DOMUS CULTA. - The impoverishment of the revenues of the Roman Church, owing to the hostility of the Eastern emperors, the granting of lands in emphyteusis, and other causes, compelled the popes to make up for it by a more rational exploitation of the estates remaining to them in the vicinity of Rome.
Beginning with Pope Zaccaria (d. 752), they organized large estates under direct cultivation, eliminating the large leaseholders and grouping each estate around an inhabited centre, providing it with a church, mill, storehouses, and whatever else was required for spiritual, economic, and social life, and placing them in reciprocal relations for the exchange of necessary products. The cultivators who made them productive thus entered the ranks of pontifical employees alongside the ecclesiastics and formed rural militias which, when necessary, were able to take up arms in defence of the Pope. The d. c., which under Zaccaria numbered 5, subsequently increased, especially under Adriano I (d. 795), and ensured ecclesiastical property greater stability and more substantial income to meet the internal difficulties of the temporal power. They were situated in the Roman Campagna and southern Tuscia.