Camera Papae: problems of Papal Finance in the later Middle Ages

1953 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Peter D. Partner

Boniface VIII probably spent some half a million gold florins on the acquisition of lands for the Caetani. But of that money not a word is said in the Introitus and Exitus volumes, the main account books of the Apostolic Chamber. Where was it accounted for and from whence did it come? The pope had certain special sources of income which would not ordinarily be reckoned in the main account books, and of these, some could properly be termed his fortune as a private person, while others attached to his office as pope. There was the private fortune which he had before he assumed the tiara. There were the incomes of benefices personally reserved to him, gifts made him by prelates and laymen, legacies, sometimes the goods of deceased prelates, and the so-called ‘private visitations’ and ‘secret services’. Later in the fourteenth century many other sources were tapped for the benefit of a secret fund, and all in all the sums which it disposed of were formidable and sometimes enormous. The ends to which the money was directed were as various as the characters and policies of the pontiffs: it was used for nepotistic ends on a princely scale, as a mere convenient subsidiary to the main financial machine, as a war account, as a means of making enormous loans to lay rulers, or simply as a petty cash account. The earliest records of the secret accounts to survive are from the midfifteenth century, but the large sums involved, and its covert but great importance in papal policy in general make the earlier history of this institution as interesting as it is obscure.

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9 (107)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Irina Variash

The article discusses the issue of the so-called segregation norms against Muslims that emerged in the fourteenth century in Christian Law. The author analyzes source material relating to the history of the Crown of Aragon and raises the following question: is it possible to trace any connection between the urban environment and those social strategies that were applied to the infidels in the Middle Ages? Such research optics makes it possible to distinguish several types of segregation laws, some of which were a product of the urban environment and urban culture, which is substantiated by the author on the basis of the royal ordonnances, capitulae of the Valencian Cortes, Fuero of Valencia. The author discusses new legal norms that contradicted the early privileges for Muslims (12th — 13th centuries) and regulated Muslims’ appearance (a distinctive sign on clothes, a special hairstyle), their right to live together or next to Christians, their work on Sundays and Christian holidays, and also prohibited the public call to prayer. Paradoxically, these norms, being aimed at restricting the rights of the infidels (i.e. the Others), were formulated under the influence of the urban environment, in a settlement that was heterogeneous in its genesis and diverse in its nature. The Iberian-Latin civilization, which accumulated the human capital of the Muslim civilization in the course of the Reconquista, began to change its own social strategies in the management of Muslims in the fourteenth century. The experience of the cities was crucial in this process.


Author(s):  
James A. Palmer

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city. Challenging the view, this book argues that Roman political culture underwent dramatic changes in the late Middle Ages, with profound and lasting implications for the city's subsequent development. The book examines the transformation of Rome's governing elites as a result of changes in the city's economic, political, and spiritual landscape. It explores this shift through the history of Roman political society, its identity as an urban commune, and its once-and-future role as the spiritual capital of Latin Christendom. Tracing the contours of everyday Roman politics, the book reframes the reestablishment of papal sovereignty in Rome as the product of synergy between papal ambitions and local political culture. More broadly, it emphasizes Rome's distinct role in evolution of medieval Italy's city-communes.


1947 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. B. McFarlane

The problem that I am going to discuss this afternoon is one which must surely have exercised the minds of all those who have given a moment's thought to the financing of the Hundred Years' War. What conclusions have been reached it would be hard to say. For apart from two or three illuminating though hardly conclusive pages by Mr A. B. Steel, to whom my indebtedness should soon be obvious, nothing seems to have been printed on this subject in recent times. Yet unless we have some idea why men lent large sums of ready money to the English kings of the later Middle Ages, we must approach the political history of the period at a considerable disadvantage. To an increasing extent as the fourteenth century advanced and preponderantly throughout the course of its successor these lenders were natives and drawn from all sections of the propertied classes. The king's treatment of his creditors was therefore bound to affect his relations with his most powerful subjects. It would be surprising if his success or failure in meeting his obligations did not markedly influence their attitude towards his rule.


Nuncius ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-55
Author(s):  
Nurit Golan

Abstract This article engages with the Creation cycle (hexaemeron) sculpted on the vault of the south portal of the choir of the Holy Cross Church at Schwäbisch Gmünd (1351–1377). Several reliefs depict the cosmological creation, which was a rather rare topic in monumental sculpture on public display during the Middle Ages. Being based on cosmological theories, taught at the universities, but not expected to be shared with the laity, it is a unique intellectual cultural phenomenon. The article seeks to interpret anew the full scientific significance of these unprecedented iconographic cosmological depictions. The choice of topic and location of the cosmological reliefs will be explained in relation to the town’s socioeconomic and political developments that brought to substantial changes in the lives of the burghers. Presenting these novel ideas to the medieval public in an ecclesiastic context suggests an important change in the intellectual history of the region in the late fourteenth century.


