the patriarchs of Byzantium or Alexandria; he also sought to regulate a wider range of practices he described as superstitiones profanasque Graecorum observationes, extending episcopal discipline beyond strictly liturgical correction into the sphere of domestic ritual, funerary custom, lunar observance, and popular devotion.Footnote 57 The synod did not treat “superstition” as a separate problem of popular religion detached from liturgical identity; instead, Scaglia incorporated these practices into a broader program of correction aimed at bringing the Greek-rite community under closer episcopal control.

The Greek rite was not abolished, but its toleration was made conditional upon the suppression of customs the bishop considered incompatible with Catholic discipline.

Regarding the sacraments, Greek priests were prohibited from conferring Confirmation at the time of Baptism, a prerogative reserved to bishops, and from administering the Eucharist to children of one, two, or three years of age, since they had not yet attained the age of reason. As for the Last Rites, which were rarely performed among the Greek-Albanians, Scaglia instructed priests to administer them even when not expressly requested, in order to ensure that the dying received proper pastoral care.Footnote 58 In matters of marriage, the bishop reaffirmed Tridentine norms in order to eliminate what the Catholic Church regarded as de facto divorces, especially the practice of repudiation followed by remarriage. He also sought to suppress any reference to Eastern ecclesiastical authority, ordering Greek priests to pray during Mass for the Supreme Pontiff and the bishop pro tempore of Melfi and Rapolla rather than for the patriarchs of Byzantium or Alexandria.Footnote 59

The synod also condemned a series of practices identified as superstitious or profane observances. These included homage paid to the new moon, marked by greetings and songs, and the regulation of daily life according to lunar phases and stellar movements. Scaglia further prohibited funerary customs such as placing wine, legumes, and other foods upon corpses, or distributing bread, wine, and sweets in front of the church during burials. He also criticized the refusal to grant ecclesiastical burial to women who died in childbirth without having received the blessing, the restriction preventing women from receiving the sacraments during the forty days before the rite of purification, and the celebration of the so-called feast of the Arciporco, a ritual of Armenian origin that he considered incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy.Footnote 60

The synod therefore confirms the central argument of this article. In Barile, accusations of superstition did not merely concern isolated customs. They became a means through which episcopal authority translated ritual difference into a problem of discipline and jurisdiction. At the same time, the need to codify these prohibitions after the settlement of 1634 suggests that episcopal authority remained contested. The Greek-rite community had preserved its separate church and its ritual identity, but Scaglia continued to use diocesan legislation to restrict the practices through which that identity was expressed.

VIII. Conclusion

In the aftermath of the Council of Trent, the regulation of devotional practices cannot be understood as a purely top-down process of confessional discipline, as traditionally assumed in older historiography. Rather, as the case of Barile demonstrates, it took shape through a continuous process of negotiation between ecclesiastical authorities and local communities, producing a dynamic field in which discipline and adaptation were constantly redefined. In this respect, the case examined here aligns with recent historiography on early modern Catholicism, which has emphasized negotiation, accommodation, and local agency over models of unilateral imposition. The Greek-rite Albanians of Barile did not oppose Tridentine reform through open resistance. Instead, they engaged in recurring forms of adaptation – control over sacred space, intermarriage, factional organization, and diplomatic negotiation – that allowed them to preserve aspects of their ritual and social identity while formally remaining within the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy, showing that confessional belonging was not a fixed condition but a flexible and situational practice.

Within this context, the category of “superstition” emerges as a crucial site of tension. Rather than denoting a stable or coherent set of illicit beliefs, it functioned as a classificatory tool through which ecclesiastical authorities translated cultural difference into doctrinal deviation, allowing them to expand their jurisdiction into areas of everyday practice. At the same time, the practices thus labeled formed part of a structured system of meaning, in which ritual gestures, domestic customs, and empirical knowledge were closely intertwined: what appears in episcopal sources as disorder or ignorance can therefore be reinterpreted as the trace of an alternative logic of religious experience.

