438 ray a. kea
Moses George (c. 1155–c. 1190), left his throne in search of a pious or monastic
retirement. Can this be identified as a Mediterranean or eastern Mediterranean cul-
tural and religious trait?
The royal dynasty’s imperial vision was expressed in construction and iconograph-
ical projects of high-ranking churchmen like those of Georgios (1031–1113), who
served for 50 years (1063–1113) as archbishop of the capital and archimandrite in the
Monastery of the Holy Trinity and, earlier, as archimandrite in the Monastery of
Great Antonius. The walls of the archbishop’s barrel-vaulted crypt tomb and its
adjoining commemorative chapel are covered entirely in Greek, Coptic, and Old
Nubian text on one wall was a portrait of Georgios under the protection of the Holy
Trinity. Towards the end of his life the archbishop built a large annex to the monastery
and after his death the annex served as a xenon or xenodocheion, an institution of
Byzantine origin that functioned as a hospice–hospital for pilgrims and others. The
archbishop’s tomb, along with the tombs and chapels of venerated monks and high-
ranking ecclesiastics, made the monastery a pilgrimage and healing center in the east-
ern Mediterranean world.
Makuria’s connections to Latin Christendom have only recently come to light.
One of the interior walls of the Monastery of the Holy Trinity has a painting of the
Anastasis (Christ’s resurrection and descent into Hell). An analysis of the painting has
uncovered a striking analogy with contemporary Latin–Christian art in the stylistic
depiction of the dead suffering in Hell. The depictions are so similar to Latin–
Christian, as opposed to Byzantine and Coptic, paintings that the investigating
archaeologist finds no plausible explanation “other than a direct import of ninth cen-
tury models from Western Europe into Nubia” (Zurawski, 2007: 30–31). This sup-
position has to be considered in light of Nubian pilgrims’ visits to the shrine of Saint
James at Santiago de Compostela in the tenth century and presumably earlier. Ten
kilometers upstream from Old Dongola was Banganarti, a center of healing and pil-
grimage since the eighth century. A Latin graffito on the wall of the Upper Church
(or Raphaelion) of Banganarti by a Provençal or Catalan man named “Beneseg”
(Benedict) suggests that a merchant or pilgrim from Latin Christendom visited
Makuria in the first half of the fourteenth century. This is the southernmost medieval
wall inscription in the Latin script that has so far been discovered. Supplementing
Beneseg’s graffito is a fourteenth-century invocation to the Virgin Mary written in
Old Nubian and Italian. What does this text tell us about trans-societal relations in the
Mediterranean context?
In his “Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross,” written between 1300
and 1321, Marino Sanudo Torsello proposed an alliance with Christian Nubia as part
of his plan for the conquest of Egypt as a way to regain control of Jerusalem for Latin
Christendom. The proposal is not as far-fetched as it might appear. Since the twelfth-
century the papal court saw Nubia (and the rest of Eastern Christendom) as a poten-
tial object of Latin missions and some scholars believe that an alliance of some sort
was formed between the papal court and Christian Nubia in the 1270s. In 1316,
Dominicans founded a mission at the Makurian capital and in 1330 the pope nomi-
nated a Dominican as Latin bishop of the city. Furthermore, there were Genoese
merchants living in Old Dongola in the fourteenth century; at the time, Makuria was
a strong and large kingdom (not a divided, unsettled, and fractured polity, as
described in standard histories of Nubia). Makuria stretched from southern Egypt to