Archive

ARCHIVE. - Etymologically it derives from ἀρχεῖον, the magistrate's palace where the records of the magistracy were kept. Among the Greeks, however, it was called χαρτο-φυλάκιον, or γραμματο-φυλάκιον; among the Romans: archium, archivum, tabularium, grapharium, chartularium or chartarium publicum, sacrarium, scrinium, etc.

In the proper sense, by a. we mean a collection of records concerning an individual or a community, arranged for the purpose of protecting administrative, political and juridical interests or also for the purpose of purely historical documentation. Generally a. are customarily classified, under various aspects, into general and particular a., living and dead, current and deposit. By reason of provenance, the principal classification is given by the division into civil a. and ecclesiastical a.

I. CIVIL ARCHIVES

Among Italian civil archives, the following should be mentioned:

1. State archives, which are under the direct authority of the Ministry of the Interior through the Superior Council of Archives and the Board operating within the Council, and comprise: a) The Archive of the Republic, located in Rome, which mainly collects archival material originating from the departments of the central government.

b) The State Archives, 20 in number, located in the principal Italian cities, of which the 9 largest (Turin, Genoa, Milan, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, Palermo) exercise supervisory functions over all the minor archives of a given regional district within their competence.

c) The Sections of State Archives, established to the number of 74, in the capitals of the various provinces, each reporting to the respective archival Superintendency competent for the territory.

2. The archives of public non-state bodies, among which should be listed the archives of autonomous bodies, municipalities and provinces, parastatal bodies, auxiliary bodies of the State, credit institutions, public-law entities, trade-union associations, public institutions of assistance and charity, etc.

3. Notarial archives, which are distinguished into district, mandamento and municipal archives, unless they exist as sections of the State Archives or of the sections of State Archives.

4. Private archives, which are likewise subject by law to particular supervision on the part of the superintendency of the archival district to which they belong.

The current legal regulation of archives is governed by the law of 22 Dec. 1939, no. 2006.

II. ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHIVES

Among ecclesiastical archives, mention should be made of: the Pontifical Archive, the diocesan archive, the parish archive and other lesser ones.

1. Vatican Pontifical Archive (v. VATICAN, ARCHIVE).

2. Diocesan archive

In every episcopal curia there is a diocesan archive, divided into two distinct sections, the public and the secret, in which are collected and kept the acts, instruments and writings concerning diocesan affairs, both spiritual and temporal, all of which must be registered in the catalogue or inventory of the archive itself.

In the public section are arranged the acts and writings accessible to anyone having an interest therein.

In the secret section are cautiously kept those acts which, either by their nature or by prescription of law, must remain secret. Only the bishop or the apostolic administrator is permitted to open the secret archive by himself and examine its papers. In the event of a vacancy of the episcopal see, the custody of the secret archive is subject to particular prescriptions.

The canon law concerning the diocesan archive is contained in cann. 372-84 of the CIC.

3. Parish archive

Can. 470, § 4, obliges every parish priest to have his own parish archive, whose maintenance and custody constitute a grave duty, attended by severe penal sanctions (cann. 2383, 2406). In it are kept the parish registers (v.), the register de statu animarum, the official acts and communications of the ordinary and of the curia, the official correspondence and every other writing that necessity or utility suggests should be preserved; furthermore the registers, inventories and writings that concern the fabrica or church and the parochial benefice, with separate inventories (cann. 1522, n. 3, 1523, n. 6; circular of the Sacred Congr. Conc. 20 Sept. 1929).

For the parish archive too there exists the obligation of the inventory, one copy of which must be deposited at the diocesan archive (can. 383). With the exception of secret documents, the parish archive too is accessible to the public (can. 384).

4. Other ecclesiastical archives to be remembered are: the archives of cathedral and collegiate churches (capitular archives); the archives of confraternities and works more dependent on ecclesiastical bodies, which are likewise obliged to keep an inventory, one copy of which must be deposited in the diocesan archive (can. 383); the archives of religious institutes, of abbeys, of monasteries and of convents.