The evidence examined here also highlights the epistemological limits of normative and inquisitorial sources. Scaglia’s reports, whether addressed to the Holy Office or to Propaganda Fide, were shaped by institutional expectations and rhetorical aims directed toward securing intervention, and so tend to amplify deviance and obscure the internal coherence of local practices. Yet precisely through their detailed descriptions, these sources inadvertently preserve fragments of the cultural worlds they sought to discipline, allowing the historian to reconstruct them through a close reading of the traces embedded within normative discourse. Finally, the case of Barile sheds light on the internal ambiguities of post-Tridentine ecclesiastical governance.

The overlapping jurisdictions of the Holy Office and the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, together with the personal influence of figures such as Desiderio Scaglia, reveal a system in which decision-making was neither fully centralized nor entirely consistent: the preservation of the Greek rite within a framework of negotiated separation was not the result of a clear doctrinal position, but of a contingent balance between competing institutional logics. By foregrounding the interaction between local practices and institutional frameworks, this study contributes to a broader understanding of confessionalization as a process shaped as much by negotiation as by discipline. The Greek-Albanian community of Barile did not simply resist or conform; rather, it reveals how the boundaries of orthodoxy themselves were historically produced through interaction, conflict, and negotiation.

References

1 John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 233–45; and O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1–16.

2 Robert John Clines, A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean: Early Modern Conversion, Mission, and the Construction of Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1–15; Niccolò Fattori, “Strong-Headed Barbarians: The Greeks of Ancona and the Papal Policies in the Sixteenth Century/Barbari, e di cervello gagliardo: I Greci di Ancona,” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia 72, no. 1 (2018): 117–40; and Yury P. Avvakumov and Charles C. Yost, “The Renaissance Papacy and Eastern Christianity: Greek and Slavic,” in The Renaissance Papacy, 1400–1600, ed. Nelson H. Minnich (Leiden: Brill, 2025), 259–86.

3 Christopher F. Black, The Italian Inquisition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 74–80, 155–62; Christopher F. Black and Irene Fosi (with Katherine Aron-Beller), eds., The Roman Inquisition: Centre versus Peripheries (Brill, 2018), 1–18; and Giovanni Pizzorusso, Propaganda Fide. Vol. 1: La congregazione pontificia e la giurisdizione sulle missioni (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2022), 45–60.

4 O’Malley, Trent, 233–45; Black, Italian Inquisition, 74–80, 155–62; Black and Fosi eds., Roman Inquisition, 1–18; Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 1–20; and Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–125.

5 Pamela O. Long, Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Nelson H. Minnich, “Renaissance Papal Court and Curia,” in Minnich, Renaissance Papacy, 51–77; Avvakumov and Yost, “Renaissance Papacy and Eastern Christianity,” 259–86; Clines, A Jewish Jesuit, 1–15; and Fattori, “Strong-Headed Barbarians,” 117–40.

