The Great Imposture: Eastern Christian Rogues and Counterfeiters in Rome, c. 17th-19th centuries

Early Modern Rome was the destination of several Eastern Christians asking for financial aid or licenses to collect alms: in many cases their identities and stories turned out to be dubious, when not blatantly false. In this article I discuss the most common types of deception experienced by Catholic authorities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by evoking some episodes recorded in the Pontifical archives. However, most of my analysis is devoted to a later and somewhat exceptional case study, that of the Coptic pupil of the Urban College Abramo Chasciur, who in 1824 managed to be consecrated archbishop of Memphis by forging several letters allegedly coming from the Egyptian political and religious authorities. The detailed reconstruction of this case leads to reflect more deeply on the agency and on the effective power that a single, ‘dispersed’ individual could exercise far from home, by skillfully playing on the expectations of his hosts and on the loopholes of the information system of the Roman Curia.