Zaccaria da S. Mauro
SPECIAL PROVIDENCES OF THE HOLY SEE FOR THE PRESERVATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHIVES. — Ecclesiastical archives, insofar as they contain documents of historical interest, are of themselves inalienable, being to be considered among the «bona praetiosa» cited in the CIC (cann. 1497, § 2; 1532, § 1).

Among the provisions adopted by the Holy See for the preservation of ecclesiastical archives in recent decades, a series of letters sent by the Cardinal Secretary of State to the Ordinaries of Italy must be remembered. In a first letter of 30 Sept. 1902, instructions were given for the compilation of inventories and a «Form of regulation for the custody and use of ecclesiastical archives and libraries» was sent; in another of 12 Dec. 1907, the establishment in every diocese of a permanent commissariat for monuments and documents was ordered, with the task of drawing up first of all «a simple but exact catalogue of the documents». Again on 15 Apr. 1923, observance of the previous letters was urged, announcing the institution at the Vatican Secret Archive of a course in archival science specially dedicated to the clergy, which began in Jan. of the following year.

In connection with these dispositions, many of the major ecclesiastical archives of Italy reorganized themselves according to modern and scientific principles; in some chapters the office of canon-archivist was instituted, to be conferred on a competent person.

But the protection of minor and recent archives also presents itself as an important requirement of modern times: particularly in Italy, where the law on archives of 22 Dec. 1939 subjects to State supervision all archives of historical interest, public and private, except ecclesiastical ones.

Therefore, by express commission of the Holy Father, Card. G. Mercati, archivist of Holy Roman Church, with a letter of 1 Nov. 1942 (AAS, 34 [1942], pp. 384-89) requested from the Ordinaries of Italy precise information on the existence and content of the individual archives subject to their jurisdiction, capitular, parochial and of any other body: to facilitate the work, ample forms already prepared were sent. Thus for the first time the census of the ecclesiastical archives of Italy was carried out, together with the collection of their inventory-summaries, which will be preserved at the Vatican Secret Archive.

It should also be remembered that during the Second World War, in the period 1943-45, the Holy See intervened with the Italian civil authorities, as well as with the German and Allied military occupation authorities, for the protection of the archives entrusted to its direct jurisdiction by virtue of the Concordat (cf. Final Report on the Archives, publ. by the Allied Commission, Subcommission for Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives, Rome 1946); following an inquiry called in Sept. 1945, 779 ecclesiastical archives resulted destroyed or damaged for reasons of war, of which 53 were episcopal or archiepiscopal (v. the report by G. Battelli, in Riv. di Storia della Chiesa in Italia, 1 [1947], pp. 113-16 and 306-308).

Giulio Battelli

III. HISTORY OF THE ARCHIVE

The origins of archives go back to a very remote era. The Babylonians, Egyptians and Chaldeans certainly had archives: this is attested by the inscriptions in cuneiform characters found around the middle of the last century among the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh, which have preserved for us testimonies of the activity of those kings, and by the clay tablets discovered at el-Amarna, in Egypt. Of the Babylonian archives even the Bible has handed down the memory in the book of Eid. (5, 17 and 6, 1-2). And again from the Bible (Eid. 2, 62; I Par. 9, 1 and II Par. 34, 30) we learn that the Israelites kept in the Temple the acts that bore a character of greater solemnity. More numerous and more certain information is had, on the other hand, about Greek and Roman archives, as well as about their systematic organization.

From the most ancient age of its history Greece took care to preserve the documents of its public and private life; but only later did that organized preservation begin which, begun in Athens, would spread to many Greek cities and serve as a model for future institutions, including Roman ones. In Athens the first depository of State documents was the Areopagus, where we find them already in the time of Solon, entrusted to the custody of one of the seven νομοφύλακες. From the Areopagus they were subsequently transferred to the Bouleuterion and from there, then, to the temple of Cybele, the famous Metroon. Superintendent of it was the Πρύτασις ἐπιστάτης, on whom there depended, in hierarchical order, the γραμματεύς τῆς Βουλῆς, the ὄπογραμματαύς and the δημόσιοι.