6 Tommaso Pedio, ed., Giustino Fortunato: Badie, feudi e baroni della Valle di Vitalba, vol. 3 (Manduria: Lacaita, 1968), 223; Tommaso Russo, L’esodo e la memoria: Introduzione alla ristampa di “Il Vulture ovvero brevi notizie di Barile e delle sue colonie” di Angelo Bozza e “L’immigrazione albanese” di Giustino Fortunato (Rionero in Vulture: Calice, 1990); Russo, “Minoranze etniche, linguistiche e religiose: Albanesi, Greci e Schiavoni,” in Storia della Basilicata, vol. 3, L’Età moderna, ed. Antonio Cestaro (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2000), 90–113; Costantino Marco, ed., Angelo Masci: Discorso sugli Albanesi del Regno di Napoli, 4th ed. (Lungro: Marco Editore, 1990); Giuseppe M. Viscardi, “Chiesa ed etnie nella Basilicata moderna: Albanesi e zingari tra tolleranza e riforma religiosa (secoli XVI–XVIII),” Ricerche di Storia Sociale e Religiosa 51 (1997): 135–68, at 161–62; Valeria Verrastro, “I greci in Basilicata tra medioevo ed età moderna: La storia e le fonti,” in Minoranze etniche nel Melfese: Ebrei, Greci, Albanesi tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Filena Patroni Griffi, Antonella Pellettieri, and Valeria Verrastro (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2002), 37–76; Pietro De Leo, “Migrazioni albanesi tra basso medioevo ed età moderna,” in Storia della Basilicata, vol. 2, Il Medioevo, ed. Cosimo D. Fonseca (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2006), 348–54; Italo Sarro, “Li poveri nobili coronei”: Storie di migrazioni nel Regno di Napoli (Nardò: Besa Muci, 2022), 35, 86, 156, 165–67, 171–72, 177; Antonella Liuzzi, “Old and New Minorities: The Case of Arbëreshë Communities and Albanian Immigrants in Southern Italy,” Migration Letters 13, no. 2 (2016): 258–68; Cesare Santus, Trasgressioni necessarie: Communicatio in sacris, coesistenza e conflitti tra le comunità cristiane orientali (Levante e Impero ottomano, XVII–XVIII secolo) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2019); and Cesare Santus, Jean-Pascal Gay, and Laurent Tatarenko, eds., The Inquisition and the Christian East, 1350–1850 (Durham: Durham University IMEMS Press / Boydell & Brewer, 2025). For a first survey of the sources on Barile, see my “Greci e Latini nel casale di Barile: Prime fonti per un percorso di ricerca,” Bollettino Storico della Basilicata 35 (2019): 181–203.

7 Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (hereafter cited as AAV), S. Congregatione Concilii, Relationes dioecesium, Melphiensis et Rapollensis, 516 A, Relationes ad limina of Gaspare Cenci, bishop of Melfi and Rapolla, 26 March 1590, c. 121r: “the more serious superstitions have been abolished and completely abandoned” (superstitiones magis graves sunt sublatae et penitus omissae). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

8 O’Malley, Trent, 233–45; and O’Malley, Trent and All That, 1–16.

9 Vittorio Peri, “Chiesa latina e chiesa greca nell’Italia postridentina (1564–1596),” in La Chiesa greca in Italia dall’VIII al XVI secolo: Atti del convegno storico interecclesiale (Bari, 30 aprile–4 maggio 1969), vol. 1 (Padua: Antenore, 1973), 271–469; and Emanuele C. Colombo, “Il Cristo degli altri”: Economie della rivendicazione nella Calabria greca di età moderna (Palermo: New Digital Frontiers, 2018), 61.

10 Elena Brambilla, La giustizia intollerante: Inquisizione e tribunali confessionali in Europa (secoli IV–XVIII) (Rome: Carocci, 2006), 106; and Giovanni Romeo, Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe nell’Italia della Controriforma (Florence: Sansoni, 1990), 123.

11 Vincenzo Lavenia, “‘Quasi haereticus’: Lo scisma nella riflessione degli inquisitori dell’età moderna,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée 126, no. 2 (2014): 2–20, at 5; Vittorio Peri, Chiesa romana e “rito” greco: G. A. Santoro e la Congregazione dei Greci (1566–1596) (Brescia: Paideia, 1975); and Black, Italian Inquisition, 74–80, 155–62.

12 The title may be rendered as “A very brief instruction concerning certain rites of the Greeks, addressed to the Most Reverend Fathers and Lords, the Latin bishops in whose cities or dioceses there dwell Greeks or Albanians living according to the Greek rite.” Vittorio Peri, “La Chiesa greca in Italia dal secolo VIII al XVI,” Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa 5 (1969): 503–12; Peri, “La Congregazione dei Greci (1573) e i suoi primi documenti” Studia Gratiana 13, Collectanea Stephan Kuttner 3 (Bologna: Institutum Gratianum, 1967): 129–256; Peri, “Inizi e finalità ecumeniche del Collegio Greco in Roma,” Aevum 44, no. 1 (1970): 1–71; Peri, “Chiesa latina e chiesa greca nell’Italia postridentina,” 271–469; Peri, Chiesa romana e “rito greco”; and Colombo, “Il Cristo degli altri”, 61.