Vivarium ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 340-366
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Martin

Abstract The history of thinking about consequences in the Middle Ages divides into three periods. During the first of these, from the eleventh to the middle of the twelfth century, and the second, from then until the beginning of the fourteenth century, the notion of natural consequence played a crucial role in logic, metaphysics, and theology. The first part of this paper traces the development of the theory of natural consequence in Abaelard’s work as the conditional of a connexive logic with an equivalent connexive disjunction and the crisis precipitated by the discovery of inconsistency in this system. The second part considers the accounts of natural consequence given in the thirteenth century as a special case of the standard modal definition of consequence, one for which the principle ex impossibili quidlibet does not hold, in logics in which disjunction is understood extensionally.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 113-139
Author(s):  
Ryan Szpiech

The Hebrew works of convert Abner de Burgos/Alfonso de Valladolid (d. ca. 1347) were translated into Castilian in the fourteenth century, at least partly and probably entirely by Abner/Alfonso himself. Because the author avoids Christian texts and cites abundantly from Hebrew sources, his writing includes many passages taken from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. The Castilian versions of his works translate these citations directly from Hebrew and do not seem to make any direct use of existing Romance-language Bibles (although his work might have relied indirectly on Jewish Bible translations circulating orally in the fourteenth century). Given the abundance of citations, especially in Abner/Alfonso’s earliest surviving work, the Moreh ṣedeq (Mostrador de justicia), his writing can serve as a significant source in the history of Hebrew-to-Romance Bible translation in the fourteenth century. The goal of this article is to consider the impact of polemical writing on Bible translation in the Middle Ages by analyzing these citations in Abner/Alfonso’s Castilian works.


TALIA DIXIT ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 59-83
Author(s):  
Carmen Benítez Guerrero ◽  
◽  
Covadonga Valdaliso Casanova

Although traditionally it was considered that the annals were the form of historical writing in the Early Middle Ages and fell into decline in the thirteenth century, several witnesses prove that the series of annals –i.e., series of concise historical records arranged chronologically –were copied, corrected, expanded, and continued, bringing it up to date, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This article comprises a study of a series of annals copied in the fifteenth century, but composed before, that cover the history of the Castilian Crown, focusing especially on the so-called Reconquest. As we will try to show, its contents are closely related to other annals written in Andalusia in the first half of the fourteenth century, as well as to later similar compositions


Author(s):  
George Garnett

Chapter 5 analyses three genres of historical writing about England in the later middle ages: histories of individual churches, universal histories, and histories of the kingdom. It confirms the provisional judgement reached in Chapter 4: that with respect to the Conquest and earlier England, historical writing fossilized. There were, however, exceptions, most of which could be categorized in the first genre. These are examined in great detail, and follow on from the treatment of the unusual episodes recorded during the thirteenth century at St Augustine’s, Canterbury and Burton Abbey which were considered in Chapter 4. The first is the problematic, neglected Historia Croylandensis attributed to (Pseudo-)Ingulf, which is for the most part a fabrication of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but which masquerades as the work of the abbot at Crowland at the end of the eleventh century, and therefore as contemporaneous with the great post-Conquest histories of England. The second is the early fourteenth-century Lichfield Chronicle, written by Alan of Ashbourn. The third is a general history of England conventionally attributed to John Brompton, abbot of Jervaulx in the early fifteenth century, and perhaps written at the abbey. All three pay a great deal of attention to (different) twelfth-century compilations of Old English and immediately post-Conquest law. This unusual characteristic accounts for their exceptional interest in the Conquest. The chapter also includes a briefer discussion of the more conventional histories into which condensed earlier discussions of the Conquest were inserted.


Author(s):  
Petr Sorokin

St Petersburg, founded in 1703 and now the second largest city in Russia, has always been considered as a ‘new city’. However, it was not founded on a barren site. The land in the mouth of the Neva has been inhabited since the Neolithic era. In the middle ages, it was home to Ingrian and Russian settlements. Constant military conflicts over this territory both in the Middle Ages and in post-medieval times have left their traces—the remnants of the demolished Swedish fortresses, Landskrona (fourteenth century) and Nyenschantz (seventeenth century). During the 300-year history of St Petersburg, many fortifications, engineering structures, and architectural sites have been lost, and their history and remnants are becoming a target for thorough architectural research.


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