Among the Romans the temples of Juno, of Ceres, of Saturn and of other divinities were the first depositories of public acts, in any case concerning the State, under the custody of the same priests and of the magistrates, who at first were the censors, then the quaestors, and later the prefects. However, the first public building, which thereafter remained the only one, destined on purpose to gather the documents of the Roman State, was the Tabularium, built through the work and at the expense of the consul Quintus Lutatius Catulus in 78 B.C. on the Capitoline, facing the Forum on one side and the Campus Martius on the other, entrusted to the care of the magister census, who availed himself, for the discharge of the various services, of tabularii, adintores tabularii, opportores. The material deposited and kept here, arranged chronologically and by subject, was much consulted by scholars, according to the testimony of Tacitus (Dial. 39), and of Cicero (Pro Milone, 27). Not only in Rome, but also in the provinces of the empire flourishing archives arose, though under the different name of Gesta municipalia; and Constantinople too had its own archive, when the empire came to be divided into West and East. However, the wise organization of archives, such as it had been established by Rome, did not take long, in the centuries following the fall of the empire, to fall apart, above all because of the progressive disintegration of the imperial administration under the pressure of the barbarian invasions and their consequences.

Thus the glorious tradition of archival depositories, held in such honor in classical antiquity, faded away, and, apart from the archive founded at Aachen by Charlemagne, we have almost no other memory of collections of documents in all the States that arose on the ruins of the Roman empire.

The merit of having saved from dispersal a great part of the documents prior to the 11th century belongs to ecclesiastical archives (first of all the archive of the Roman Church), the only ones that have preserved, even amid such dissolution of times and institutions, their historical continuity. The dominant motives that favored the preservation of so much material, precious for the purposes of universal culture, were first of all the care that the Church itself always placed in the custody of all the documentation that could in any way concern it, and then the respect with which sacred places were always honored.

One must, however, go as far as the middle of the 4th century to be able to have certain information about the official archive of the Holy See, whose origin is certainly earlier than the peace of Constantine. We know in fact that Pope Julius I (341-52) ordered the gathering and preservation of all the acts concerning the donations and legacies made to the Church (cf. Liber Pontificalis, ed. L. Duchesne, I, p. 205); while the first seat of the archive of the Popes was the one established by Damasus I (366-84) in the basilica of St. Lawrence (afterwards called in Damaso in his honor), as is gathered from the inscription made to be engraved on one of the architraves: «Archibis, fateor, volui nova condere tecta» (A. Ferrua, Epigrammata Damasiano, Vatican City 1942, n. 57, p. 210). Here it remained until around the middle of the 7th century, at which time it was transferred to the Lateran palace.

Contemporaneously with this Lateran archive, another depository was instituted near the Confession of the basilica of St. Peter, where important documents were jealously kept, among them the cantio given by the archbishop of Ravenna Felix, the donations of Pepin and of Charlemagne and the pactum of Otto I. A third archive arose still around 1083 on the slopes of the Palatine, near the arch of Titus, in the so-called Turris chartularia, which gathered above all the documents relating to the administration of the properties of the Holy See and the registers of income and expenditure (cf. E. Casanova, p. 307).

It is necessary, moreover, to give appropriate emphasis to the monastic archives that have preserved for us precious collections of parchments, cartularies and codices. Although they concern almost exclusively the — let us say — economic life of the various monasteries, since they deal above all with contracts of various kinds, these collections have the merit of documenting their activity and economic prosperity and the order existing in their administration. It suffices, among the many, to recall the archives of the abbeys of Montecassino, of Subiaco, of Farfa, of St. Salvatore of Monte Amiata and of very many other monastic centers in Italy and abroad.

The history of archives begins to brighten again already from the 11th century, when one witnesses the development of the communal phenomenon, in Italy more than elsewhere. The changed conditions of life of the Italian cities due to the revival of commerce, the restored administrative and judicial autonomy of the urban centers, the formation of the guilds of arts and crafts, the rapid and progressive demographic development, all enter into the great interplay of transformation of medieval society, from which those nuclei would emerge that, gradually growing, would free themselves from the central authority to create their own independence. Consequently new demands appear and new needs invest the field of politics as well as of law, of economy and of finance. All these new forces now feel the necessity of a documentation that gives value to their every act, to their every statute, that safeguards their every interest. Hence that multiplication of papers, of instruments, of registers in which the activity of each individual institution is channeled; hence also the care taken for the gathering and preservation of documents, which we find already distinguished by offices and by subject chronologically, though with a rudimentary order, and the provisions issued by this or that commune as a guarantee of their integrity. And since, unlike the French, English and German communes, which remained as purely civic organisms, the Italian commune presents itself as a true territorial State, one can affirm that its archive is a true and proper State archive, also and above all because the material kept in it does not represent only the interest of the individual, but involves the right of the entire collectivity. In the same way the archives of the Swabian and Angevin kings were organized in southern Italy, as is demonstrated by the studies of E. Shamer and of B. Capasso.