13 Giovanni Pizzorusso, “Le fonti del Sant’Uffizio per la storia delle missioni e dei rapporti con Propaganda Fide,” in A dieci anni dall’apertura dell’Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede: Storia e archivi dell’Inquisizione (Roma, 21–23 febbraio 2008), Atti dei Convegni Lincei 260 (Rome: Scienze e Lettere, 2011), 393–423; Pizzorusso, “La Congrégation ‘de Propaganda Fide’ à Rome: Centre d’accumulation et de production de ‘savoirs missionnaires’ (XVIIe–début XIXe siècle),” in Mission d’évangélisation et circulation des savoirs (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles), ed. Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile, Marie-Lucie Copete, Aliocha Maldavsky, and Ines G. Zupanov (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2011), 25–40; Pizzorusso, “La Congrégation de la Propagande: Une instance centrale pour l’élaboration d’un statut juridique du clergé missionnaire,” in Les clercs et les princes: Doctrines et pratiques de l’autorité ecclésiastique à l’époque moderne, ed. Patrick Arabeyre and Brigitte Basdevant-Gaudemet (Paris: École des Chartes, 2013), 47–60; Pizzorusso, “La Congregazione pontificia de Propaganda Fide nel XVII secolo: Missioni, geopolitica, colonialismo,” in Papato e politica internazionale nella prima età moderna, ed. Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Rome: Viella, 2013), 149–72; Pizzorusso, Propaganda Fide, 45–60; Long, Engineering the Eternal City; and Minnich, “Renaissance Papal Court and Curia,” 51–77.

14 Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza: Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin: Einaudi, 1996); Brambilla, Giustizia intollerante, 106; Romeo, Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe, 123; and Black, Italian Inquisition, 155–62.

15 Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–8, 45–52.

16 Ginzburg, Night Battles, 1–20; and Ginzburg, “Clues,” 96–125.

17 David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 19–35, 97–120.

18 Vittorio Frajese, Le categorie della Controriforma: Politica e religione della prima età moderna (Rome: Bulzoni, 2011), 45–68; and Cameron, Enchanted Europe, 67–75.

19 Black, Italian Inquisition, 74–80, 155–62.

20 Vincenzo Lavenia, “Superstizione, medicina, malattie sacre: L’Inquisizione romana e il dibattito tra il Cinque e il Seicento,” in Magia, superstizione, religione: Una questione di confini, ed. Marina Caffiero (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2015), 33–66; and Black, Italian Inquisition, 160–70.

21 Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, 97–120, 145–60; and Romeo, Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe, 123–45.

22 Ginzburg, Night Battles, 1–20; and Ginzburg, “Clues,” 96–125.

23 Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, 145–60; and Cameron, Enchanted Europe, 67–75.

24 Archivio del Dicastero per la Dottrina della Fede (hereafter cited as ADDF), Stanza Storica (St. St.), QQ 2 M, De Italo-Graecis, pars prima, ab anno 1603 ad annum 1699, letter of Deodato Scaglia, bishop of Melfi, to the cardinals of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, Melfi, 27 April 1627, cc. 326r–334v, at c. 326r; and Francesca Vera Romano, Magia, stregoneria e “superstizione” nel Viceregno di Napoli: Le diocesi di Melfi, Tricarico e Vieste tra Cinquecento e Settecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 2025, 156–97). The documents of this dossier are now published in Francesca Vera Romano, ed., Tribunali ecclesiastici e culture popolari: Fonti per lo studio di magia e “superstizione” nel Regno di Napoli (1581–1713), I Quaderni del Lab 9 (Naples: Istituto per la Storia del Pensiero Filosofico e Scientifico Moderno, CNR, 2026), 107–118.

25 ADDF, St. St., QQ 2M, De Italo-Graecis, pars prima, letter of Deodato Scaglia, cc. 328v–329v.

26 Vincenzo Lavenia, “‘Anticamente di misto foro’: Inquisizione, stati e delitti di stregoneria nella prima età moderna,” in Inquisizioni: Percorsi di ricerca, ed. Giovanna Paolin (Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2001), 36–80, at 43.

