CAPITOLARE. — Technically, this term refers to legal provisions articulated in *capitula* that found their particular expression under Frankish rule. Originally, they were not true and proper laws, since, according to the Germanic concept, the only body capable of making laws was the assembly. Capitularies were instead, in their origins, ordinances or decrees (also called *praeceptiones* or *decretiones*), which, as royal power evolved to the detriment of popular power, came to acquire their own validity, alongside or above Frankish law itself, especially when the sovereign overcame the formal difficulty by submitting these ordinances to the mere approval of the assembly.
Among the tasks that the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire assigned to the Frankish sovereigns, the most prominent was that of the *titulus ecclesiae*, given the religious character of the new imperial institution.
The exercise of this task led the sovereign to concern himself progressively with the provision of ecclesiastical offices, the discipline of the clergy, and even dogmatic and doctrinal matters, as is evident from a whole series of capitularies in which the growing interference of imperial power in ecclesiastical affairs can be clearly seen. Among these capitularies, those that particularly concerned the regulation of the Church and ecclesiastical matters were given the specific appellation of *capitularia ecclesiastica*, being distinguished from the others that dealt with the organization of civil affairs and were therefore called *capitularia mundana*. A third type of capitulary, which regulated both civil and ecclesiastical matters simultaneously, was called *capitularia mixta*.
With the extension of Frankish conquest under Charlemagne and his successors, there resulted a greater diffusion of the Catholic religion in the newly subjected lands of the empire, an expansion of the ecclesiastical powers assumed by the emperor, and a more extensive application of ecclesiastical capitularies.
To understand properly this interference of civil power in ecclesiastical affairs, it is necessary to bear in mind the fact of the union of the political functions of the bishop with his religious ones, first through the immunitary relationship and then through that of vassalage. When imperial policy believed it could place greater reliance on ecclesiastical dignitaries than on lay ones for the administration of public affairs, granting ecclesiastics wide exercise of civil powers in the name of the emperor, the office of an ecclesiastical nature became so closely linked with the public one that the emperor believed he could not regulate the latter without also controlling and directing the former.
Yet ecclesiastics also came into a position of subjection to imperial power by another route, when they were designated as *missi dominici* in those embassies sent periodically into the vast territories of the empire as organs of control and judgment over local administrations. Moreover, the contamination of the two orders, the ecclesiastical and the civil, also occurred through the assemblies. In this connection, it must be kept in mind that the very organization of the Church in various places was absorbed and in part identified with political organizations. Thus councils were often the same assemblies as those of the State, directed by the sovereign or his representatives, and the decrees of such assemblies also dealt with matters concerning faith and the discipline of the clergy. In this respect, conciliar canons thus came to represent, for that period and those regions, a further concrete encroachment of the lay element into the administration and life of the Church and ecclesiastical affairs. Yet this interference of the highest laity in religious matters, which was tolerated at the beginning in the spirit of a supposed dependence of the sovereign on the central authority of the Church and for the better advancement of religious faith and the internal discipline of ecclesiastics—and which was also in part favored by the ambitious and autonomy-seeking aims of local ecclesiastical currents—eventually met with reaction from the hierarchy of the Church, and a whole movement arose that would culminate in the reforming policy of Hildebrand, aimed at freeing the ecclesiastical hierarchy from the meshes of the feudal political order.
At first, there was a separation, or rather, an independent conception of the two offices held by ecclesiastics, the religious and the civil, and just as the consecration to the episcopate and the provision of churches was held to be the absolute competence of the ecclesiastical side, so the conferral of any civil powers on the incumbent could be granted only subordinately and separately. It is well known how already a capitulary of 818–19 by Louis the Pious, in response to this new trend, seemed to leave the election of the bishop to the ecclesiastical side (MGH, *Capitularia*, 1, p. 275). But soon imperial legislation under Lothar returned to the rigid Carolingian organization. Indeed, Lothar even insisted, with the *Constitutio romana* of 824, that the consecration of the pope could not take place unless he had first taken the prescribed oath in the presence of imperial envoys (MGH, *Capitularia*, 1, p. 322).
As the power of ecclesiastics grew, especially in Italy, they often became the arbiters of the election of political leaders. Thus Guido of Spoleto owed his imperial election to the oath he took to safeguard ecclesiastical prerogatives according to the formula: “I declare before God as my witness that I will love the Holy Roman Church with all my heart and rejoice in her and will observe ecclesiastical rights in their proper order...” (MGH, *Capitularia*, 2, no. 222).
A series of ecclesiastical capitularies is recognized as having special authority because they were received and systematized in the *Lombarda*, which for a long time had particular application in Italy and to which even religious authorities referred in resolving disputes, even among ecclesiastics. In the *Lombarda*, the provisions to which reference is made are included in Book III and are arranged more precisely under various titles (tit. I, *De episcopis et clericis*; tit. II, *Quando liceat alterius clericum accipere vel non*; tit. III, *De decimis*; tit. VIII, *Quando liceat rectoribus ecclesiarum acta antecessorum suorum rescindere*; tit. IX, *De pontificibus*). The most notable of these provisions are summarized below.
In tit. I, a group of capitularies dating back to Charlemagne is collected. In chap. 1, mention is made of a synod in which bishops, abbots, and *viri illustres* were gathered together with the emperor, and it was decided that suffragans should remain subject to metropolitans *secundum canones*, who also had power over them to correct them. It was further established that monasteries should live according to their rules and that abbesses should reside without interruption in the monastery (chap. 3). Bishops were recognized as having power (*secundum canones*) over priests and clerics within their parishes (chap. 4). Exemption of clerics from civil jurisdiction was declared (chap. 11), the irrevocability of monastic status was affirmed (chap. 11), and the perpetuity of the dedication of consecrated places was sanctioned (chap. 13). The proper episcopal jurisdiction in disputes between clerics was established (chap. 14). Also noteworthy is a capitulary of King Pippin (chap. 17) on the power of the bishop (*pontifex*) to ordain his own church and to compel clerics to live in canonical order, with the threat that if any bishop (*pontifex*) should refuse to distinguish his clerics in canonical order, he should be anathema.
Of particular note is chap. 36 of the same title, which declares Roman law as proper to the ecclesiastical order.
Two chapters of Pippin in tit. II deserve mention, where the bishop is forbidden to receive a
Clerics and priests from other dioceses without dimissory letters. In tit. VIII, noteworthy are a chapter by Lothar (cap. 2) regarding the rescindability of penalties assumed by predecessors in ecclesiastical precaria, and a chapter by King Charles (cap. 4) on the division into four parts of ecclesiastical tithes: one part to the bishop, a second to the clergy, a third to the poor, and the fourth for the fabric of the Church.
Antonio Bota
Liturgy. — In medieval liturgical language, a c. was called both the Ordo containing the prescriptions for the celebration of liturgical offices and the antiphonary, and especially the index of pericopes from Holy Scripture to be read at Mass. At first, these were indicated by marginal annotations on the very codices of the Old and New Testaments; later (certainly already in the 7th century), the indications relating to both the Epistles and the Gospels, arranged according to the order of the "Temporale" and the "Sanctorale," were collected into separate codices, called precisely c., or comes, lectionarium, etc. There existed c. for the Epistles alone (*c. epistolorum*), or for the Gospels alone (*c. evangeliorum*), or for both combined into a single organic whole.
To avoid confusion, the individual c. will be treated under the entries epistolary; evangelary; cf. also comes; lectionary.