The period of the Italian communes therefore has a particular importance for the history of archives, so that it is not rash to maintain that communal archives contain the germ of modern archives.

However, such a development, which might also have expanded when the commune was replaced by the signoria, in the 14th century and subsequently in the 15th, was to suffer a halt because of political struggles, although even in this period measures intended to regulate the life of archives were not lacking, as, for example, those implemented on various occasions by the communes of Florence and Siena and in 1325 by the commune of Bologna, and the ordinances issued in the Kingdom of Naples by Sancha of Majorca in 1338 and by Joanna of Anjou in 1347 and 1354. In any case, the establishment in Italy of the signorie and then of the principalities, and the consolidation of the great European monarchies, marked a rebirth for archives, by then entirely subservient to the politics and interests of the lord or sovereign, as is shown by the appellations "reale", "ducale", etc., joined to the common designation.

Consequently, from that time onward there began that slow but progressive process of concentration of archives, which finds its logical counterpart, moreover, in the centralizing nature assumed by the State and which leads gradually to the founding of general archives. The first attempt of this kind was made at Innsbruck in 1506 by Maximilian I of Habsburg, followed later by Ferdinand I, although it is necessary to reach the reign of Maria Theresa to find gathered together in the "Haus-, Hofund Staatsarchiv", founded by her in Vienna in 1749, the majority of the documents concerning the empire. Far more decisive was the centralizing action carried out in Spain by Charles V, who made (1543) the castle of Simancas the "Archivio de la Corona de Castilla", an action pursued with greater vigor by his son Philip II, who availed himself for the recovery and collection of State documents of the work of the historian Gerónimo Zurita, and also by Philip IV, who dictated the regulation of 1633.

Through a series of fruitless attempts made from Sixtus IV (1471-84) to Sixtus V (1585-90) to unite the various pontifical archives into an organic whole, the Church too finally succeeded in concentrating in the Vatican the majority of its documents through the work of Paul V, who in 1612 founded the present Vatican Secret Archive, entrusting its custody to Baldassarre Amidei.

Similar attempts were made elsewhere, with greater or lesser success, as for example in France by Richelieu, by Fouquet, by Colbert, and in England by Queen Elizabeth, who instituted in 1578 the "State Papers Office".

As a conclusion to and in correspondence with the whole broad organizational movement gradually brought about within the individual States, there arose in the 17th century an archival literature, which, begun with the Methodus archivorum sive modus eadem texendi ac disponendi (Milan 1648) of Niccolò Giussani, admirably opened the field to all future discussions, among which a prominent place was held, in the following century, by the one agitated concerning the use, in the classification of documents, of the subject system or the chronological system, both upheld by two French archivists, respectively P. C. Le Moine and J. C. Chevrières.

Another step forward in the field of archival organization was taken with the French Revolution, when the Convention, by the law of 7 Messidor, Year II (25 June 1794), granted the right of public access to archives.

The 19th and 20th centuries offer us a whole series of measures taken in favor of archives by the various States, as well as the impulse given by them to the publication of inventories, so that these might reveal to the great world of scholars, with that usefulness which is easy to understand, what and how many treasures of information each archive may contain within itself.

Today the study of problems inherent in archives is not agitated solely within the ambit of the nation, but takes on a character of international collaboration; to this end the "Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle" (I.I.C.I.) functions, to which the highly interesting Guide International des Archives is due, as well as the "Commission des Archives", instituted by the "Comité International des Sciences Historiques". Vedi CLASSIFICAZIONE, SISTEMI di.

Niccolò Del Re