Global Catholicism, Cosmopolitanism, and Early Modern Rome as Imperial Capital

This paper will look at the impact of global Catholic imperialism on Rome in the early modern period. It will argue that the papacy’s claim to universal spiritual sovereignty, backed up by the major Catholic imperial powers, Spain and Portugal, joined with the temporal alliance of Rome and those powers to make the city a crossroads of global cultural contact on a previously unknown level in Western Europe. Both the papal court and broader city benefited from a substantial traffic of foreign visitors and returning missionaries from China, Japan, India, and the Americas, as well as knowledge and artefacts from those areas. The result was an early cosmopolitanism that merged easily the imperial Renaissance then in full bloom in Rome.