Abstract

This essay aims at outlining the human and scientific figure of Prince Leone Caetani, whose ten-volumes Annali dell’Islam reconstructed the history of the so-called “orthodox” Caliphate of the first four “successors” of the Prophet Muhammad on the basis of the original Islamic sources available at the time. According to the original plan, the narrative should have been brought till the fall of the Abbasid caliphate in 1254, but the personal troubles of the “Prince of the Orientalists” curbed his excessive ambitions. The author reflects on the typically positivistic approach adopted by Caetani, who concerned himself more with the economic dimensions of the Islamic experience than with its strictly spirituals aspects. Notwithstanding its limitation, the Annali dell’Islam still attract the attention of international scholars as a model of methodological and philological correctness and a corner-stone of the 20th-century both Islamic and general historiography