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14th - first half of 15th century Kaffa (present-day Feodosia in the Crimea) Chased silver Nine plate fittings in the form of six-petalled rosettes have survived from the set of a knight's dress belt. The heraldry of four elements indicates the owner's connection with the Kingdom of Aragon, since the coat-of-arms of Aragon is a shield crossed by four vertical red stripes on a golden ground. Of exceptional interest are the depictions of personages: a musician and a lady sitting beneath deciduous trees (in the medallion with the lady we can also detect a cassone); a man in a Mongol robe seated in the Eastern manner on a cushion, again beneath a tree; the mendicant monk, however, lacks not only the shade of a tree, but even a seat, which points the humble simplicity of the character. The poses of the two main figures - an Eastern grandee, a Turk representing Islam and a Franciscan representing the Roman Catholic Church - convey the atmosphere of a lively discussion. The ciborium (container for the consecrated host) held by the monk indicates the typical 13th-14th-century theme of a dispute on faith. This idea was current in the Mongol milieu. The lady though makes a reconciliatory gesture, holding out a flower to the Eastern potentate. This kind of narrative interpretation of the theme, with overtones of gallantry, derives from the Italian novella of the 13th and 14th centuries. This set of belt fittings was probably made in Kaffa (eastern Crimea) by a Latin craftsman on the instructions of a client who had not lost his connections with the traditions of the Aragonese crown in Sicily or Provence. The decoration of the elements reflected historical realia of one of the most distant parts of the Latin world. From the 1260s through until 1475 the Catholic West maintained productive contacts not only with Orthodox Byzantium, but also with the Islamized Turko-Mongol East. |
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