27 ADDF, St. St., QQ 2M, De Italo-Graecis, pars prima, letter of Deodato Scaglia, c. 331v.

28 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 17–25.

29 Ginzburg, “Clues,” 96–125.

30 Black, Italian Inquisition, 155–62.

31 AAV, S. Congregazione del Concilio, Relationes dioecesium, Melphiensis et Rapollensis, 516 A, Relationes ad limina of Bishop Deodato Scaglia, Melfi, 28 December 1628, c. 135r.

32 Archivio Diocesano di Melfi (hereafter cited as ADM), Fondo del Capitolo della Cattedrale di Melfi, Separazione tra Greci e Latini fatta per ordine della Sacra Congregazione di Propaganda Fide: Relatione degli errori et abusi dei Greci nel Regno di Napoli, e particolarmente nel Casale di Barile, cc. 31v–44v. The report is now published in Romano, Tribunali ecclesiastici e culture popolari, 119–42.

33 ADDF, St. St., QQ 2M, De Italo-Graecis, pars prima, ab anno 1603 ad annum 1699, fasc. XIV, De ritu latino inducendo ubi viget graecus ritus, letter of Andrea Perbenedetti, bishop of Venosa, to Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, 25 April 1615, cc. 164r–168v, at c. 164v: “many superstitions and diabolical experiments prevailed among them” (regnavano tra di loro molte superstitioni et esperimenti diabolici). Andrea Perbenedetti had previously served as vicar to Federico Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, and was close to the Borromean reforming milieu, which was particularly attentive to the eradication of superstition and the disciplining of religious practice. See Giuseppe M. Viscardi, “Andrea Perbenedetti: Un vescovo borromaico nel Mezzogiorno secentesco,” in San Carlo e il suo tempo: Atti del Convegno internazionale nel IV centenario della morte, ed. Accademia di San Carlo (Milano, 21–26 maggio 1984) (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1986), 2:1185–205; and Wietse de Boer, La conquista dell’anima: Fede, disciplina e ordine pubblico nella Milano della Controriforma (Turin: Einaudi, 2004).

34 Pierroberto Scaramella, Le lettere della Congregazione del Sant’Ufficio ai tribunali di fede di Napoli, 1563–1625 (Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2001), XL.

35 ADDF, St. St., QQ 2M, De Italo-Graecis, pars prima, fasc. XIV, De ritu latino inducendo, 1615, c. 168v: “In Rome. Our Lord directs that the abuses of the Albanians who follow the Greek rite in Italy be treated in the Holy Office, together with the absolution for that old man. On 4 June 1615, the matter having been reported before His Holiness, he ordered that the ordinaries in the Kingdom of Naples be written to, so that they see to the introduction of the Latin rite where the Greek rite prevails” (À Roma. Nostro Signore dice che si tratti nel Santo Offizio delli abusi delli Albanesi che in Italia fanno il rito greco: et insieme all’assoluzione per quel vecchio, Die 4 Junij 1615 Relata coram Sanctissimo Domino mandavit scribi ordinarijs in Regno Neapolis ut curent introduci ritum latinum ubi viget ritus graecus).

36 Ginzburg, “Clues,” 96–125.

37 ADM, Fondo del Capitolo della Cattedrale di Melfi, Separazione tra Greci e Latini, cc. 38r–39v.

38 ADM, Fondo del Capitolo della Cattedrale di Melfi, Separazione tra Greci e Latini, c. 44r.

39 Andrea Castagnetti, “Le decime e i laici,” in Storia d’Italia. Annali, vol. 9, La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea, ed. Giorgio Chittolini and Giovanni Miccoli (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 509–29; Giovanni Miccoli, “‘Vescovo e re del suo popolo’: La figura del prete curato tra modello tridentino e risposta controrivoluzionaria,” in Chiesa e il potere politico, 885–906; Adriano Prosperi, “La figura del vescovo tra Quattro e Cinquecento: Persistenze, disagi e novità,” in Chiesa e il potere politico, 241–48; Mario Rosa, “La Chiesa meridionale nell’età della Controriforma,” in Chiesa e il potere politico, 295–326; Colombo, “Il Cristo degli altri”, 19; and Vittorio Frajese, “Visti da Roma: Paolo Sarpi e Fulgenzio Micanzio nel triennio protestante 1606–1609,” Nuova Rivista Storica 103, no. 1 (2019): 173–202, at 195.

