ARNOLFINE, LAND.- Group of castles in southern Umbria, between Terni, Spoleto, Amelia, and Narni, whose administrative unity, in memory of a previous feudal autonomy, was preserved from the 11th to the 18th century by ecclesiastical government, alongside the much larger Patrimony of S. Pietro in Tuscia. The following belonged to this special district, amid the shifting of dominions and the diversity of their fortunes: Cesi, Sangemini, Poggio Azzuano, Macerino, Porzano, Collecampo, Cisterna, Scoppio, Fiorenzuola, Messenano, Arezzo, Palazzo, Appecano, Castiglione, Acquapalomba, Fogliano, Rapicciano, Balduino, Portaria, Quadrelli, Fossola, Cicigliano, Montecastrilli, Dunarobba, Collesecco, Farneta, Avigliano, Castel del Monte, Casigliano, Mezzanelli, S. Maria in Pantano, Montignano, Configni, Acquasparta, and the ruined Gallicitulo.
The name of the territory (Terra Arnulphorum, as Cencio Camerario calls it in the Liber Censuum and Nicholas III in a bull of 1289, or Terra specialis commissionis Arnulforum, as Martin V calls it around 1417) and the family name of the Arnolfi themselves, the ancient proprietors of the places, derived from a vassal of Otto I and Otto II, companion of the two emperors on their Italian expeditions, who appears as comes et missus sacri Palatii in documents of 981. To this Arnolfo, perhaps already at the time of the first Otto, in the distribution of fiefs to his followers carried out immediately after the imperial coronation (961), the lands of the curtis regia of Casentino, around the ancient destroyed Carsoli, must have been granted in fief. By the agreement of 1004 between Henry II and John XVIII, these lands were exchanged for the Church’s dominions in Carinthia dependent on the bishopric of Bamberg, and were added to the Patrimony to form the foundations of the ecclesiastical State. Arnolfo’s sons and successors, already subject to the duke of Spoleto, assumed the status of vicars and then divided into two branches, ruling respectively the mountainous or Spoletan T. A. and the lowland or lower T. A. A long series of donations—to the monasteries of Farfa and Montecassino—in the 11th and 12th centuries marked their existence, while from them descended the counts of Sangemini, the Bentivenga of Todi, and the Cesi, later d’Acquasparta, and while the donations themselves progressively eliminated their remaining power; thus making possible, as Farfa’s power disintegrated and the struggles with Barbarossa ceased and, more especially, with the reorganization carried out by Innocent III, the establishment of direct ecclesiastical government over the region. A sign of this was the erection of the fortress of Cesi, residence of the rectors of the T. A.; these subsequently appear divided into the five castellanies of Cesi, Portaria, Macerino, Castiglione (later Porzano), and Gallicitulo (later Fiorenzuola), and on several occasions they promulgated and secured the confirmation of their Statutes. In the succeeding centuries, beginning already in the years following the death of Innocent III, animated by the rekindling of imperial struggles, the strengthening of civic autonomies, and the repression of heresy, the T. A. became the cause of continual conflict between Terni and Narni, between Todi and the Church, and between Terni and Spoleto; in particular, the disputes were fierce over possession of the estate known as that of the Arsicciali and of Poggio Azzuano. A large part of the political history of the Umbrian cities and their relations with the curia revolved around the castles of the T. A.
To put an end to the lengthy dispute, Alexander VI, by a bull of 29 April 1502, placed the T. A. under the government of the clerics of the Apostolic Camera. But Julius II revoked the bull, and every Pope thereafter returned to the question, while disagreements reignited among the neighboring cities, until, in 1568, Pius V definitively confirmed Alexander VI’s act, retaining Cesi at the head of the T. A. as the seat of the vicar of the clerics of the Camera. By then, however, the ancient unity, preserved through so many vicissitudes, was reaching its crisis: between the end of the 16th century and the 17th, it was undermined by the Church’s frequent concessions of new lordships; only the community of Cesi, with the few lands that remained to it, retained the ancient pride of dominance and defended it in the lengthy dispute over Poggio Azzuano with the dukes of Acquasparta. Nevertheless, although reduced to those few places, and by then more the land of Cesi than of the Arnolfi, the district remained in existence until the Napoleonic upheaval, only to be forgotten and disappear during the final restoration of the Papal State.