BARTHOLOMEW of Lucca. — By birth Tolomeo Fiadoni, Dominican historian and theologian, born in Lucca ca. 1236 to a merchant family, died at Torcello in 1327. In 1272 he is found at Naples with St. Thomas Aquinas, but after the latter’s death he returned to Lucca. Between 1285 and 1302 he served five times as prior of the convent of S. Romano in his native city. He took part in the elections of the Masters General between Fra Alberto da Chiavari (1300) and Fra Bernardo de Jusix (1301). In 1303 he was sent as ambassador to Benedict XI to obtain the lifting of the interdict that had struck the entire clergy of Lucca. His fellow citizens often chose him as arbiter in their disputes. He was counsellor to Countess Coopana, second wife of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca. From 1309 to 1318 he was in Avignon. On 5 March 1318, at the age of eighty-two, he was entrusted with the diocese of Torcello. Over a jurisdictional dispute in a Benedictine monastery he came into conflict with the Patriarch of Grado, who even went so far as to excommunicate him (1321). However, on his appeal, John XXII declared him innocent and reinstated him in his rights (1323). In ecclesiastical politics, B. is one of the earliest defenders of the potestas directa.
In the course of his many travels in Italy and abroad he amassed much archival material. His first juridical work (Determinatio compendiosa de iurisdictione imperii, ed. G. Mathes, Turin 1924) contains ideas later developed in the second part of St. Thomas’s De regimine principum, certainly due to him. He also wrote: Tractatus de iurisdictione Ecclesiae super regnum Apuliae et Siciliae (ms.); Examen (Siena 1888). But his principal works are those of a historical character: Historia Ecclesiastica Nova (in Rer. Ital. Script., XI, Milan 1727, pp. 740-1242) and the Annales (in MGH, Scriptores rerum germanicarum, new series, VIII, Berlin 1930).