40 Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide (hereafter cited as ASPF), letter of Andrea Paleologo to Francesco Ingoli, Naples, 22 July 1634; and Cirillo Korolevskij, “Le vicende ecclesiastiche dei paesi italo-albanesi della Basilicata e della Calabria. I. Barile,” Archivio Storico per la Calabria e la Lucania 1 (1931): 43–68.

41 ASPF, Acta, 1634, Sacra Congregatione de Propaganda Fide, decree of 15 September 1634; now published in Romano, Tribunali ecclesiastici e culture popolari, 143.

42 ADM, Fondo del Capitolo della Cattedrale di Melfi, Separazione tra Greci e Latini, letter of Cardinal Desiderio Scaglia to Deodato Scaglia, 25 November 1634, cc. 45v–46r; now published in Romano, Tribunali ecclesiastici e culture popolari, 143–44.

43 Angelo Torre, Luoghi: La produzione di località in età moderna e contemporanea (Rome: Donzelli, 2011); Torre, “I luoghi dell’azione,” in Giochi di scala: La microstoria alla prova dell’esperienza, ed. Jacques Revel (Rome: Viella, 2011), 300–317; and Torre, Il consumo di devozioni: Religione e comunità nelle campagne dell’Ancien Régime (Venice: Marsilio, 2005).

44 ADM, Fondo del Capitolo della Cattedrale di Melfi, Separazione tra Greci e Latini, c. 41v.

45 Ibid., c. 40v.

46 Ibid., c. 41r.

47 Gaetano Greco, “I giuspatronati laicali nell’età moderna,” in Chiesa e il potere politico, 534–66.

48 Osvaldo Raggio, Faide e parentele: Lo stato genovese visto dalla Fontanabuona (Turin: Einaudi, 1990); and Raggio, “Strutture di parentela e controllo delle risorse in un’area di transito: La Val Fontanabuona tra Cinque e Seicento,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen Âge, Temps modernes 99, no. 2 (1987): 1017–28.

49 Dora D’Istria, “La nationalité albanaise d’après les chants populaires,” Revue des Deux Mondes 63 (May 15, 1866): 382–418; Giuseppe Valentini, Il diritto delle comunità nella tradizione giuridica albanese (Florence: Vallecchi, 1956); Davide Pettener, “Temporal Trends in Marital Structure and Isonymy in S. Paolo Albanese,” Human Biology 62, no. 6 (1990): 837–51; Patrizia Resta, Il Kanun di Lek Dukagjini: Le basi morali e giuridiche della società albanese (Nardò: Besa, 1997); Giuliana B. Prato, “Minorities in Italy: The Case of Arbëresh and Albanian Migrations,” in Beyond Multiculturalism: Views from Anthropology, ed. Giuliana B. Prato (London: Routledge, 2016), 79–102; and Attilio Vaccaro, “Cultura albanese e tradizione giuridica: Considerazioni sulle consuetudini attraverso la storiografia e il racconto odeporico tra Ottocento e Novecento,” Palaver 10, no. 1 (2021): 175–308.

50 Raggio, Faide e parentele; and Raggio, “Strutture di parentela e controllo delle risorse,” 1017–28.

51 ADM, Fondo del Capitolo della Cattedrale di Melfi, Separazione tra Greci e Latini, c. 30r.

52 ASPF, letter of Andrea Paleologo to Francesco Ingoli, Naples, 22 July 1634; and Korolevskij, “Le vicende ecclesiastiche dei paesi italo-albanesi della Basilicata e della Calabria. I. Barile,” 43–68.

