La «Moscovia» di Antonio Possevino SJ. Il resoconto di una missione impossibile

Abstract

The mission of the papal legate Antonio Possevino SJ in Muscovy in 1582 aimed at bringing back the Russia of Ivan IV «The Terrible» into the Roman Catholic Church and at winning it over to an alliance of Christian princes willing to make war on the Sublime Door. The mission failed on both counts and Possevino gave a detailed account of it in his work «Muscovy.» This article tries to reconstruct the reasons for that failure by starting from Possevino’s report in which it is evident that he had not fully understood the reasons that made his mission impossible to achieve. Possevino’s mission was doomed from the start and not just for matters of faith. It was, above all, for the political effects that the issue of faith would entail: the risk to the Prince of being abandoned by his people, of losing his people’s support – something always linked to the «symbolic» purity of the Orthodox faith, a consensus which could have been shattered after a union with Rome.