53 Pizzorusso, Propaganda Fide, 45–60; and Pizzorusso, “La Congrégation ‘de Propaganda Fide’ à Rome,” 25–40.

54 ASPF, letter of Andrea Paleologo to Francesco Ingoli, Naples, 22 July 1634.

55 ASPF, Acta, 1634, Sacra Congregatione de Propaganda Fide, decree of 15 September 1634; and ADM, Fondo del Capitolo della Cattedrale di Melfi, Separazione tra Greci e Latini, letter of Cardinal Desiderio Scaglia to Deodato Scaglia, 25 November 1634, cc. 45v–46r; both now published in Romano, Tribunali ecclesiastici e culture popolari, 143–44.

56 Deodato Scaglia, Melphiensis et Rapollensis Ecclesiarum synodales constitutiones: In quibus praecipua ad catholicam fidem, ad cleri mores, ad animarum regimen, coeteraque ad ecclesiasticam disciplinam spectantia disponuntur … celebrata anno MDCXXXV (Venice, 1638); Cleto Corrain and Pierluigi Zampini, “Documenti etnografici e folkloristici nei sinodi diocesani dell’Italia meridionale (Abruzzo, Campania, Beneventano, Lucania-Salernitano, Puglia, Calabria),” Palestra del Clero, nos. 3–5 (1968), page references being to the offprint (Rovigo, 1966), 1–57, at 55–57; and Giuseppe M. Viscardi, Vita sociale e mentalità religiosa in Basilicata: Istituzioni ecclesiastiche, santità e devozioni (secoli XVI–XX) (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2019), 17.

57 Scaglia, Melphiensis et Rapollensis Ecclesiarum synodales constitutiones, Sessio III, Tit. I, De ritu Graecorum et Albanensium, eorumque reformatione, pp. 65–74, at 73–74; and Viscardi, Vita sociale e mentalità religiosa in Basilicata, 17.

58 Scaglia, Melphiensis et Rapollensis Ecclesiarum synodales constitutiones, Sessio III, Tit. I, De ritu Graecorum et Albanensium, eorumque reformatione, pp. 65–74, at 73–74; and Viscardi, Vita sociale e mentalità religiosa in Basilicata, 17.

59 Scaglia, Melphiensis et Rapollensis Ecclesiarum synodales constitutiones, Sessio III, Tit. I, De ritu Graecorum et Albanensium, eorumque reformatione, pp. 65–74, at 73–74, and Sess. II, Tit. XXIV, De Sacramento Matrimonii; and Viscardi, Vita sociale e mentalità religiosa in Basilicata, 17.

60 Scaglia, Melphiensis et Rapollensis Ecclesiarum synodales constitutiones, Sessio III, Tit. I, De ritu Graecorum et Albanensium, eorumque reformatione, chaps. 3 and 17, pp. 65–74, at 73–74, and Sess. IV, Cap. 1, De funeribus et exequiis, 14: “let them beware of greeting the newly rising moon with salutations and songs” (lunam noviter orientem salutationibus et cantilenis caveant salutare); the synod likewise forbids the revel “which they commonly call Arciporco” (commessatio, seu dissolutio illa, quam vulgo dicunt Arciporco), and orders that “they not throw wine, legumes, and other foodstuffs upon the corpses of the dead” (ne super cadaveribus defunctorum vina, legumina, aliaque comestibilia proiiciant). On the Albanian funerary customs: “when a corpse is buried we forbid the querulous laments and wailing of dishevelled women, and, after the burial, the joining of those women’s hands, the washings, and the distributions of bread, wine, and sweetmeats in the churches or before their doors, these being customs of the Albanians” (et cum cadaver sepelitur incomptarum mulierum quaerulas narrationes, et eiulatus, ac post sepulturam mutuos eorundem mulierum nexus manuum, et lotiones, necnon panis, vini, ac bellariorum distributiones in ecclesiis, vel prae foribus earum [qui mores Albanensium sunt], interdicimus).